Sculpture: Bolt Ahoy

• Share

Some seem to fly through the air like a jet taking off. Some dangle from the ceiling and seem to float, like a yellow submarine, at ankle, knee-or eye-level. Yet none of these ever actually move, for they are not boats, not planes, but sleekly minimal bolts and beams cantilevered into a startling semblance of motion by Manhattan's Robert Grosvenor, 31. "I like sculpture to be a kind of quick thing, like what we see out of train windows," says Grosvenor. "I like things I've seen very fast and I don't know what they are, but I remember the outline, the image. I'd like my sculptures to be remembered the same way."

Grosvenor's sculpture is memorable for its engineering finesse, for its life and sweep, for the way in which a huge Grosvenor dwindles grandly into the distance, playing joyfully with the sight lines of Renaissance perspective. The Larry Aldrich Museum in Connecticut specially commissioned his 100-ft.-long yellow piece for its greensward, and Manhattan's Whitney proudly hangs the 23-ft.-long Tenerife in its lobby. Thanks to his training as an architect, Grosvenor's work is not only handsome but portable — indeed, some times floatable. A swooping, 40-ft.-long black T, recently seen at The Hague's Gemeentemuseum, has been taken apart and stored in a warehouse (the exhibition of which it was a part was supposed to travel to Paris, but May's riots intervened). A 21-ft.-long pair of red floats will soon be anchored a few yards off the shorefront home of a Connecticut couple who live on Long Island Sound near Greenwich.

The prospect of a floating sculpture is particularly pleasing for Grosvenor because he has had long experience with the sea. Born rich and raised in the rich stretches of Newport's Ocean Drive, he sails his own 20-ft. gaff-rigged sloop. After studying architecture in Paris, he experimented with abstract expressionist painting and junk sculpture in a Manhattan loft. Then one day he stepped into an elevator that wasn't there, and the fall broke both his legs. In the course of his six-months' hospitalization he meditated and discovered his true bent. Today he first sketches his ideas on paper, next lays out a full-scale model in string, finally orders the plywood and starts cutting. (His wife Jackie helps with the sanding.) He delights in astonishing architects with his uncanny ability to defy the laws of gravity. "I work very intuitively," he says. "I'm not a mathematician. I start with an illogical idea and try to make it work."

Grosvenor likes nothing better than to design a work to fit a particular space. But he has learned that there is nothing more important than the choice of a client. Invited by Hugh Hefner to do a lobby for a Playboy Club in Wisconsin, Grosvenor proposed a piece so large that people would have to walk over or around it. Hefner never actually told him in so many words that it would not do. "Next thing I knew," Grosvenor recalls, "they were buying $9,000 trees to put where my piece was supposed to go." Grosvenor is currently at work on a huge rainbow-like arc, commissioned by a Newport collector, that will curve out and downward from a 30-ft. cliff near the ocean. Even a $9,000 tree, he figures, would have trouble growing downward.