Clement Meadmore, 76; Sculptor Mixed Love of Jazz, Aerodynamics, Geometry

Clement Meadmore, a sculptor whose monumental artworks suggest flight, dance and other forms of natural movement, has died. He was 76.

Meadmore died April 19 in New York City after he fell at his apartment, lapsed into a coma and was taken to Bellevue Hospital, according to his art dealer Peter Rose. He never regained consciousness. In recent years he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He had been a longtime resident of New York.

The clean precision and huge scale of Meadmore’s sculpture appealed to corporate clients with outdoor plazas to fill, including the Chase Manhattan Bank in Milwaukee and the McAuley Health Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was also commissioned to create large-scale works for public spaces in Princeton, N.J., Mexico City and several cities in Australia.

Meadmore, who was born in Melbourne, Australia, was a student of aeronautical engineering and industrial design before turning to sculpture about 1953.

He began with wall reliefs but soon expanded to large, free-standing forms in steel and later, bronze. He used basic geometric shapes, a feature of minimalism, but added texture to surfaces and distorted circles, squares and lines to show his interest in abstract expressionism.

“I try to use geometry to create a level of intensity and emotion, which is not what you expect from geometry,” Meadmore said in a 1997 interview with The Australian newspaper. “I am trying to humanize geometry.”

A jazz aficionado and an accomplished drummer, Meadmore once compared making his sculpture to making music.

“It’s totally improvised, a little like working with a series of chords,” he said.

Some of his titles, including “However” and “Raincheck,” suggest names of jazz works. Others, such as “Upswing” and “Wingspread,” point to his fascination with aerodynamics.

Meadmore’s art reflected his range of interests -- “the rigor of an engineer, the elegance of a designer and the lyricism of a musician,” said Anna Schwartz, his Melbourne art dealer, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald last week.

Meadmore settled in New York City in 1963, believing that in Australia, “Even if you did the best sculpture in the world, nobody would know about it,” he told Ken Scarlett, a well-known Australian art curator who wrote Meadmore’s obituary for the Sydney newspaper.

Soon afterward his work was exhibited in major museums in New York, including the Whitney Museum in 1967 and the Museum of Modern Art in 1969.

Other museums that own his work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Cleveland Museum in Ohio and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Meadmore is also known for the furniture he designed and sold in his Melbourne shop during the early 1950s; a black metal chair with woven rope seat and back is considered a classic. He later wrote several books on the subject, including “The Modern Chair” (1974), a survey of furniture designs.

Born Feb. 9, 1929, Meadmore attended the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for two years before he changed career plans and left school. He lived for several years in Sydney before immigrating to the U.S. He became a citizen in 1976.

Working on monumental sculptures in his New York studio apartment, he sat at a table and placed miniature shapes together at different angles until he liked what he saw. Then he built small models until he was satisfied. The final work was fabricated in Connecticut.

Meadmore was married and divorced twice. He is survived by a brother, a sister, a son and a granddaughter.