BMA 1990.80

Empty spaces don't usually attract our attention until we see a border or boundary around them. One empty space in Lever #2 is clearly defined by a long, sweeping arc of wood that looks like a question mark lying on its side. Another empty space is enclosed by seventeen rods arranged in the shape of a funnel and held in place by a bell-shaped frame. Altogether, the wood, rattan, and the empty spaces combine to make a sculpture that is simultaneously massive and delicate.

As a master craftsman, Puryear was committed to showing what wood could do: that it was strong but easily bent, that it was lightweight but also self-supporting, that it could be laminated. He was also intrigued with the idea that he could "draw with wood." He could use wood to make a long line that seems to roll and swell like a wave in the ocean, or make a cluster of lines that open up like the veins of a leaf or the spokes of an umbrella. Some people look at his work and think of the skeleton of an extinct animal.

"Although his sculptures seem irreducible, as if not one line or edge could be changed, they are extremely suggestive - of tools, vegetables, vessels, animals and people. They seem happy with an identity that cannot be fixed."

Puryear describes himself as a "builder, a maker," fascinated by the process of producing an object with his own hands. He started building as a child growing up in Washington D.C. His far-reaching interests led him to read books about birds, music, and archery, and the books led him to building. "If I became interested in archery," he said, "I made the bows and arrows, if I became interested in music, I made the guitars."

When Puryear entered college, he started out studying biology, then decided that his real interest lay in painting. It wasn't until he enlisted in the Peace Corps in 1964 that he began to think of himself as a woodworker. He was sent to teach in a small secondary mission school in Sierra Leone on the West Coast of Africa. When he wasn't busy teaching biology, French, and English, he spent his free time seeking out local carpenters. He watched with fascination as they worked their materials completely by hand without benefit of electrical tools.

"We learned from each other. I taught them to make guitars and kayaks and they in turn showed me how to do old world joinery.... I became close to some carpenters, some woodworkers there. That was pretty moving, to me, to see people working without technology. I was taught a lot by just watching them work. That's where I was first exposed to people who worked with wood with any real skill."

After two years in Sierra Leone, Puryear traveled far north to Sweden where he sought out the makers of modern Scandinavian furniture who were devoted to wood and eager to teach their skills. While in Stockholm, he also began to visit a museum of modern art. Puryear, who had always been suspicious of abstract art, began to see "how powerful primary forms could be." By the time he returned to the United States in 1968, he realized that superior craftsmanship, by itself, did not make art, that "skills alone are not enough."

In 1968, Puryear entered Yale University as a graduate student and decided to apply his sense of fine craftsmanship to the making of sculpture. At Yale, he learned about avant-garde "minimalist" sculptors whose works have a clean, precise, uncluttered look. It was no secret that many minimalist artists did not produce their sculptures with their own hands. They conceived of the sculpture's form then turned over their plans and specifications to industrial technicians who produced the sculptures using factory machines. Puryear was impressed by the purity of minimalist sculpture but ultimately resisted this system of producing art. He wanted to build his sculpture with his own hands.

"I have a hard time thinking of myself as dictating to others how to do my work. And I think it has to do with where I came from in society, where I fit in society, the fact that my people were always executors, workers, their hands were always busy, their backs were always bent. It would be very hard for me to turn into the kind of person who is giving orders for the work to be realized by somebody else. I guess I don't trust that."

"I never did minimalist art. I never did, but I got real close.... I looked at it, I tasted it and I spat it out. I said, this is not for me. I'm a worker."

"I'm basically kind of a maverick. I've always felt - and maybe this goes way, way back to my earliest years - I really felt like an outsider. I never felt like signing up and joining and being part of a coherent cadre of anything, ideologically or esthetically, or attitudinally. I never felt compelled to do that."

Puryear's studio is filled with stacks of wood from all over the world plus the clamps, files, and planes that he uses to transform the wood into sculpture. He is the first to admit that handwork is long and tedious. He described the long process of making one of his sculptures:

"Months and months to screw in clamps, of laminating layers, months and months of it, and it was so monotonous that it wasn't work in which I profited from the ruminations involved. My mind was tied up, my hands were tied up... .And still I had this compulsion to control it, to not give it up to anybody else.... I could afford my own labor. I couldn't afford somebody with the same level of skill...."

In 1989, after eighteen years of teaching and working in his studio, Martin Puryear was named the best artist at the Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, a prestigious international art exhibition where the work of more than 150 artists from 42 countries was considered. One critic has called him "one of the best sculptors alive." Another claimed that "no artist today has a greater reverence for wood or can do more with it."

Puryear's growth as an artist comes from his willingness to seek out people from a wide range of cultural traditions, who can teach himwhat they know about wood and can stretch his artistic imagination. He is an artist who believes that skill and a sense of beauty can be found in cultures worldwide. By daring to learn from craftsmen and artists as disparate as the carpenters of Sierra Leone, the woodworkers of Sweden, and the instructors of Yale University, Puryear has been able to absorb their wisdom and use it to produce sculpture that comes from the deepest part of himself. For in the long run, Puryear believes that art can come only from the individual:

"I taught for two years at...a black college...and there were times when I found it hard, or a struggle, let's say, to encourage students to find themselves, because they were so busy being members of a group.

My encouragement was to find the you in there. That's what's going to have to make the art; not your history, not your culture. Those things are reflected. They're never going to go away. That's in your nature. It's in who your are. But there's a you in there that's even more crucial than that, and you've got to find it and you've got to release it."