RICHARD LIPPOLD SCULPTURE 1947
Richard Lippold, Willard Gallery
Richard Lippold: RICHARD LIPPOLD SCULPTURE 1947. New York: Willard Gallery, [1947]. Original edition. Tan paper sheet printed on both sides and double folded as issued. Artwork, list of displayed works and Yeats quote. Lippold’s first solo show. Light handling wear, otherwise a fine copy. Rare.
8.25 x 11 folded exhibition announcement for the exhibition from April 12-May 8, 1948. Mr. Lippold first exhibited his sculpture in the group show ''Origins of Modern Sculpture'' at the City Art Museum in St. Louis in 1945 and had his first solo show in 1947 at the Willard Gallery in New York, where he continued to exhibit periodically until the early 1970's.
From “Richard Lippold, Sculptor of Metal Abstractions, Dies at 87 [August 30, 2002]” by Ken Johnson: Richard Lippold's works, in which webs of wires in polished gold and silver hues were punctuated by geometric forms, were often suspended as though hovering in or soaring through cosmic space. Because of the delicate and reflective qualities of his materials, Mr. Lippold's works seem to dissolve into pure light.
His art belongs to a sculptural tradition that began in the early 20th century with Cubism and Constructivism, which shifted focus from the shaping of solid materials to the orchestration of spatial relations among abstract elements.
Mr. Lippold was less a pure formalist, however, than a lyric poet of space and light. A mood of euphoric futurism and spiritual aspiration animates his major public works, which he usually designed in consultation with architects.
In 1950 the architect Walter Gropius commissioned Mr. Lippold to produced a piece that now stands on the Harvard University campus. Called ''World Tree,'' that open structure of straight and circular metal tubes rises 27 feet, resembling a powerful radio antenna. In 1976 he produced ''Ad Astra,'' a slender, 115-foot-tall double spire bearing starlike wire bursts, for the front of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Two of Mr. Lippold's important public works can be seen in New York. ''Orpheus and Apollo,'' commissioned in 1961, is a 5-ton, 190-foot-long constellation of polished bronze bars connected by wires that hangs over the lobby at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center.
''Flight,'' a complex construction of shimmering gilded wires, was installed in 1963 in the lobby of the former Pan Am Building, which is now the MetLife Building.
Born in Milwaukee on May 3, 1915, Mr. Lippold studied industrial design as well as piano and dance at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1937, he set up an industrial-design studio in Milwaukee and did freelance work for Chicago corporations.
In 1941 he abandoned design and began teaching art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, inspired by the Constructivist works of Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, he began making small, delicate wire constructions in iron, brass and copper.
In 1944 he and his wife, Louise Greuel, a dancer, moved to New York with their first child. In 1955 the family moved to Lattingtown on Long Island, where Mr. Lippold lived and worked for the rest of his life.
Mr. Lippold first exhibited his sculpture in the group show ''Origins of Modern Sculpture'' at the City Art Museum in St. Louis in 1945 and had his first solo show in 1947 at the Willard Gallery in New York, where he continued to exhibit periodically until the early 1970's.
In 1952 he was included along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still in the ''Fifteen Americans'' exhibition organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Dorothy Miller. In 1990 the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee organized a retrospective and published a catalog that remains the best source of information about the artist.
From 1945 to 1947 Mr. Lippold taught at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vt., and then led the art department at what was then called Trenton Junior College in New Jersey before teaching at Hunter College from 1952 to 1967.
The Neumann-Willard Gallery opened in 1936 by Marian Willard and originally was called the East River Gallery. Its name was changed to the Neumann-Willard Gallery in 1938 when JB Neumann partnered with Willard for a couple of years. In 1945 the gallery was again renamed to the Willard Gallery.
Although the name of the gallery has changed many times, the type of art exhibited as remained the same. Marian Willard was the woman behind selecting all of the artists to exhibit in her gallery. She was innovator of her time. Willard wanted to show new American and European art. Most of all, Willard was known for her very talented eye and her resistance to prevailing artistic inclinations. During the times of artistic criticism and disposition for conservatism in art in America, she fought for the acceptance of many new modern artists. In starting her own gallery, she wanted to not only provide a locale for the repressed minority of artists to display their work, but also give those artists a safe place for nurture and growth, ideas that she truly subscribed to.