MANUEL IZQUIERDO Myth, Nature, and Renewal
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MANUEL IZQUIERDO Myth, Nature, and Renewal ROGER HULL HALLIE FORD MUSEUM OF ART Willamette University Salem, Oregon distributed by university of washington press seattle and london This book was published in connection with an exhibition arranged by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University entitled Manuel Izquierdo: Myth, Nature, and Renewal. The dates for the exhibition were January 19 to March 24, 2013, with companion exhibitions entitled Manuel Izquierdo: Maquettes and Small Sculptures and Manuel Izquierdo: Works on Paper, presented from November 17, 2012, to February 10, 2013. Designed by Phil Kovacevich Editorial review by Sigrid Asmus Printed and bound in Canada CONTENTS Front cover and Fig. 2, page 15: Manuel Izquierdo. Cleopatra. 1982. Welded sheet bronze. 23 x 16 x 30 inches. Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. The Bill Rhoades Collection, a gift in memory of Murna and Vay Rhoades. 2008.023.020 Frontispiece: Manuel Izquierdo in his studio, 1967. Photograph by Alfred A. Monner, courtesy of the Manuel Izquierdo Trust. Back cover and Fig. 93, page 96. Manuel Izquierdo. Center Ring. 1982. Woodcut. 30 x 22 inches. Hallie Ford PREFACE Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. The Bill Rhoades Collection, a gift in memory of Murna 7 and Vay Rhoades. 2012.003.013 Photo credits: Arbona Fotografo, Figure 4; Bridgeman Art Library, Figure 74; Karen Engstrom, page 132; Paul Foster, Figures 22, 24, 27, 50, 54, 79, 81, 82; Richard Gehrke, Figure 62; Carl Gohs, Figure 68; Aaron Johanson, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Figures 20, 21, 23, 35, 37, 38, 41, 45, 46, 47, 59, 60, 67, 73, 75, 76, 80, 83, 86, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 108, and page 119; Manson Kennedy, page 6; Felipe Llerandi, Figure 11; Jim Lommasson, Figure 78; Kevin Longueil, Figure 103; 9 Frank Miller, front cover and Figures 2, 3, 7, 26, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 84, 92, 96, 107; Alfred A. Monner, frontispiece and Figures 49, 57; Don Normark, Figures 29, 30, 32, 33, 55, 56, 104; Mary Randlett, page 12; Andrew Wedlake, Figures 90, 91, 93, 94, and back cover. MANUEL IZQUIERDO Myth, Nature, and Renewal Book © 2013 by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University 13 Essay © 2013 by Roger Hull All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher. JOSÉ IZQUIERDO TORRES Library of Congress Control Number 2012947127 121 ISBN 9781930957671 Distributed by University of Washington Press SOURCES AND RESOURCES P.O. Box 50096 Seattle, Washington 98145-5096 124 CONTRIBUTORS 133 MANUEL IZQUIERDO Myth, Nature, and Renewal BY ROGER HULL Introduction Manuel Izquierdo was a teenaged refugee from Europe when he arrived with his two younger sib- lings in Portland, Oregon, in 1943. They spoke their native Spanish, had learned French during several years in hostels near Draguignan and Marseilles, and knew basic English following a year in New York City waiting to be placed with an American family. The final leg of their years-long odyssey, which had begun soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, was a train trip across North America. They traveled through the Columbia Gorge on a misty morning at the end of May and pulled into Portland’s Union Station. This new city was to be Manuel Izquierdo’s home for the next sixty-six years, until his death in 2009. He was destined to become a key figure in Oregon’s golden age of modern sculpture, but such a notion was beyond imagining on that first overcast morning. In a career that spanned more than half a century Manuel Izquierdo created sculpture in a variety of media, making his early works out of terra cotta, plaster, and wood. After meeting the American sculptor David Smith in the early 1950s, he pioneered welded metal sculpture in the Pacific North- west and became best known for his steel and bronze works, marvels of adventurous form-making and stunning technical proficiency. Izquierdo also made prints, pastel drawings, and collages. Early on, he was a painter as well as a sculptor. In both two- and three-dimensional media he developed a formal language and a series of themes that interrelate all his work despite its tremendous range. The basis of this thematic language and his creativity as a whole resided in his practice of drawing, the seedbed of his creativity. Izquierdo drew incessantly—on old envelopes, on napkins, on scraps of cardboard, on full sheets of fine paper. His mode of drawing was calligraphic, harking back to the calligraphy of Lloyd Manuel Izquierdo, 1972. Photograph Reynolds with whom he learned printmaking in his early years in Portland. A long apprenticeship by Mary Randlett. Hallie Ford with the sculptor Frederic Littman, known for his flowing figures, reinforced Izquierdo’s innate Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. The sense for the curve, counter-curve, and swerving accent line. In his Page of Ideas (1966; Figure 1), Bill Rhoades Collection, a gift in memory of Murna and Vay Rhoades. Izquierdo sets out forty ink drawings, more or less ten to a row, as a cupboard of calligraphic and 2006.045.006 pictographic forms, an inventory of possibilities. 