Joel Shapiro, a celebrated American sculptor who sought to challenge the constraints of Minimalism in works that imbued life-size stick figures with a surprising depth of feeling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 83.
His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was acute myeloid leukemia.
Mr. Shapiro’s best-known sculptures are easy to recognize. Constructed from wooden beams jutting in different directions, they typically suggest a human figure with outstretched arms, a blocky head and a torso shaped like a cereal box.
Often the figures appear to be walking or paused in midstep; it’s not clear if they are coming toward you or moving away. They look sturdy and almost athletic compared with the gaunt walking men of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s heroes.
Despite their narrow formal vocabulary and building-block-like clunkiness, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures convey an uncanny range of emotion and movement. From one piece to the next, his figures variously leap with apparent joy, dance balletically, fall backward, twist in existential pain, topple onto their heads or collapse onto the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Their subject, in the end, is balance, or rather imbalance — of both the spatial and mental sort.
“Every form is loaded with the psychology of its maker,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview in 2024.
In some ways, he resembled Richard Serra, whose massive walls of tilting steel also flirted with the threat of imbalance. Yet while Mr. Serra was drawn to sweeping curves that cut horizontally through the landscape, Mr. Shapiro’s sculptures are mostly vertical and echo the scale of the human body.
“I’m not interested in blocking the landscape or the architectural space,” he once said. “You can see around my work. It’s transparent.”
Still, he executed more than 30 large-scale commissions for public sites. His biggest and most lauded sculpture, “Loss and Regeneration,” was commissioned for the plaza of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which opened in 1993. That work consists of two independent bronze casts: One, a larger-than-life solitary figure, appears to be falling, while the other, across the plaza, is a squat house shape that has been upended. They both use a minimum of means to say something profound about history and loss.
A native New Yorker, Mr. Shapiro was a cosmopolitan figure in owlish glasses. His studio occupied a former electric substation in an area of Long Island City in Queens that was zoned for light industry. He liked to point out that it was within walking distance of P.S. 150, where he had attended elementary school.
Witty and acerbic, he issued his share of denunciations. “I don’t think it is problematic to be an angry person in the art world,” he said in an interview in 2017. “I think it is problematic if you punch someone.”
Joel Elias Shapiro was born on Sept. 27, 1941, the younger of two children, and grew up in a cultured Jewish family in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. His father, Joseph Shapiro, was a physician. His mother, Anna (Lewis) Shapiro, was a microbiologist who dabbled in sculpture, making clay figures in the basement of the family’s semidetached house. “All of my babysitters were artists,” Mr. Shapiro once recalled.
He was a regular visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he admired the Egyptian mummies, and he took art classes at the Museum of Modern Art. “I still have some of the stuff,” he said. “It’s tempera on paper. The one I recall image-wise is a bent-over figure with buildings collapsing around him. Very upbeat!”
His childhood, he said, was an anxious time when he felt pulled between his love of art and a filial obligation to follow his father into medicine, although he was, by his own admission, a lackluster student.
After flunking out of the University of Colorado Boulder, he transferred to New York University, his parents’ alma mater, and majored in pre-med.
“My father was a very dominant kind of strong character, and the idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” Mr. Shapiro said in 1988 in an oral history interview conducted by the art historian Lewis Kachur for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
He spent two years in India with the Peace Corps before returning to New York in 1967 and lamenting the direction the local art scene had taken. The cult of Minimalism was accompanied by painting-is-dead raptures, and leading artists like Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt were turning out sleek metal boxes that looked as if they had never been touched by a human hand. Mr. Shapiro wanted to take art in a more personal direction.
What emerged were his “fingerprint drawings” of 1969. Stretching as long as 12 feet, the works were crammed with repeating rows of Mr. Shapiro’s fingerprints — usually ink impressions of his thumb or index finger — providing abundant forensic proof that art is inseparable from the singular identity of its creator.
His career took off with relative speed. In 1969, the art dealer Paula Cooper tapped one of his fingerprint drawings for a group show at her pioneering gallery on Prince Street in SoHo; a year later, she gave him his first one-man show.
By then, Mr. Shapiro had married Amy Snider, an art educator who founded the Art and Design Education department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They separated in 1972, after five years of marriage. (She died in 2019.)
In addition to his daughter from that marriage, Ivy, an art adviser, Mr. Shapiro is survived by his wife, the artist Ellen Phelan, whom he married in 1978, and two grandchildren. He lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
By the end of the 1970s, the Paula Cooper Gallery had combined the seemingly antithetical functions of avant-garde showcase and day care center. “Joel and Elizabeth and I had children at the same time,” Ms. Cooper recalled, referring to Mr. Shapiro and the artist Elizabeth Murray. She remembered how they would pick up each other’s children from school: “All our kids were friends. We were so close.”
In 1982, at age 41, Mr. Shapiro was honored with a much-praised midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But over the years, as he became better known, some of his followers complained that his stick-figure sculptures lacked the radical spirit of his early work.
They preferred what was known as his “tiny house period,” as exemplified by a 1974 show he had at Paula Cooper, which included cast-iron houses that were barely four inches tall and placed directly on the floor. Those diminutive works, which could look as forlorn as a lost glove, challenged the conventional idea of a sculpture as a monument set on a raised pedestal.
Mr. Shapiro was also well regarded for his works on paper, especially his abstract compositions in chalk and charcoal. They typically show solid black squares silhouetted against airy, lightly smudged backgrounds, and are clearly the drawings of a sculptor seeking to define form at its most and least condensed.
In 1992, Mr. Shapiro made news in art circles when he left his longtime gallery for the larger and more commercial PaceWildenstein (now Pace Gallery). Ms. Cooper was stung by his defection.
“For two or three years,” she recalled, “Joel kept asking me, ‘Should I go?’ Finally, I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Joel, go!’ I was very sad and upset.”
Over time, he realized that he missed Ms. Cooper’s empathetic advocacy. He believed he had “made a mistake” by leaving, he said. He and Ms. Cooper reconciled in 2010, when she told him that she was willing to work with him on an informal, noncontractual basis.
Other dealers were also willing. In his last decade, Mr. Shapiro had one-man exhibitions with an unusually large number of galleries, including, in Manhattan alone, Paula Cooper, Pace, Craig Starr Gallery and Dominique Levy Gallery (now Levy Gorvy Dayan).
His last major show, which opened in September at Pace, included a monumental wooden sculpture, “ARK” — his largest ever — its jumble of brightly painted planks and beams suggesting a boat in midjourney. It has since been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
“I don’t think singular representation is operative,” Mr. Shapiro said in 2024, referring to the once-common practice of dealers nurturing their artists. “Now they have 50 or 60 artists they represent, all these galleries. When you have a show, they work very hard. The rest of the time, your work is in storage.”
Asked if he found it difficult to generate new work for so many shows, he said: “You want to do something new and expand what you know. It’s hard, because you don’t quite know what you want to know.”
He added: “In my case, I just start to stick pieces of wood together and look at them. I don’t think my demands are so grand.”
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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