One morning in May 1967, the sculptor Larry Bell woke to a double accolade few artists could hope for.
Artforum magazine, arbiter of advanced taste, had filled its cover with one of the minimal glass cubes that had just rocketed this 27-year-old Angeleno to fame in the art world. Out in the much wider world, those innovations had earned him a place in the crowd scene on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles’ new album, alongside such creative lights as Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas.
“It becomes a big thing in my life, and all I could think of was all of my artist friends that were, I thought, much better artists than me,” said Bell, 85. The modesty is typical. Interviewed for his first profile in this newspaper, he talked about his major artistic career as “65 years of unemployment.”
That “unemployment” included playing a notable part in the minimal art movement that revolutionized sculpture in the 1960s. Bell, along with New York peers like Donald Judd and Robert Morris, replaced the complex compositions of predecessors such as David Smith and Henry Moore with simplified objects whose shapes — like Bell’s cubes — could often be taken in at a glance. In the West Coast’s spin on Minimalism, sometimes known as “Light and Space” art, Bell, John McCracken and Robert Irwin dressed those simple shapes in surfaces that played with color and reflection.
Bell’s lifetime’s work is now on view — summarized, you might say — in “Improvisations in the Park,” an installation of six recent glass sculptures chosen by New York’s Madison Square Park Conservancy for its renowned art program, in which Bell’s predecessors have included more current art stars such as Nicole Eisenman and Roxy Paine.
Set down in the lawns and clearings of one of Manhattan’s most popular parks, Bell’s work, now full of bold blues and reds, seems to have shed the almost industrial rigor that was its early signature, back when it was all grays and browns. It seems happy to be sniffed at by dogs, ogled by toddlers, caressed by the leaves falling on it. “The pieces are alive,” Bell said, minutes after getting his first look at their new setting. “They are witnessing and bearing witness to the reality of the park, and not in conflict with anything.”
A few days before the project’s Sept. 30 unveiling, Bell had flown in from Taos, N.M., where he’s mostly lived since 1972, after years in Los Angeles and a mid-60s stint in Manhattan. He showed up to a fancy preview of his installation in the safari jacket and rain hat of a small-town granddad. (That’s what he is: His three kids and all four grandchildren were due to join him for his New York opening — a family first, he said, that’s left him feeling “totally blessed.”)
“Sixty-four thousand people a day walk by!,” Bell exclaimed, as he got that taste of his art in a very public place, after years of more esoteric venues. Though the size of those crowds clearly thrilled him — he cited it several times — his take on the art they would see remained humble: “It looks comfortable, it looks friendly, it looks interesting.”
Most visitors will find his sculptures more impressive than that.
An installation called “Pacific Red II” consists of 12 head-high squares of red glass standing on edge to form six Vs, like the prows of six ships or six birds on the wing, the nose of one in the tail of the next. Their colors range from the brilliant scarlet of a classic Venetian vase, at one end of the piece, to a darker, smokier red at the other, in striking contrast to the green lawn below.
Bell as a sculptor of light shines in “Blues from Aspen,” a six-foot cube of blue glass, with a smaller blue box stuck inside and a few feet of empty space between them. It refracts and reflects views of a crab apple and three gingkoes.
“Red Eyes” is the most welcoming of Bell’s park pieces. It’s made of two Cs of red glass that interlock, like hands reaching out to clutch each other. A visitor daring to step over the stanchions could walk into the gap in between.
In 1967, the pioneering work that earned Bell his Beatles’ cameo was much less approachable: Plain cubes of smoky glass, often about a foot to a side, were raised to eye-height on plinths of clear plastic. If you worked at it, you might glimpse the subtlest swirls of color floating inside, caused by metal films Bell vaporized onto his surfaces.
But mostly, his glass cubes looked like … cubes made of glass. They did not aim to please, and often, they didn’t.
