Although Richard Serra seems destined to be remembered as “the man of steel,” when he died this week, I found myself thinking back to a story he had told me about his younger and more vulnerable self.
In 1969, he received his first commission for a sculpture. The request came from the artist Jasper Johns. Serra considered the event a turning point in his life, and when we spoke about it over the years — first in 1989, when I interviewed him at his house in the wilds of Nova Scotia, Canada — he confirmed a suspicion of mine: Good artists impress the viewing public, while great artists impress their fellow artists.
This story begins on May 19, 1969, when a now-historic group show entitled “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which had just moved into Marcel Breuer’s fortresslike building on Madison Avenue. The 22 artists in the show were then known as Process artists and interested in dismantling the fanatic geometry and high gloss of Minimalist sculpture reigning in New York.
When visitors to the Whitney stepped off the elevator onto the fourth floor, the first work they saw was Serra’s startling “Splash Piece: Casting.” It looked nothing like a traditional sculpture. It had no clear shape or decipherable subject. There was no pedestal beneath it to proclaim its importance. Instead, it lie directly on the floor, a scattering of assorted metal fragments.
Serra had created it by splashing and ladling a pot of molten lead against the base of the wall. The work, however primitive in appearance, alluded slyly to his 20th-century art heroes, specifically the pouring technique of Jackson Pollock. Serra also credited Jasper Johns, who might seem like the opposite of Pollock. Johns’s careful, wax-based brushstrokes suggested that art is not a bid for transcendence, but a series of incremental steps.
Serra, 30 and shaggy haired, had shown his first splash piece a year earlier, in a group show at the Castelli Warehouse, a storage space on West 108th Street. He was disappointed. Only a few people saw the show; those who did, failed to understand it. The critic Philip Leider, a friend of his, mistakenly claimed in a review that the work was made from silver paint. “I called Phil up and said, you are going to be embarrassed by this,” Serra recalled. “It wasn’t silver. It was lead.”
The splash piece that Serra made for the Whitney show was better received. One of the visitors to the show was Johns, then 39 — hardly old, except by the standards of the youth-bedazzled 1960s. A taciturn man who had an international reputation, Johns had never met Serra but admired his splash piece. “It was impressive and beautiful,” he later noted, and he decided that he would try to buy it.
Johns asked his art dealer, Leo Castelli, to inquire into its status. He was told it was sold. But Serra was thrilled to learn that Johns wanted to own a work of his. “It was like I had been tapped on the head by the pope,” Serra told me. He offered to re-create the splash piece in Johns’s studio.
Johns had recently bought a building known as the Bank, on East Houston Street, that had housed the Providence Loan Society. The main room, a double-height space, served as his studio. When Serra visited one day to select the site for the piece, he thought there wasn’t enough free wall space to accommodate a work on the scale of the Whitney piece. So instead, he did a smaller piece in a corner of a wide hallway adjacent to Johns’s studio.
Unlike the Whitney piece, which was done at night to avoid subjecting the public to noxious fumes, the Johns piece was done during the day, in the last week of 1969. Serra had an assistant, the composer Philip Glass, who had supported himself as a plumber and whom Serra credited with introducing him to the material of lead.
The splash piece, by the way, was also a cast piece — this is essential. When Serra spattered the lead, he didn’t just let it form puddles on the floor. Instead he aimed it at a steel plate, roughly two feet high and five feet long, that jutted from the bottom of the wall at an angle. After the lead cooled — it went from liquid to solid almost immediately — Serra separated it from the plate, or “uncorked it,” as he told me. He was left with a lead cast, a sculpture — a long, often rough-edged slat of metal.
Johns offered Serra a drawing in exchange for the sculpture, and Serra eventually — in 1981, more than a decade later — selected “Skin,” a tall 1975 drawing, in charcoal and oil, whose central image vaguely resembled a human figure with skeletal arms and bony hands, in a low-cut dress; it was in fact a direct imprint from Johns’s body.
It was a reminder that Johns and Serra shared, among other things, a love of casting and printing, of imprinting — whether the subject was a hand, two ale cans or the anonymous space between a wall and the floor. Which is not to say that Johns’s body print looked anything like him. “You can’t know what sex the drawing is,” Serra told me in 2019 in his loft on Duane Street. “Is it a monkey’s head, or a woman’s head, or a man’s head? It’s in my kitchen. I see it every day, and it is really nourishing.”
As the years went by, Serra continued to admire his Johns drawing, and Johns continued to admire the Serra sculpture in the hallway of the Bank. But such equilibrium did not continue forever. In 1988, Johns sold the Bank; he had moved to the Upper East Side. He did not take the splash piece with him, since the rules of site-specific art prohibit it from being dislodged.
He consulted Serra on what to do. Serra advised him to dismantle and discard the piece but to keep the steel plate that had been used to make it. “If you have a place where I can make the piece, it will be the same piece,” Serra kindly offered. Johns kept the steel plate. In the years that followed, he did not ask Serra to remake the piece, perhaps because he felt it belonged to a specific moment that had passed.
In 1991, Johns learned that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was creating a gallery for Serra’s work. Someone called him and asked whether he would consider donating his Serra to the museum. Johns said, “Yes, I would be delighted, but the piece does not exist.”
He still had the steel plate. He donated it to the museum.
And so Serra set out to recreate the piece in San Francisco, which is the city of his birth. But in the end, it wasn’t the same piece. “Gutter Corner Splash: Night Shift,” which bears the impressively long date of 1969/1995, is not in a corner. Serra made it against a long, open wall, and it is larger than the piece he had made for Johns. “Later, I realized that what Richard made in San Francisco,” Johns said, “was the piece I originally wanted — the piece at the Whitney.”
At any rate, the other day I looked up “Gutter Corner Splash” on the SFMoMA website and found a wonderfully crisp photograph: Seven silvery, rough-edged bars, each about 15 feet long, lie side by side on the floor at the base of a white-painted wall whose entire bottom edge is besmirched by schmutz — the metallic residue of the piece’s creation.
After making the piece for Johns, Serra did not see him much. He told me his encounter in the studio represented the most time they ever spent together. He recalled that Johns had prepared a nice lunch, “frying a fish” as Joe Cocker blasted on the stereo. “During all of this,” Serra said, “he also mixed some green paint, and put one stroke on a target that he had been working on. I was completely dumbfounded. Johns is going about every activity with equal intensity. That is very close to Eastern philosophy. There is no hierarchy in your activity.”
That was apparently their sole shared meal, which makes sense. Serra, like Johns, was an intense presence who had no patience for small talk. He did not need Johns’s companionship because he had something better: Johns had offered a chance to make a new work and further concretize his ideas, which is not to say that ideas alone make a work of art. As Serra liked to say, “Work comes out of work.”
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