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Richard Serra’s Magnificent Balancing Act


The sculptor, who died this week, built massive houses of cards.

He was a working-class alchemist originally from San Francisco; as Janet Malcolm once said, “his aura was of rough small-town America rather than of bohemia.” In New York in 1968, he took on Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists, but instead of paint, he splashed molten lead onto the base of a wall. When this gargantuan plate of steel was installed in 1981, cutting the plaza like the slash of a knife, it was derided by judges, lawyers, civil servants, politicians, and others who worked in the building. At the opening dinner of the 2007 survey, the president of its board of trustees mused to a large crowd, “Richard, we built this for you,” referring to the recently renovated building’s horribly overscaled second-floor galleries and space-eating five-story atrium.

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