Mel Bochner, a conceptual artist from Bell’s generation, referred to the “aggressive silence” of Bell’s barely-there early work, calling it “dehumanized art.” In a video call from Washington, James Meyer, a National Gallery curator who wrote a major book on Minimalism, pointed out that Bell’s early critics could sometimes go even further, asking what Meyer called “the basic question” of Minimalism: “Is it art?”
I faced that question. As a kid, I lived with a classic Bell cube, bought in an extravagant moment by my assistant-professor parents, and I remember the jeers it got from my friends: “You call that art?” and “Gee, did your parents get taken!” (Disclosure: The sculpture was recently donated to a museum, so I have no stake in Bell.)
I enjoyed how that scorn made me feel like a cultural rebel — a feeling Bell said he once shared. “Maverick stuff” is how he labels his first cubes’ defiant spirit, and said he had found it, “romantically interesting.” Art like his continued to face resistance right through the 1990s, when the next generation of artists came to see Minimalism, austere and reticent, as “a very authoritarian kind of patriarchal art,” Meyer said. That led to some lean years for Bell, before his once-radical art became familiar and accepted enough to join what Meyer called “the canon.” (Bell is now represented by the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth.)
Today, with minimalism fully entrenched as a lifestyle choice — think the decluttering of Marie Kondo or Kim Kardashian’s Donald Judd knockoffs — visitors to Bell’s sleek, colorful work in the park can see it as simply appealing, maybe even verging on the ornamental. “Finish Fetish,” the snarky, alternative title once given to the Light and Space art of West Coasters, might now be the shoe that fits.
Yet thanks to its new setting, Bell’s installation feels less fetish-y about finish than ever before. Bell was impressed, and surprised, by how comfortable his pristine sculptures feel among “the trees and the squirrels and the tourists and the homeless and the wealthy and the busy and the hot-dog stands — you know, all of that real world.”
Rather than standing aloof and alone, the works in Madison Square Park seem to be part of a scene. Their empty spaces are beginning to fill with fall leaves. Squirrels and even rats run between their panes. Denise Markonish, the Park Conservancy’s chief curator, saw a pigeon exploring the inside of one piece, “trying to figure out what kind of space it was in.”
Bell is happy to imagine his sleek artworks getting filled with snow; he didn’t flinch at the prospect of a Coke can landing inside one: “What you’ve got is what you’ve got, and what happens to it is what happens to it.”
Markonish did the flinching for Bell, saying she has every intention of removing detritus, but she pointed out another surprise “appearance” that pleased her: The endless reflections, in Bell’s plate glass, of all the people strolling or rushing or jogging past, or sometimes even pausing to take in the art. Markonish thinks of the sculptures as “video screens” that capture a view of the world they sit in.
Despite having roots in the long-ago era of “Sgt. Pepper’s,” those works are peculiarly of our moment, said Robert Slifkin, an art historian at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. He has written about Bell’s standoffish early cubes as coming out of a Cold War context, channeling both “the seduction of technology” in postwar culture, and the inhumanity of that technology’s nuclear threat. Bell’s Cold War Minimalism seems to mix sleek appeal and a sense of menace.
Slifkin feels that Bell’s latest pieces may likewise need to be understood in light of their era — our era — with its “experience economy” and sleek smartphone surfaces that bring endless flashes of the passing world. Today, in Madison Square Park, Slifkin said, the “real analog” for Bell’s pieces might no longer be the seductive technology of war, but “the people sitting on benches in the park looking at their phones.” The very latest iPhones run an operating system that makes them more “glassy” than ever before, and more Bell-ish.
As always, Bell resists weighing in on his art’s meaning. “Whatever you see is what it is,” is about as final a word as he’s willing to offer. All he will say is that he still has a lot of passion for the glass — the “melted sand” his art has been made from for more than six decades. “The cards are on the table, and I’m playing the hand I was dealt.”
Larry Bell: Improvisations in the Park
Through March 15, Madison Square Park, 11 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; (212) 520-7600; madisonsquarepark.org.
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