Martin Puryear Changes the World Through Wood

It’s an object that shouldn’t have body language, yet it does. And from body language, it’s a quick jump to personality. Those who grew up with Tove Jansson’s Moomins may see in “Self” a shade of the cold and lonely Groke, slouching through life with those same indeterminate not-quite-shoulders, that same sense of being sealed off from the world. And so it goes: The large outrigger in “Lever #1” (1988-89) is titled for a tool but strongly suggests a wagging tail. A knee-high, cast-iron sculpture composed of three ovoids is instantly recognizable as a raptor perched on a rock, at once evoking stillness and incipient motion. (Puryear is also a trained falconer.)

Really, Puryear has never fit in. For sixty years, his work and career have proceeded in quiet defiance of dogma about the way important art should look, behave, or be made. In an era that valorizes outsourced production, he has always preferred making things by hand. He used a stint with the Peace Corps, in Sierra Leone, and two years studying printmaking at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art to learn from local carpenters, toolmakers, and furniture-makers. When it was considered a weakness to let viewers’ minds divert from confronting the mute material presence of an abstract object, Puryear made space for allusion. (The eight-foot-tall inverted funnel of “Noblesse O.,” from 1987, can be viewed as pure form, but it would be silly to deny its resemblance to the Tin Man’s hat.) It’s as if, sometime in the nineteen-sixties, Puryear looked around at the pieces of human experience being excluded from high art, and decided to invite them all in.

The exhibition’s title is a nod to this openness and complexity, the way that, in any Puryear work, you can pick multiple threads to follow—the flat-out beauty of his forms and materials; the ingenuity of his joinery; the resemblances and references to nature, to history, and to a Black artist’s reflections on Blackness and whiteness. Everything connects. “Nexus” is also the name of a piece from 1979: a large, not-quite-circular hoop of cedar that flares out slightly where the two ends—one painted black and one painted white—meet. An etching from Puryear’s student days in Stockholm shows him already rehearsing the mound shape that would recur in so many variations later on, here composed of four lumpy blocks—three inked in a mottled beige, one inked in black—and titled “Quadroon.” In the catalogue, the curator Emily Liebert tells the story of Puryear’s childhood encounter with John James Audubon’s portraits of two gyrfalcons, one white and one black, the result of environmental adaptation. “I made a connection about human racial difference by way of these species,” Puryear said.

Growing up, Puryear aspired to be a wildlife illustrator; in college, he planned to major in biology before switching to art. Nature, its surfaces and interior logic, is a constant presence throughout this show. Wall labels identify the woods used—Alaskan yellow cedar, Swiss pear, lignum vitae—as one might name a respected collaborator. At a deeper level, nature’s inherent mechanism of reiteration and mutation is also Puryear’s. In sculptures, drawings, and prints you can watch as the peculiar hump of “Quadroon” straightens up to become “Self,” then stretches into something resembling a hunkered-down bear, then elongates into something like a preening bird. In the twenty-tens, it puffed out and acquired the distinctive flopped shape of a Phrygian cap—a sartorial emblem of liberty during both the American and French Revolutions.