Highlights: Richard Serra died of pneumonia at the age of 85 in Orient, New York. Born on the west coast, in San Francisco, on November 2, 1938. Son of a Jewish mother from Odessa, Ukraine, and a father of Spanish origin from Majorca. Serra has created sculptures for more than a hundred public places from Philadelphia to New York, Paris, Berlin and Bilbao, as well as São Paulo, Paris and Rio de Janeiro. The artist was still able to benefit during his lifetime from his entry into the history of art.

He made weight with the visual lightness of his works which weighed up to hundreds of tons and where the experience of the visit often remained forever engraved in the hearts of the spectators.…

Death of Richard Serra, giant of steel sculptures

He made weight with the visual lightness of his works which weighed up to hundreds of tons and where the experience of the visit often remained forever engraved in the hearts of the spectators. On Tuesday March 26, the internationally recognized American artist died of pneumonia at the age of 85 in Orient, New York.

American artist Richard Serra died on March 26, 2024, at the age of 85. Here in 2010, before the Prince of Asturias awards ceremony. © MIGUEL RIOPA / AFP

By: Siegfried Forster Follow

Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, major retrospectives at the Center Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Arts in New York, gigantic permanent installation of spirals and labyrinths at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, monumental commission for steel walls for the Grand Palais in Paris or towers in the sand of Qatar... Fortunately for him, Richard Serra was still able to benefit during his lifetime from his entry into the history of art as one of the greatest sculptors of his time. An artist who created, by twisting volumes, shapes never seen before.

Born on the west coast, in San Francisco, on November 2, 1938, Richard Serra studied fine arts at Yale, in the south, before living and working in New York, on the east coast of the United States. Is it this life fueled and agitated by the different geographical poles that is found in his works, celebrated for their strong and mysterious tension?

A steel monster washed ashore

Everyone who met him remembers the steely look in Richard Serra's blue eyes. Son of a Jewish mother from Odessa, Ukraine, and a father of Spanish origin from Majorca, little Richard had a connection with the San Francisco shipyard. Where his father worked, at the age of 4, he saw a battleship leave the shipyards. Being faced with a steel monster washed up on the ground, and the tremor of meaning through the material that goes with it, an experience that has never left the artist. It is no coincidence that during his youth he worked every summer in a steelworks...

When Serra installed in 2008 for the

Monumenta

event in the 13,000 square meters of the Grand Palais in Paris five steel plates that were both thin – with a thickness of only 13 centimeters – but also gigantic – 17 meters high and 4 meters wide. large, each weighing 73 tonnes – he explained his gigantic

Promenade

installation on RFI

: “

The content of the work is found within you, as a spectator. And not in these big plates. The subject is the experience you have of entering this space and moving through it. This is your experience of this work. These five steel plates mean nothing. The true content of the work is the viewer who moves through the work. The experience he has over time. Time becomes a value in itself.

Installation by Richard Serra in the nave of the Grand Palais in 2008. Danielle Birck/RFI

An intimate sensation transformed into shared work

With each creation, Richard Serra wants to provoke in the viewer an intimate sensation in a public place, intended to itself transform into a shared work. An equation that doesn't always work as he imagined or hoped. Some of his installations provoke violent reactions. The most emblematic example is his monumental sculpture

Tilted Arc

, inaugurated in 1981 in Federal Plaza, a business place in New York, and very quickly contested by local residents. Eight years later, and following numerous petitions and legal battles against the work, the artist had to dismantle this metal plate measuring 3.6 meters high and 36.6 meters long. And many other pieces by Serra provoke incomprehension:

Octagon for Saint Eloi

, for example, placed in 1991 on the square of the Changy church in Saône-et-Loire in France, will be nicknamed "the bolt" by the residents.

On the other hand, in Berlin, following an argument, it was he himself who withdrew his project for the Holocaust memorial. When his project was modified, Serra withdrew it in the late 1990s "

for private and artistic reasons

." On the other hand, the idea of representing a sea of steles remained.

The shock of the Brancusi workshop in Paris

Serra has created sculptures for more than a hundred public places, from Philadelphia and Saint-Louis to New York, Paris, Berlin and Bilbao, as well as São Paulo. But with France, Richard Serra maintained a special relationship. Thanks to a grant, in 1965 he discovered the work of Giacometti, one of his masters whom he spent "

hours observing at the dome, like a groupie

", he confided to RFI.

But Paris is above all the shock of Brancusi's studio recreated at the National Museum of Modern Art. His encounter with the work of the great Romanian artist will be crucial for the painter's decision to become a sculptor in turn. But where Brancusi excelled in the search for elegance and lightness with his bases and his way of purifying his subjects and drawing a line in space, like the Bird

in Space

, Serra will do the opposite. He is in search of form, not image. Thanks to the balancing act and the immense weight of his steel plates, the American artist often sought to arouse in the viewer a feeling of insecurity and trouble.

In Spain, the country of his father's birth, he found another key element of his future artistic approach. Velásquez's

Las Meninas

made him understand the importance of integrating the viewer into the design and perception of the work: “

I looked at it for a while before realizing that I was an extension of the canvas. It was a revelation.

“Delineator” by Richard Serra (1974/75). Coll. by the artist/ProLitteris/Serra Studio/Gordon Matta-Clark

A balance that is both menacing and poetic

Before steel became his favorite material, he also used rubber and liquid lead. In an interview with the daily

Le Monde

in 2008, he explained how steel came into his life: “

One day, while placing a lead plate in the corner of the workshop where I was with Jasper Johns, I I saw that it stood alone, vertically. I then obtained large steel plates: this is the origin of these pieces (Strike) which are inserted, without fixing, in the corner of a room and transform perception.

In 1969, he created his founding work,

One Ton Drop

(“House of Cards”), with an apparent fragility worthy of a house of cards. In fact, he positions four lead plates so that they only support each other. From this balance, both threatening and poetic, he will henceforth make his signature.

In 1997, Documenta in Kassel, one of the largest contemporary art fairs in the world, had to order a crane to lift and honor the more than 100 tons of steel of Richard Serra's work.

After his death, his creations will truly become “self-supporting” works. But, even without the support of the master, his monumental sculptures in orange-brown steel will continue to arouse the emotions of spectators.

American artist Richard Serra's four steel monoliths in the Qatar desert. AFP/File

Death of Richard Serra, giant of steel sculptures

Death of Richard Serra, giant of steel sculptures

A steel monster washed ashore

An intimate sensation transformed into shared work

The shock of the Brancusi workshop in Paris

A balance that is both menacing and poetic

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