Richard Serra’s Paris Moment@Art

Steven Erlanger writes:

France is making a fuss this week over Richard Serra, the 68-year-old American bantamweight who fashions elegant, gargantuan art out of steel. Richard Serra, at left, at the Grand Palais museum in Paris.

Photo: Michel Euler/Associated Press

Mr. Serra opens the annual solo show called Monumenta in the echoing Grand Palais.

Photo: Olivier Laban-Mattei/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A cruciform crystal palace of filigreed iron and glass, the Grand Palais rises 197 feet at the nave and covers 775,000 square feet, and filling it is a monumental task.

Photo: Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Mr. Serra began struggling with the problem two years ago. "First, you have to figure out scale," he said. "I was overwhelmed by the space and wasn’t exactly sure what to do. But I realized you have to deal with the entirety of the space — to think otherwise was to kid myself." He couldn’t just deal with the floor plan, he said. "I had to go vertical here."

His answer is a sculpture called "Promenade," five enormous slabs of Cor-Ten steel set along the central axis of the floor.

Photo: Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

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In 1983 he created "Clara-Clara," a sculpture commissioned for the pit, or forum, of the Pompidou Center as part of a Serra retrospective show. Two large, inclined steel C’s, each roughly 12 feet high by 108 feet long and weighing 105 tons, curve away from each other at the ends and nearly meet in the middle, but allow a viewer to walk through.

But the weight was considered too much for the site, and Dominique Bozo, then the Pompidou Center’s director, suggested placing the sculpture at one end of the Tuileries garden, so it would frame the Louvre Museum at one end and the large obelisk from the Temple of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde at the other.

Photo: Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Much to Mr. Serra’s chagrin, those who visit it, on dusty ground, have decided in a kind of collective fancy to put their footprints on the steel. The soles of sneakers and athletic shoes may have their own formal design, but the prints look tacky on the orangey patina of the steel.

Photo: Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

Mr. Serra, who owns "Promenade," invested close to $1 million for its development and construction. But he says he has no idea what will happen to it after Monumenta — or what Paris will decide to do with "Clara-Clara."

Photo: Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times

@Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/07/arts/design/20080507_SERRA_SLIDESHOW_index.html