Art: The Man of Small Things

In 1975, when he was 34 years old and had been showing in galleries for about a decade, Richard Tuttle had a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A big show at a New York City museum can be career making. Or it can play out the way his did. Tuttle was working with the humble materials he favors to this day--wire, string, bits of Styrofoam, matches, scraps of plywood and cardboard--which he lightly assembled into strange little delicacies. Some of the works in that show, like his "rope pieces"--three-inch lengths of clothesline, fluffed a bit at the edges and attached to the wall with three nails--seemed less like works than offhand gestures, the merest residues of an intuition. Years later, Tuttle described another of them as "some paint on the end of a coffee stirrer, placed on a 40-foot wall."

To anyone holding to more strenuous notions of art, whatnots like that seemed too flimsy for words. Actually, the reviewers had words, plenty of them, including pathetic, precious and farce. Though he had notable defenders, the bad press was such that the show's curator, Marcia Tucker, eventually lost her job. Hilton Kramer, who was then the unappeasable critic of the New York Times, dismissed Tuttle with a few lines that followed the artist around for years. Playing off Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's famous directive that less is more, Kramer announced that "in Mr. Tuttle's work, less is unmistakably less ... One is tempted to say that, so far as art is concerned, less has never been as less as this."

That should have been enough to consign Tuttle to the scrap heap of history, though you suspect that even there he would have had fun with the scraps. But his fragile art, with its flickering pulse, has turned out to be durable. Three decades later, he's the subject of "The Art of Richard Tuttle," a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) that sends you home with your senses briskly reconditioned. After it closes in San Francisco on Oct. 16, the exhibition goes on the road for two years, heading first to the Whitney--talk about "I shall return!"--then to Des Moines, Iowa; Dallas; Chicago; and Los Angeles.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the SFMOMA curator who organized the show, calls that tour "a victory lap," and she's right. Over the past decade, Tuttle has been increasingly recognized as a genuine, if highly idiosyncratic, American master. In the 1980s, when so much art was big and declamatory, it was always a relief to come across one of Tuttle's meticulous drawings or his gentle constructions, making their case that the smallest gesture could carry weight. When the noise of that decade died down, the low-intensity virtues of his work became more obvious, even to the market. Three years ago, one of his early works, Letters (The Twenty-Six Series), sold at auction for $1 million.