ART REVIEW : Caught in Thought : Wit of Winsor on Display at Newport Harbor

Einstein once said that the simplest solutions are the most elegant. That’s something Jackie Winsor seems to know. She’s a New York abstract sculptor who, at 51, is regarded as among the leaders of her generation. Despite that prepossessing reputation, her work has never been seen in depth on the West Coast until now.

Over the weekend, the Newport Harbor Art Museum opened a nationally touring, 25-work survey that may not convert case-hardened haters of abstract art but is certain to delight everybody else.

Wait. You expect citizens to drag themselves all the way to the museum for a paltry baker’s two-dozen of sculpture?

Well, yes. You see, even though she’s been intensely at work for a quarter-century, Winsor’s whole oeuvre consists of just 75 pieces. She puts boundless amounts of time, thought and effort into each one and it shows. They don’t look labored but her concentration gives them the kind of density of experience that makes you want to look at them hard and repeatedly. Actually, it’s pretty rare for a survey to include a third of an artist’s entire output.

Will you give me a break? I never understand this kind of stuff to start with and when I read catalogues to get some help I get even more confused by all that esoteric artspeak.

All the more reason to go. The show, organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, comes with a catalogue that is a model of clarity. Essays are by curator Dean Sobel and art critics Peter Schjeldahl and John Yau. The writings are so limpid you can see the meanings at the bottoms of the words.

Winsor’s work began as a kind of extension of Minimalism in the late ‘60s and came to concentrate on simple Platonic shapes such as cubes and spheres. Minimalism tended to seek success through stark intimidation. Richard Serra was out to impress by threatening to drop two tons of slab steel on your head. Donald Judd’s pieces looked like part of an air-conditioning system bent on lecturing you on higher math. It was good work but very macho-monolithic.

Winsor’s generation appreciated their fundamentalism but were slightly less Gregorian and Draconian. Barry Le Va wondered about randomness, Eva Hesse was fascinated by process and Bruce Nauman by the expressive vectors of the body--including the voice. Added up, this Postminimalist thrust amounted to a reintroduction of the human factor.

Writers on Winsor’s work find significance in the fact that she was born in Newfoundland in an environment of small bucolic fishing villages. Her childhood was rather rigorous both in the old-world British bearing of her parents and its no-frills backwoods setting. All the same, she thrived on it. When the family moved to Boston in 1951 it gave her a chronic case of culture shock.

This is so clear in the work that it amounts to a kind of non-specific aesthetic autobiography. Formally, Winsor’s art is very plain and assertive. Expressively, it is as mannerly, nuanced and complex as a Henry James short story.

The earliest work in the show is “Rope Trick” completed in 1968. Its very title seems to give away the game. It’s a length of rope held upright by means of a metal rod inserted through its middle. Just a nice sight gag. But then the whisperings of the mind begin. Looks like hair, like a girl’s braid. Rope is something normally flexible now become erect. Intimations of the phallic. A mixture of messages.

In other pieces, Winsor spins out the expressive ramifications of rope until we are back in some primeval place where there are hairy mastodons and a pair of “Bound Logs” that appear like a precious primitive talisman made by a child 80 feet tall.

Civilization appears in “Brick Dome,” a kind of impenetrable cement igloo ringed with neat concentric rows of brick. It’s utterly true to its own logic and thus completely mad, like civilization itself. What we really see in all these works are exercises of simple formality whose gravity is so apt we delight in them as in the exercise of wit.

Winsor is never witty in the ordinary sense, or ominous, opulent, introverted or any of the other things we seem to feel in the work. She seems to catch herself on the brink of expressing such states and pulls back, the model of discretion. Because of her reticence, she can startle in unexpected ways. Recent “Insert Pieces” look like simple frames hanging on the wall but we do a double take because their centers go deeper than the wall itself. Subtle sabotage of expectation. Winsor makes cubes, each roughly the size of a card table. The most boggling is called “Fifty-Fifty.” It is made of myriad strips of wood nailed together in grids and stacked to the desired height. All this meticulous care results in a piece that is curiously reassuring. Some things in this world are still done with care. Not compulsion, care.

Other cubes are more solid but each has a small, square peep-hole in each face so we can see their inner workings, as if inside the walls of a house. One is made of lovely green painted wood she salvaged from her demolished studio. She dragged another down the street with her car, abrading it horribly. She had one dynamited, then reassembled it. All have autobiographical intimations and wonderful surfaces a painter would envy.

The most compelling cube is “Burned and Red Inside-Out Piece.” In it she extended each face of the block by stacking layers of plywood in pyramidal shapes until it became faceted. It suggests some ritual tribal object of the 20th Century.

The best of several spherical works is “Circle/Square.” Made of altered cement it looks like marble. She squared off the basic globe shape, making flat circular sides that frame squares of concentric descending steps. There’s a sweet gravity about the work that is both archaic and classical. It’s like a monument to the early Greeks gravely conjuring with the properties of geometry.

The work makes the profound impression of being a great masterpiece of modern sculpture, as when one faces a really first-rate Brancusi.

Winsor’s art reminds us of Kierkegaard’s observation that purity of the heart is to will only one thing.

Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, to March 29, closed Mondays, (714) 759-1122.