Art: The Iron Age Of Sculpture

Radical changes in art come less often than we like to think, but some have been utterly fundamental. One of these was the arrival of iron as a material of sculpture. This happened in the 20th century -- about 75 years ago -- at the hands of Pablo Picasso and his older friend, the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez. It signaled the first basic change in not only the materials but also the nature of the art since the invention of bronze casting, which occurred so long ago that it belongs to the domain of myth, not history.

The advent of iron is the subject of an extremely beautiful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, curated by Carmen Gimenez, with excellent catalog essays by Dore Ashton and Francisco Calvo Serraller. "Picasso and the Age of Iron" involves three European artists -- Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez and Picasso -- and two American ones, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Its time span is from 1928, when Picasso made an open frame of iron rods with a pinhead and two tiny startled hands and called it Figure, to Smith's maturity in the early 1960s. But its core is the '30s.

Though the show doesn't pretend to be encyclopedic, it is chosen with fine visual intelligence and, not incidentally, is very well installed. Above all, it conveys with exhilarating clarity the sense of discovery that went with the development of iron as a medium of sculpture. We are used to it now: half the corporate plazas of America are cluttered with large and often otiose welded objects. Now and again a real masterpiece is produced in iron -- most recently, the astonishing work by Richard Serra, Intersection II, that was on view until last week at the Gagosian Gallery in SoHo. But the Guggenheim's exhibition rewinds the tape of art history to the time when iron was not an expected material, and makes the rusty stuff seem marvelous again.

Why did iron matter? Partly for symbolic reasons: it was the common material of industry, old as the smith-god Hephaistos but new as the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- "ignoble," vernacular material that, set up beside the "noble" marble and bronze of traditional sculpture, could not but detonate new trains of imagery.

But mainly, as it turned out, it mattered for formal reasons. Iron is quintessentially structure, not mass. Inside every figure produced by the academies had been a leaner, more abstract presence -- the wire armature on which the clay or plaster was built, hidden by the later work of representation. Just as Michelangelo had imagined the figure latent in the raw marble block, hidden by the superfluities of stone, so it fell to Picasso, Gonzalez and others to imagine a second structure within the conventionally sculpted figure: a kind of iron essence, expressed in line and plane rather than continuous surface, in openness rather than solidity.