Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Martin Puryear
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art
83%
Alien Huddle. 1993-1995. Red cedar and pine
The value of Puryear's art often lies in his ability to turn technical feats of making and construction into artistic accomplishments. He aestheticizes craftwork by letting its processes run free and loose, which intensifies the contradictions latent within them. In Alien Huddle, there's the inclusion of that small bulb of a different wood-type on the side of the smaller cedar orb; there's the quiet symphony of line that results from the wood pieces forming such a variety of joints; there's the blemishes of the object's surface, which conflict with the perfection of its form; there's the slight asymmetry to the two wings coming off the sides of the the smaller sphere. It's not that all of this is of sufficient visual interest to elevate the craftsmanly nature of Puryear's object to some aesthetic plane higher than where woodwork lies. It's that all of these visual oddities are simple results of this form having been executed at all: Puryear's method lays bare the nonidentity between a form and the way it instantiates as a real object. You can see this in the little gaps between some of the pieces of wood. (TFS, 2025)
Des Moines, IA: Private collection
65%
Untitled. 2001. Etching with drypoint and chine collé
Puryear has a habit of making prints out of or after his sculptural projects. I'm not sure if this is one of those because I haven't been able to find the sculpture (if there is one) which it refers to, but anyway it has that look. Regardless, it's better as art than many of the schematic, ancillary-to-a-sculpture prints of his I've seen, which often lose the uncanny qualities of whatever three-dimensional object they refer to. This, I think, is a result of Puryear's tendency to overdesign the print overall rather than to develop pictorially whatever qualities of the depicted object might remain strange and salient in two dimensions. This print, on the other hand, has developed such qualities, namely, the curving lines on the exterior of the cone that resolve eventually into parallels, and the clean proportionality of the object despite the vagaries of the way its been drawn (which is emphasized by a number of faint intersecting horizontals). Too, there's the fact that the two models depicted — iterations, presumably, of the same ideal form — don't exist in any kind of coherent pictorial space but rather ambiguous cohabitate in the same creamy abstract field of the paper itself. The print has the feel of a schematic for an unbuildable object, whereas many of Puryear's similar prints look like decorative commemorations of the projects they depict. (TFS, 2025)
Des Moines, IA: Private collection
62%
Untitled. 2017. Embossing on paper
The story of this print is more or less: the artist made a version of it very early in his career as a student in Sweden and lost every copy, but then years later one of them ended up on eBay — who knows how — which inspired Puryear to recreate it; this 2017 version is a left-right reflection of the original. So, how to criticize the new print as art? It definitely gets docked a few points for being primarily a memento, but the fact that Puryear decided to flip the composition implies that there are conceptual things afoot beyond the fact that he wanted to have a new version of the nostalgic old artwork he lost. The asemic weirdness of a sextet of floating umlauted letters is aesthetically powerful on its own, and this power is enhanced by the print's embossed format, which makes it sort of an object and sort of an image and sort of neither. If, overall, it has somewhat the character of juvenilia — the inkless print seems a bit "experimental" — it also contains, as a germ, the main fixation of Puryear's art: the conflict between meaning and the way it takes shape within the world of objects. Maybe that's why he wanted to recreate it. (TFS, 2025)
Des Moines, IA: Pappajohn Sculpture Park
47%
Decoy. 1990. Cast iron
This sculpture has a few redeeming elements: the skeuomorphic surface of its big horizontal disc (the metal is striated so it looks like wood grain) is cool; the nonfunctional metal wheels beneath the disc are interesting; the joke that's being told about modernism's incorporation of the pedestal into the artwork's form is pretty funny. But then the whole thing ends up revolving around that stupid insectal telescope form, which is an affront to basic sculptural decorum — it makes the whole thing so fucking unbalanced which is obviously the point but c'mon, Martin! — as well as a huge symbolical sore thumb. Puryear's work is great when organicism and representation seem to sort of exist inside of it like a buried body, hidden deep under its surfaces and only making themselves apparent as specters or faint recollections. There's nothing spectral about Decoy's antenna: it's a fat thing crushing all the rest of the sculpture's subtleties. (TFS, 2025)
Des Moines, IA: Private collection
42%
Lookout. 2025. Lithograph
Puryear made this print in commemoration of his 2023 Storm King commission, which I've heard he considers his opus. The print depicts the monument, also called Lookout, in profile; the print itself is not an opus. If it has any value, it's in how the image elucidates Puryear's thinking about his sculpture: the way the background warps to accommodate the bean's presence, and the way the dots along the object's flank correspond with the interstices of the sidereal grid behind it, implies some sort of intended cosmic import to the sculpture's physiognomy and relationship with its surroundings. But as a print, this is all rather schematic and decorative — and depthless, too. The value of Puryear's sculptures typically lies in the tension between the ideal (if uncommon) forms they refer to and the difficulties, the necessary imperfections, of instantiating such forms as real objects. The virtuality of a two-dimensional representation effaces this tension and opens it onto simple prettiness. (TFS, 2025)