I was lucky enough, some years back, to be involved in a large retrospective exhibition of Albert Paley’s work in Washington DC. I remember that after much curatorial brainstorming, we gave the exhibition the title American Metal.1 We didn’t feel the need to narrow it down more than that, because we knew that the audience in the nation’s capital would know exactly what was implied: that for decades, the artist had enjoyed a
dominant national role. But the exhibition showed far more, in fact. It demonstrated that collectively, this work is a microcosm of the history of metal in art. Over his career, there has been no aspect of the culture of metal that Albert Paley hasn’t impacted and changed. There is a profound ubiquity here, of an artist whose presence is everywhere: the modern history of jewellery, architectural metalwork, ornamental art, and sculpture.
The V&A Museum recently purchased a superb Paley gate. It is now installed in its metalwork gallery, and joins their existing examples of his work. This was an important purchase, for while the artist’s reputation has been a global one for a long time, there have been few opportunities on this side of the Atlantic for the public to see it.
Paley’s career has spanned well over fifty years. He trained at the renown Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and quickly arrived on the American scene toward the end of the 1960s. He established a national profile through his jewellery, though from the start, the work implied a sculptural sensibility. He moved largely out of precious materials and stones, into a wider range of forged metalwork – candelabra, stands, tables – and made the forge into his principal vehicle of expression. And he always drew. A major breakthrough came in 1974, with his winning the commission to create the Portal Gates for the Renwick Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. This magnificent work – a powerful presence still, facing the White House – initiated an ongoing commitment to the art of gates, entranceways, and doors,
that led to the creation and installation of masterworks all over America.
As we look at the gates, associated drawings, and the sculptures, we can discern that the artist has made scale itself into a vehicle for poetry. Undoubtedly, this is connected to the range of his activity over the years: his early expertise in jewellery and his subsequent move to large scale sculpture, has made the ability to manipulate detail, while still achieving a sense of monumentality, into second nature for him.
The larger works have the feel of elemental forces, harnessed by the artist, who is holding it all in check for us. But at the same time, they deal in minutiae, and have the detail we usually assign to jewellery. Scale, of course, isn’t simply to do with size, so much as the ability to suggest and compose the size of things in relation to one another, and in relation to the viewer. Paley’s ability to compose in this way is exceptional. In a fit of understatement he tells us that ‘I have never really had a problem with scale. I approach the work in the same way, with the same set of aims.
When the work gets larger, of course, different things influence it: making it hold together physically, accepting that somebody might walk up to, around, and even into it, there are different considerations.’2 Scale bestows the work with the ability to envelop the viewer. This is exacerbated by the sense of movement. The artist recently made the point about his forged work that “I suppose underneath it all, the commonality is that it is to do with movement, or implied movement. Simulating movement helps me deal with the three dimensional nature of the work”. ‘Implied movement’ is the key phrase here I think. There is a beautiful poise between stasis and movement in the work. It is as though the artist creates a monumental composition, a stability that is necessary to the architectural function of the piece – gates and fences shouldn’t really move – which he then tests and even subverts with sweeping line. He uses this linearity to complicate the composition, to add layers to it: “With the forge work, because it’s basically linear, it is really to do with lines in space, whether it’s straight or curved. It’s about penetrating space”.3 Connected to this creative tension between stasis and movement, is one between natural and geometric form.
The architectural work of the 1980s and 1990s is often a fusion of the natural and the monumental. The organic flow of the forged work makes us think of the great fin de siècle metal masters of the Art Nouveau style, such as Hector Guimard and Antoni Gaudí. Paley has an intense connection to that period, and has built a beautiful collection of works across the media: Art Nouveau… was significant to the decorative arts in several ways. It eliminated historicism. It embraced commercialism and elevated the crafts. The form context of Art Nouveau embraced Symbolism, Expressionism, and the cult of the avant-garde. Although this era was short-lived, it energized and transformed the studio art movement.4 In Paley, while the natural forms can give a sense of exploding into space, at the same time he uses a subtle geometry which keeps it all in a controlled tension. Ultimately, the artist is dealing with the complexity of human emotion, and is trying to trigger empathy between object and viewer: “I want the work to emotionally reflect what we are feeling… [I want] a different sense of empathy. I try to achieve this through linearity, the dance of line as you walk around a piece”.5
It has always seemed to me that Paley’s wonderful drawings hang tantalizingly between those of a sculptor and an architect. He allows himself to imagine, and to organically generate, line, space, and movement that could only exist on paper. The speed and flair of the drawings put us in mind of Rodin, where everything is about the movement of bodies. But the designer in him always ties back at some level to tangible structure also. One has an assurance that we are looking at something that could exist in three dimensions, and that is a place, as well as an idea. One thinks of the great architectural draftsmen of the fin de siècle in this regard, of Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and again of Hector Guimard. It is surely to do also with the fin de siècle concept of ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, or ‘total work of art’, in which sculpture, architecture, and the ornamental arts are fused into a single mode of expression.
The symbolic and aesthetic sensibility in Paley’s work reveals a consistency of mind, a view of the world, and an organic flow that ties it all together, from the early brooches to the monuments that contribute to cityscapes all over America. The artist has often talked about humanism, and the need for art to relate to people, in all their complexity. That is why he has committed himself, through the decades, to an art that lives in domestic and public, urban space. It is one of the most important oeuvres in metal or any other material of the last hundred years.
Paul Greenhalgh, October 2019
Endnotes
1 American Metal: the art of Albert Paley, 2014, Corcoran Gallery of Art.
2 Interview with the author, 2016.
3 Interview with the artist 2016.
4 Site Specific Metalwork: An Architectural Dialogue, in Greenhalgh,
The Persistence of Craft (2002, London and new Jersey) p.94
5 Interview with the artist 2016.