13 Figure 1. Figure 2. Manuel Izquierdo. Page of Ideas II. Manuel Izquierdo. Cleopatra. 1982. 1966. Ink on paper. 19 x 24 1/8 inches. Welded sheet bronze. 23 x 16 x Portland Art Museum, Oregon. 30 inches. Hallie Ford Museum of Gift of the Manuel Izquierdo Trust. Art, Willamette University, Salem, 2010.37.13 Oregon. The Bill Rhoades Collection, a gift in memory of Murna and Vay Rhoades. 2008.023.020 Drawing as the means of generating ideas for new and unexpected forms links Izquierdo to the tra- dition of automatist Surrealism, to such artists as André Masson and Joan Miró who—beginning in the 1920s—delighted in freely drawn lines wandering their way to unforeseen destinations. Izquierdo’s drawings relate to this tradition even though his purpose was to generate ideas for tan- gible, three-dimensional forms. His work further interplays with Surrealism by blurring distinctions between the human, animal, and botanical, to suggest transformations from one being into another. This potential for metamorphosis, from a plant to a warrior to a constellation of stars, aligns him with the French Surrealists and to such other artists as the English painter Graham Sutherland. As a sculptor, Izquierdo dealt with the universal themes of myth, nature, and the possibility of At the same time, welded sheet-metal sculpture is fundamentally a post–World War II development redemption and renewal. His subjects range from the early series of shepherds and warriors associated with American industrial fabrication. In embracing this new material and process, Izqui- (The Iliad stirred his imagination throughout his life) to mythological figures such as Icarus, to erdo Americanized his sculpture (leaving behind the genteel beaux-arts tradition that he learned voluptuous, biomorphic abstractions of women—mortals such as Cleopatra or his own dancing while studying with Littman) even as he drew upon the buoyant forms of European art. It was this and skipping daughters, odalisques loosely based on works by his beloved Goya, or goddesses, merging of American and European sources that led him to his highly original sculptural forms. most notably Venus, whose aura enlivened and distracted Izquierdo throughout his life. Picasso’s undulant Surrealist female forms of the 1930s were not lost on Izquierdo, nor were Matisse’s cur- Izquierdo admired international modern sculpture, including the work of Julio Gonzáles, Jacques vaceous odalisques. Lipchitz, Henry Moore (whose studio he visited in the 1960s), and Marino Marini. He saw these sculptors as spiritual confreres rather than idols, makers like himself of fabulous forms—fabulous A quintessential Izquierdo welded bronze sculpture is the gleaming golden-hued Cleopatra (1982; in the sense that they evoke fabled, mythical, or universal themes. Despite his new, flourishing Figure 2). Its swelling volumes, meandering tendrils, and rectangular tablets of base and interior roots in the American Northwest, Izquierdo was a younger de facto member of an international, “mirror” derive from squiggly drawings such as those on the page of ideas, but the sculpture European-inflected brotherhood of modern sculptors. That this went largely unrecognized was asserts itself as a fantastical object in space, viewable from a variety of perspectives though insist- a matter of regret to him, for he was a man not only of great talent but also enormous ego. He ing on being recognized as an abstracted image of the lady of the Nile on display and at leisure dreamed of an international reputation but never found the time or the means to launch his work on her barge. Izquierdo’s faultless welding (the weld beads ground and sanded smooth and thus into an orbit beyond the Northwest. Nonetheless, he took pride in being a highly regarded mem- invisible) gives the piece a taut clarity despite its sensuousness. Fully three-dimensional, Cleopatra ber of the august group of Oregon modern sculptors that included Hilda Morris and Frederic Litt- reflects its origins in drawing because of its rising and falling contours and seamless transitions man as well as Tom Hardy, James Lee Hansen, Lee Kelly, and Jan Zach. from one plane to the next. 14 15 Line is friskier and more syncopated in Figure 3. Figure 4. Manuel Izquierdo. Star Gazer. Ventura Izquierdo, Ceuta, 1922. Izquierdo’s wood and linoleum block 1977. Woodcut. 23 3/4 x 16 3/4 Arbona Fotografo. inches. Hallie Ford Museum of Photograph courtesy of the prints.