Branching in all directions

“It’s funny,” says Richard Tuttle, strolling through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fourth floor, home to his first full retrospective, “I think you can have a maximum of maybe three real art experiences in a day if you’re willing and wanting to, and here we are putting 300 pieces in a show, and I think to myself, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

It’s less a matter of jitters than an example of the preoccupation with quandary that Tuttle’s friends know to be characteristic of his thinking.

“If you’re into the art part of it, though,” he says, “the experience can pass on; you can take it in now but realize the art later.”

Included in the retrospective are many of Tuttle’s earliest defining works: small geometric drawing/paintings; tiny cubes of folded paper with compositions cut out of their sides; and low-profile, solid-color paintings on canvas stretched over oddly shaped pieces of plywood. There are his wall pieces made from cut, sewn and dyed canvas; irregular octagons of white paper adhered to walls; abstract and vaguely referential works in ink, pencil and paint on paper; and constructions from all manner of materials.

And there are the works for which Tuttle is perhaps still best known: wire pieces, re-created by the artist every time they are exhibited, made by drawing a curvilinear or angular pencil line on the wall, tracing it with a piece of wire affixed at each end with a tack, and then allowing the wire to curl away from the wall, becoming a second line in space and casting a third line in shadow.

“It seems inappropriate to talk about art the way you talk about other things,” says Tuttle, who speaks of his work as an entity apart from himself. “The work takes care of me; I don’t take care of it,” he says. And: “The work is far more intelligent than I am.”

The more he talks, the more evident it becomes that Tuttle, a man whose casual demeanor masks a mind tuned to subtlety, distinction and detail, has high hopes for his art.

“When I was younger, I was a total fanatic about art -- art and only art; art was it -- and I see now that I was just trying to make the most secure relation to art that I possibly could,” he says. “And once I did that, I could see that it was about art into life, that the real purpose of art isn’t art but life. If you have the tool and know how to use it, it’s like nothing else to make life everything it can be, and I think my generation saw how to use the tool in a very experimental way.”

Blazing a maverick path

It’s been 40 years since Tuttle, born in Rahway, N.J., in 1941 and raised in nearby Roselle, had his first solo show, with New York dealer Betty Parsons. He had come to New York -- the logical destination for someone who knew even as a child that he wanted to be an artist -- after graduating in 1963 from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he’d studied art, philosophy and literature, with additional studies at Pratt Institute. After a semester at Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture and a brief stint in the U.S. Air Force, he took a job as Parsons’ gallery gofer.

Parsons was known for supporting artists who seemed odd and improbable. Tuttle showed similar promise, with his little drawings and paper cubes. He continued to show with Parsons until her death in 1982. And even today, Tuttle, who with his wife, poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, divides his time between Manhattan and Abiquiu, N.M., is described as a maverick by, it seems, everyone with anything to say about him.

Those watching the avant-garde saw the young Tuttle as occupying a special position relative to Minimalist artists attempting to make what artist and critic Donald Judd called “specific objects”-- nonreferential works that showed little evidence of the artist’s hand and that sidestepped traditional categories of painting and sculpture.

Tuttle’s distilled-down work prompted critic Barbara Rose to include him in her 1965 Art in America article “ABC Art,” a defining text on Minimalism. But the quirky, ephemeral, intimate and overtly handmade aspects of his work signaled a shift to critic and curator Lucy Lippard, a key voice in describing the emerging Post-minimalists -- less a movement than a generation loosely showing the influence of Minimalism while also departing from it.

Although Tuttle’s work has ranged widely, as the SFMOMA retrospective makes evident, certain tendencies have remained constant: an eye for potential in the most basic materials; unending interest in the relationships among line, surface and space; a drive to make works that compel contemplation by way of (and despite) their simplicity; and, amid peers who sought to conquer the “expanded field” with extreme displays of material and mass, a fascination with commanding space via works that initially seem unimposing, sometimes barely there.

“The profession of the artist is a sort of service profession,” Tuttle says. “Art is there for us to use, but art contributes by helping us to clarify things. It doesn’t sign, seal or deliver anything.

“One of the reasons I’ve done so many different kinds of work is because in the end, really, art is something larger than the human brain can grasp. That’s why it’s so attractive to have it be in the world with us. You can’t grasp it, but you can have it, and there aren’t many things like that, especially things that can make your life better.”

Madeleine Grynsztejn, senior curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, understood the attraction Tuttle describes when she first encountered one of his fabric pieces 13 years ago. “It stopped me in my tracks,” remembers Grynsztejn, who organized the retrospective. “It was completely compelling, and yet I didn’t know what it was, and as someone whose job it is to be looking for the zeitgeist, to be taking the pulse, and at a time when a lot of art was dealing in very clear messages and functioning almost more like advertising, I found myself unable ... to easily explain it, and therefore unable to explain it away.”

The experience lead Grynsztejn to pursue what others recognize as the daunting task of grappling with Tuttle’s work.

“While he may be part of a generation, he is not part of a movement, and historians don’t quite know how to wedge him into the outlines of the history they have set in stone,” says Katy Siegel, assistant professor of art history at Hunter College in New York and a contributor to the retrospective’s catalog. “Other complications include the fact that he changes constantly, rather than being identified with a single stylistic moment, and that so much of his career has been in Europe.”

