Arts and Letters

Those forms of expression which survive longest seem to be those which exhibit profound revelations of eternal values, garbed in styles totally appropriate to their times, to be described eventually as "classic." In our own century such forms have been the inventions of a few original and inspired talents, the spaces between them filled with minor efforts to succeed through shock tactics or regurgitations of previous styles.

Surely the first sculptor of this century to assert the qualities of this era was Brancusi, through his symbolic reaching for space by means of aspiring forms and reflective surfaces which tended to dematerialize his metals and to emphasize the quality of the space around them. This conquest of space was, and is, the principal physical characteristic of this century.

Few sculptors have continued such a direct means of describing our time, but among them one of the purest exponents of this direction was the late José de Rivera, who acknowledged the influence of Brancusi as well as Mondrian and Vantongerloo, all of whom were intuitively pursuing the dematerialization of substance as subservient to space. The astonishing technical perfection of de Rivera's sculptures, along with the delicate strength of his linear forms, established him as a perpetuator of the classical tradition. As John Canaday wrote in 1960: "[His] forms in polished metal… are about as perfect a fusion of technique and expression as contemporary sculpture—for that matter, sculpture of any period—offers."

José de Rivera was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1905, beginning his studies in Chicago with classes in drawing with the muralist John Norton. He worked on the Federal Arts Project of the W.P.A. and served in World War II. He died on March 19 of this year, at the age of eighty.

Although most of his works were on a modest scale, suggesting, however, vast spatial inclusions, several of his pieces achieved monumental proportions in public situations, notably at the New York World's Fair of 1964 and for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, in 1967.

De Rivera was a man of great modesty and privacy, his only ambition seemingly focused on the creation of perfectly beautiful and poetic forms. He said in 1972, "My notion is that the primary function of the artist is the creation and production of work." This sounds very much like the only known remark of Johann Sebastian Bach when questioned about his life's work. He said simply, "I work hard." We can only hope to join these two hardworking geniuses again in one of Dante's highest circles of Heaven, although their work remains here in that divine creative domain, which helps us to survive the most destructive aspects of man's behavior.

Vale, José!