Beverly Pepper. Timeless art
The article is dedicated to the art and life of Beverly Pepper.
Beverly Pepper - a woman who was bending metal like a paper to make objects of universal admiration. She was creating her art until the very last day of her life, and even at 97, when she could no longer weld metal on her own, her apprentices were helping to continue her work.
The life story of Beverly Pepper is a story about how a city can absorb the soul of an artist. Beverly was born in America, studied in France in the 1940s, and moved to Italy in the 1950s settling in the city of Todi, where her studio was located until the day she died. Geographical distance from the artistic world of New York allowed her to gain space for innovation. Italy is a country where the past beautifully coexists with present, giving rise to her new creative ideas.
After visiting Angkor Wat in 1960, Beverly was inspired by how temples seem to have grown from the bowels of the earth, coexisting with nature as a whole. Subsequently, Beverly focused on sculpture and became known for her large-scale artworks and land art projects, where she integrated metal sculptures into a landscape of an area or a public space.
Industrial production and land art have always had a macho cast, and there weren’t many women sculptors of the generation of Beverly Pepper who bend metal sheets with the help of welders alongside with engineers who were used to building balustrades and bridges.
Pepper has always resisted such categorical labels as “female artist”, unlike other female giants of the 20th century sculpture - Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Hepworth and Louise Nevelson. In Italian, she strongly insisted to be referred to not as scultrice, but scultore.
Beverly Pepper was chosen among other artists including Alexander Calder, Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore and David Smith, through the invitation of the critic Giovanni Carandente, for the creation of monumental steel sculptures in Rome. It was a key moment for Pepper, which laid the foundation for her style and determined her future career.
Beverly's eclectic artworks tell a complex story which follows rigid principles of minimalism. Pepper worked intuitively, never did a series of works, she avoided cultivating “her own trademark style”, preferring to learn materials and processes, paying almost Zen-like attention to the “divine accident”.
Piazza San Pietro, Assisi, Italy, 2008.
Beverly Pepper was one of the first sculptors who started to use black steel to create sculptures. When interacting with the natural environment, the metal oxidizes and stabilizes without the use of paint or sealant. The artist was joking that if the weather does not please with enough rain for the sculpture to rust, her assistants just have to pee on it.
Cor-ten Steel, 2017.
“You have to listen to the materials,” Beverly Pepper said. “Metal allows for anything you can bend to your will, you just have to figure out how to make warmth come to it. Each material has its own kind of aliveness.”
Sculpture is a three-dimensional art. Beverly adds a fourth element to this definition - time. The desire to create something outside history, something bigger and more enduring than the artist herself, than all of us.
It’s hard to imaging now, that many of Beverly Pepper’s contemporary sculptures were created in the 70s. For example, the “Todi Columns” in Todi, Italy were created in 1979. When the American sculptor and environmental artist first created columns for this ancient Umbrian town their presence was controversial.
Monumental contemporary sculpture was novel here then, and Todi’s modest square, which dates at least to the 11th century, was itself a sacred space.
But the attitudes of the traditionalists have changed, in large part because of the artist from Brooklyn, who moved to Italy in the 1950s and became an honorary citizen of Todi for a decade.
Piazza del Popolo Todi, Italy.
Pepper recalls how, in those days before 3-D digital-mapping software, she simply walked across the square to understand its proportions. The morning after the columns were installed, following a night of rain, Beverly arrived alone. “I was overwhelmed by what I’d done,” - she recalled.
Public art can sometimes feel ponderous or impersonal, but the unroofed splendor of Pepper’s site-specific works can prompt unexpectedly potent encounters.
For example, the rusty appearance of black steel is a key in conveying a sense of antiquity and a sense of belonging to the world of nature.
We cannot restore the monuments of the ancient times, but we can maintain a sense of admiration in the contemporary world and, as Pepper said herself: “to endow a person with the ability to perceive a miracle”.
