Monumental Greeting

In the difficult world of public art, the dismissive term “plop art” was conceived a generation ago in response to the proliferation of monumental sculptures that had begun to turn up in empty urban plazas. The witty zinger rightly denigrated the unreasonable expectations then held for such art: In an accelerating age of urban renewal, it was hoped art could overcome the bleakness and sterility of much mediocre architecture.

Plopping art in a plaza couldn’t accomplish miracles, of course, but the baby promptly got thrown out with the bath. “Plop art” came to be negatively associated not just with cavalier expectations for the efficacy of art, but with the very idea of placing monumental sculpture in a plaza. Soon, the common wisdom was that it simply shouldn’t be done.

As a sculptor, 58-year-old Martin Puryear has spent a good deal of energy and effort in recent years on proving that common wisdom false. At the beginning of the decade, a touring retrospective of his indoor sculpture eloquently showed how he’d developed a richly poetic lexicon of sculptural forms, materials and structural methods. Since then, his outdoor sculpture has been demonstrating with regularity that it also can make a powerful mark on the landscape.

“That Profile” is Puryear’s newly unveiled monumental sculpture commissioned for the tram arrival plaza at the Getty Center. The fourth major commission by the Getty Center from a living artist, it joins terrific predecessors by Robert Irwin, Edward Ruscha and Alexis Smith, matching their high level of accomplishment.

“That Profile” is an open framework form made from sandblasted steel tubes bound at the joints by thick strands of knotted bronze. Rising more than four stories tall at the north end of the plaza, the sculpture creates a visual union of art and engineering--an image certainly suitable for this bravura hilltop site.

The famous modular grid employed throughout the entire Getty complex by architect Richard Meier here forms the structural basis for Puryear’s abstract sculpture. Standing on six legs set directly into the travertine plaza, the skeletal sculpture seems to rise up out of the Center’s rectilinear grid and billow into a contrapuntal organic form. (Imagine a fisherman’s net cast toward the sky, or perhaps an enormous woven basket upended.) Weighing several tons, it’s visually lighter than air.

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The silvery-gray sculpture, placed several feet before the low travertine wall at the plaza’s end, is distinctly frontal. From the plaza side its “front” is flat; from “behind” it swells gently outward. This gracefully curved rear grid echoes the curved and gridded window facade glimpsed on the nearby Williams Auditorium.

On a formal level, this careful siting is critical to the sculpture’s success. So is the remarkably suggestive image Puryear has conceived--an image that cleverly plays with the sun-washed location.

What’s the profile in “That Profile”? Looking at it from the cascading steps of the museum across the plaza, the billowing form indeed recalls the shape of a human head, but one whose generalized schema brings to mind a flurry of multiple associations.

Facing west toward the Pacific, the tall, graceful, slightly elongated oval bears a distinct resemblance to the regal bronze heads of Ife, Nigeria, produced in that former religious capital between the 12th century and the 15th century. The linear pattern on Puryear’s monumental head even provides a visual echo of the linear scarification marks that grace those refined and exquisite forebears.

Chronologically, Ife’s prominence as a religious and political center immediately preceded the rise of Tuscany as the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance, and it is there that a second referent can be identified for Puryear’s piece. This one comes from painting.

Think of Piero della Francesca’s archetypal profile portraits of Battista Sforza and Federico de Montefeltro. Like “That Profile,” which rises up into an azure firmament before the Santa Monica Mountains in the distance, Piero’s portraits of the countess and the duke show their absolute profiles set against an immense continuous landscape, which unfolds beneath a luminous sky. Almost Pharaonic in bearing, like their Ife predecessors and Puryear’s new sculpture, these heads create a quiet but intense sense of grandeur.

Finally, in concept if not in style, Puryear’s colossal sculptural head standing on a Modernist plaza brings to mind Picasso’s colossal head designed for the Chicago Civic Center in 1964. (Born in Washington and now living in upstate New York, Puryear moved to Chicago in 1978 to teach at the University of Illinois; he lived there throughout the 1980s.) Although the Chicago “Head of a Woman” is composed mostly of planar forms, Picasso, together with Julio Gonzalez, earlier pioneered the style of linear, open-framework sculpture extrapolated so gracefully in “That Profile.” And the Spaniard’s famous artistic fusion of European and African traditions is reflected from a different perspective in Puryear’s lovely sculpture.

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Significantly, the fanfare surrounding Picasso’s Chicago Civic Center commission is what jump-started the subsequent proliferation of monumental sculptures for urban plazas in America--the kind that eventually got dismissively tagged as “plop art.” Not only has Puryear’s distinguished body of work over two decades synthesized diverse traditions into spare, elegant, resonant objects, but sculptures like his wonderful commission for the Getty help restore to prominence a buried tradition.

In a second-floor gallery inside the Getty Museum’s west pavilion, a concise exhibition illuminates the Puryear commission. Guest curator Lisa Lyons has deftly selected and installed two earlier sculptures that establish precedents for “That Profile,” which is represented by the wire presentation model Puryear made for the commission.

Among several prints and drawings, “Rune Stone” (1966), an etching the artist made while still a student at the Swedish Royal Academy in Stockholm, offers a surprisingly early anticipation of the new sculpture’s form. (The poetic allusions embodied by the mysterious inscriptions on these ancient stones are also relevant.) Finally, artist Lynn Davis photographed the fabrication of the monumental sculpture at a Massachusetts foundry; she brings the same burnished refinement to these gorgeous documentary images as she does to her well-known photographs of heaving icebergs and ancient Egyptian monuments.

* “That Profile,” Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, exhibition through Jan. 9. Closed Mondays; parking reservations required.