130
l'AIl..TISAN
I~EVIEW
hard by his extended encounters with Old Master painting (which took
place in the last years of his life) and worked assiduously to come to terms
wi th what he saw. When he died, Thompson was attempting to adapt the
Old Master compositions he admired most to his personal narratives, trying
to make the architecture of Poussin and Titian reverberate with the sound
of superheated jazz riffs.
It
was hard to like many of the last pictures in the
Rosenfeld show-some recalled nothing so much as late De Chirico.
(I
remember seeing more exciting work in Thompson's ROl11e studio,
although how reliable my judgel11ent was back then, when I was newly
emerged fi'om graduate school, is another matter). The sad part, of course,
is that we'll never know where these pictures would have led.
Obviously, there was no shortage of painting shows worth seeing this
fall, but sculpture exhibitions provided both the most dramatic and the most
intimate works of the season: monumental architectural pieces by Anthony
Caro and Richard Serra at Marlborough Chelsea and the Dia Foundation,
respectively, and fi'agile clay figures by Georges Jeanclos at Garth Clark
Gallery. Caro's tall wooden towers puzzled visitors who came to
Marlborough's three-person show looking for welded steel; they knew that
the rather inert stone eyeballs in the fi'ont of the gallery l11ust be by Louise
Bourgeois and the endless rows of overwrought bronze backs by
Magdalena Abakanowicz, but where was the Caro? In fact, the tall, stacked
structures were recent manifestations of something that has deeply engaged
the Bri tish sculptor for more than a decade-the notion of a sculpture that
must be entered to be fully understood. The austere, chimney-like towers
slowly disclosed themselves as a pair of repeated, linked, but off-set units,
pierced wi th narrow doorways. They were handsome enough from the out–
side, but the exci tement came only when you entered, looked up into a
dim, narrow, tapering space
Ii
t from above, and proceeded through a maze–
like path that made you acutely aware of how and where you were moving:
a gap, and then into the next tower, where you repeated the choreography
of your trajectory to exit on the opposite side. The journey took you from
darkened, silent space, sheltering but too small to be inhabited, briefly into
light and a reminder of larger spaces, and then back into enclosed dimness.
This mysterious passage distorted your sense of your own size by tapping
into l11emories of childhood enclosure, "secret" places under tables, forbid–
den haunts. Presumably, more towers could be added-the structure implies
an open-ended system of repetitions-which would heighten the experi–
ence, but it's effective as it is. From what I have seen, it's one ofCaro's most
potent "enterable" sculptures-a resonant, deliberately simplified structure
that comes alive when you move through it.
The same description could be applied to Serra's much-publicized
TiJYqllcd Ellipscs,
the trio of immense, warped oval steel enclosures jaml11ed