Indeed, Grynsztejn’s project was vast, tracking down about 5,000 works from Tuttle’s prolific career, many of them overseas, and paring that output to a relatively streamlined presentation.

Although many consider the retrospective overdue, Grynsztejn sees it as arising naturally with a surge of interest in Tuttle’s generation. “There’s a roughly 30-year cycle between when an artist gains a wider audience and when a consensus begins to shake down about the work in recent art history,” she says. “This exhibition falls into place with recent surveys of work by Post-minimalists like Eva Hesse, which SFMOMA also organized, as well as Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson.”

The curator reconsidered

Grynsztejn is also well aware of another 30-year turnaround. In 1975, curator Marcia Tucker exhibited a rotating selection of Tuttle’s works at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Though the effort had its admirers, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer’s summation that “in Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less ... indeed remorselessly and irredeemably less” came to define an onslaught of negative response from critics and museum visitors.

The barrage, which in part led to Tucker’s departure (she went on to found the New Museum), was directed not just at the work. As Adam D. Weinberg, current director of the Whitney (in a turn of history, the second stop on the retrospective’s tour), comments in the catalog, Tucker’s then-radical relinquishing of the total control curators customarily assumed over work once it left the studio -- making the show a collaboration between her and the artist -- caused unease in an art world accustomed to museums imposing authoritative frames of reference on art.

In large part because of Tuttle’s generation, such collaboration has since become commonplace, forcing a rethinking of both the artist’s and the curator’s relation to studio and exhibition space. What was Tucker’s folly or provocation became Grynsztejn’s MO, with Tuttle involved in every aspect of the retrospective.

“You can see his hand all through the installation of the show,” says Cornelia Butler, who contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog and was instrumental in making the last stop of the tour the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where she is a curator. “You see Madeleine Grynsztejn’s mark as a curator, but you really see her openness to Tuttle and how he made the show something that brings all the parts together in his way, and it seems so clear.”

For Grynsztejn, such a comment is an affirmation of her belief from the start that Tuttle’s collaboration was essential, a belief she found tested at times, as when Tuttle designed movable walls for displaying framed drawings. Rather than the expected stark white slabs, Tuttle -- who insists that complexity in presentation sometimes provides clarity in viewing simple work -- proposed panels that fold like screens, made of plywood with much of the grain exposed, with some areas covered with solid-painted blocks of color and giant swatches of plaid.

“I was like ‘No, no, no,’ ” Grynsztejn says, laughing, “but we built them, and we installed the work, and he was right.”

Grynsztejn even agreed to give prominent placement to “3rd Rope Piece,” an unexpected icon of the Whitney brouhaha. The work, consisting only of a 3-inch length of rope nailed to the wall, might have been difficult for audiences in 1975, but Susan Harris, a freelance curator and art writer, longtime Tuttle fan and lender to the exhibition, envisions a different reception for the retrospective, both in San Francisco and then as it travels, scaled down slightly, to the Whitney, the Des Moines Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and finally MOCA in March 2007.

“In addition to satisfying Tuttle-ites who long have clamored for an extensive survey that lays out the breadth of Richard’s vision since the ‘60s, I think the show will be seen better, heard better, felt better than it would have before,” Harris says. “Why? I think the average art audience is more open and more visually experienced and sophisticated than before.”

An artist’s artist

Tuttle admirers suggest that some of the retrospective’s biggest beneficiaries likely will be artists themselves. “Richard’s art is, in the end, a model for artists of all generations in terms of its integrity to itself over time,” Harris says.

Says Peter Freeman, a New York art dealer and longtime Tuttle friend and collector, who with his wife, Elisabeth Cunnick, lent numerous works to the retrospective: “There is no school of Tuttle, because as simple as his work appears, other artists can’t do what he does. But Richard always has been an important presence because he repeatedly shows another way, always reminds artists of their freedom, of what they can do.”

Butler, who has worked on a number of projects involving artists who redefined art in the late 20th century, considers Tuttle a key figure: “He isn’t the only one of his generation, which is a generation that came into art at a very transitional moment and really subjected art’s hierarchies to interrogation and experimentation, but he’s an important one as an influence, as someone who doesn’t just carry the attitude but really embodies the idea that art is a daily offering into the world.”

But Grynsztejn, who describes Tuttle’s work with phrases such as “pictures of freedom” and, in more Tuttle-ish language, “objects with the same spirit as living things,” sees the exhibition as one that will heighten people’s receptivity to the world and offer rewards and surprises to a broad audience, from Tuttle aficionados to first-time museum visitors.

Siegel, of Hunter College, thinks the exhibition just might achieve the sort of effect that Tuttle hopes his art, or any art, can offer.

“Tuttle offers pleasure, of course,” Siegel notes. “He also offers the model of an artist who is constantly changing and growing, without concern for reputation or the fear of failing, as well as a self that is introspective and creative without being in any way egotistical. All of these things are vital to our culture and in short supply.”

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‘The Art of Richard Tuttle’

Where: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., San Francisco

When: 10 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. Fridays through Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to 8:45 p.m. Thursdays, closed Wednesdays; check for hours after Labor Day.

Ends: Oct. 16

Price: $7 to $12.50

Contact: (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Also

The exhibition travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 25, 2007, through June 25, 2007.