Lot Essay
Richard Tuttle is recognized as a seminal figure in the evolution of contemporary sculpture. He was educated at Trinity College in Hartford, at the Pratt School of Design and at Cooper Union before he worked for Agnes Martin. He then became the gallery assistant for Betty Parsons and in 1965 presented his first one-man exhibition there with works that he had created at the gallery. This show included the present work. A 1965 gallery installation shot documents the present piece displayed on the floor; works of this period were designed to be shown either on the floor or on the wall. Gordon Washburn wrote in the gallery pamphlet for that exhibition:
Their shapes, and particularly their edges, follow the
trembling sensibility, the delicacy of thought, the half-hidden feelings of their maker. They are constructions of the heart.
Put together out of thin sheets of wood and a thousand tiny
nails--each work a labor of the purest patience--they follow
the shapes of paper templates that have previously been
tacked on the floor or on the wall.
Each drawing has been modified until it was satisfactory to
the artist and it was then translated into wood--producing
something like a thin violin but, in this case, an instrument
which produces only visual music.
But it is by their contours that he is most eloquent, the
subtlety of their modulations giving them the air of faintly
breathing, making them seem to expand and contract like tender
living things. (G. Washburn, exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1965)
In her catalogue to the 1975 exhibition of Tuttle's work at the Whitney, Marcia Tucker wrote a note concerning the "monochrome muted colors that hover on the periphery of symbolic association: Water (cerulean blue), Fire (salmon pink)...Flower (light pink)... These works have been referred to as 'ideograms' or 'pictographs' (by Robert Pincus-Witten and Robert Murdock) because they seem to be quasi-symbolic, shorthand references to real images or experiences" (M. Tucker, exh. cat., Richard Tuttle, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1975, p. 6).
The same is true of the cloth octagonals of 1967-68, which Tuttle showed at Betty Parsons in 1968. They are made from wrinkled, dyed material stored in canvas bags and pinned to the wall with small nails. Tuttle referred to the cloth octagonals as "drawings for three dimensional structures in space" and added the following artist's statement:
150 words on my work: In life you can do two things. In art you can do one thing. There are no decisions to make in art except one--that is the possibility of art, while the actuality (of it) is life-like. And that is why anything connected with art appears paradoxical, although that is not the goal of art. Art is discipline and discipline is drawing. Drawing will change before art will. Discipline is always the same. And we will never know what art is--except as the goal, which is already defined through necessity although not understood, is essentially abstract in nature or naturally abstracted, which is to say life- like, without hope. Because color is the most abstract evidence of/in art and because we are beginning to grasp certain specific abstracted experiences (which appear as forms in art) my work looks the way it does. (Quoted in exh. cat., Richard Tuttle, Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1991, p. 87)
Their shapes, and particularly their edges, follow the
trembling sensibility, the delicacy of thought, the half-hidden feelings of their maker. They are constructions of the heart.
Put together out of thin sheets of wood and a thousand tiny
nails--each work a labor of the purest patience--they follow
the shapes of paper templates that have previously been
tacked on the floor or on the wall.
Each drawing has been modified until it was satisfactory to
the artist and it was then translated into wood--producing
something like a thin violin but, in this case, an instrument
which produces only visual music.
But it is by their contours that he is most eloquent, the
subtlety of their modulations giving them the air of faintly
breathing, making them seem to expand and contract like tender
living things. (G. Washburn, exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1965)
In her catalogue to the 1975 exhibition of Tuttle's work at the Whitney, Marcia Tucker wrote a note concerning the "monochrome muted colors that hover on the periphery of symbolic association: Water (cerulean blue), Fire (salmon pink)...Flower (light pink)... These works have been referred to as 'ideograms' or 'pictographs' (by Robert Pincus-Witten and Robert Murdock) because they seem to be quasi-symbolic, shorthand references to real images or experiences" (M. Tucker, exh. cat., Richard Tuttle, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1975, p. 6).
The same is true of the cloth octagonals of 1967-68, which Tuttle showed at Betty Parsons in 1968. They are made from wrinkled, dyed material stored in canvas bags and pinned to the wall with small nails. Tuttle referred to the cloth octagonals as "drawings for three dimensional structures in space" and added the following artist's statement:
150 words on my work: In life you can do two things. In art you can do one thing. There are no decisions to make in art except one--that is the possibility of art, while the actuality (of it) is life-like. And that is why anything connected with art appears paradoxical, although that is not the goal of art. Art is discipline and discipline is drawing. Drawing will change before art will. Discipline is always the same. And we will never know what art is--except as the goal, which is already defined through necessity although not understood, is essentially abstract in nature or naturally abstracted, which is to say life- like, without hope. Because color is the most abstract evidence of/in art and because we are beginning to grasp certain specific abstracted experiences (which appear as forms in art) my work looks the way it does. (Quoted in exh. cat., Richard Tuttle, Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1991, p. 87)