Opinion | Remembering Robert Irwin, an Artist Beyond the Canvas - The Wall Street Journal

tapanggane.blogspot.com

Artist Robert Irwin in 2016Photo: jim watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The genius of Robert Irwin, one of the first artists to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, lay in two endeavors. Mr. Irwin—who died on Oct. 25 at age 95—was, first, the most prominent progenitor of the Southern California hyper-minimalist environments of what came to be called “light and space” art. He was also a kind of itinerant philosopher who could casually mesmerize groups of students simply by talking to them, without a script. Having invited him to be a visiting artist at a university where I was then teaching, I once watched him out my office window, sitting on a low stone wall at the college town’s most popular corner, with his requisite fountain Coca-Cola in hand—he disliked the bottled stuff—and wearing his trademark Yankees cap, waiting for somebody to start a conversation. Within half an hour, he was casually addressing a fascinated crowd of perhaps a hundred people—about light, space, art and anything else that came up.

Mr. Irwin was born in Long Beach, Calif., in 1928, to a homemaker mother and a father who worked in the shipyard. His childhood—according to the artist, “sunny and uneventful”—was spent in a modest neighborhood where he eventually attended Dorsey High School. There, he became a winner in jitterbug competitions and an expert at beautifully customizing cars. Somewhat cognizant of the future educational benefits of the G.I. Bill, Mr. Irwin enlisted in the Army in 1946. Two years later, he started classes at the Otis Art Institute near downtown L.A. At Otis and a couple of other art schools, Mr. Irwin learned to draw, quite well, from such flamboyant draftsmen as Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun.