After the yelling, the hearings, the lawsuit, the dismantlement, Richard Serra entered the last decade of the last century with his mind cast toward the classics. The American sculptor, who died Tuesday at 85, got caught up in the Reagan-era culture wars with “Tilted Arc,” a 120-foot plate of curved Cor-Ten steel that sliced across Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. The work was finally removed — in Serra’s estimation, destroyed — in March 1989. “The central space is simply a regular ellipse, and the walls that surround it are vertical,” he would later recall. “I walked in and thought: what if I turn this form on itself?”

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Persons: Richard Serra, Reagan, Yorkers, Street, San Carlo alle Quattro, Francesco Borromini that’s, “ Organizations: San Carlo Locations: American, Italy, Rome, San