Space is artist's final frontier

Ibram Lassaw, the subject of an exhibition at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs, explores and rearranges space.

By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 12, 2002

Counterpoint Castle (1956-57), metal.

TARPON SPRINGS -- The art world can be cruel to artists it venerates and those it ignores. In his long career, Ibram Lassaw has entertained both success and obscurity with equanimity.

Lassaw is the subject of an exhibition at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in Tarpon Springs. "Ibram Lassaw: Deep Space and Beyond" is a small show, just 10 sculptures and 14 works on paper or canvas, but they are well-chosen representatives of his life and development as an artist, beginning with a small pastel drawing dated 1927 and continuing to an acrylic painting dated 2001.

All the works illustrate an unwavering commitment to creating art intuitively, in forms commonly described as abstract expressionist, even after collectors and commentators abandoned the once-popular movement as passe.

Lassaw, now 88, was one of the founding members of a group called American Abstract Artists that loosely organized in the 1930s. Lassau did not sell any of his work until he was almost 40, but his career took off after Nelson Rockefeller purchased a sculpture. He was included in the 1954 Venice Biennale, and his works were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His peers included Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack, whose "drip" painting some have said -- inaccurately -- was appropriated by Lassaw in his sculptures.

Space is Lassaw's main preoccupation. His best works use mazelike forms to draw the eye into the inner space he creates and to follow outer lines that have no discernible beginning or end. Counterpoint Castle (1956-57) is the most dramatic example of his intuitive-intellectual process. It was made by building up drops of bronze and copper onto a metal form with a complexity that threatens to implode. It is an intellectual mind game with hypnotic designs. Despite his assertions that his work is "something independent of my conscious will," it is a joyous piece Lassaw must have loved creating and hated to complete.

Unlike his sculptures, which revel in their three-dimensionality, his paintings and drawings are flat, a rejection of illusion and a call to see a thing as a form drawn on paper and nothing more.

His exploration of space included ideas about rearranging it and interacting with it in more than a visual way, seen in the multipositional sculptures he began making in the late 1970s. Works such as Sothis (1983) have no top or bottom, left or right; its correct position is the way it is placed at a given moment.

And he was way ahead of the Pop Art gang of the 1960s in creating "happenings." In the 1940s, Lassaw painted tiny abstracts onto glass slides that became huge images when projected onto walls that people were invited to interact with.

Fame and wealth may have eluded Ibram Lassaw, but he seems to have found contentment in being able to work as he chooses. He continues to create in his home of many decades in East Hampton, on Long Island. His daughter Denise writes in the catalog: "Someone once called Ibram Lassaw the 'happiest sculptor' in New York and I think this might be true. Gallery representation has come and gone, but all these years he has been pursuing the exploration of space as it pleases him, through hard times and good times regardless, remaining true to his own Muse. For an artist, I don't think you can ask for more."

"Ibram Lassaw: Deep Space and Beyond" complements the permanent collection at Leepa-Rattner. Like Abraham Rattner, the artist showcased along with his wife, Esther Gentle, and stepson, Allen Leepa, few will have heard of Lassaw. Lassaw and Rattner shared proximity and ideas with their more famous contemporaries. Rattner especially -- like so many other artists of the time -- worked in the long shadow of Pablo Picasso.

But these men in their own ways contributed to the forward movement of modern art, lending a distinct American sensibility to European influences. The galleries are full of paintings, drawings, sculptures and a rotating wall of works on paper by the three featured artists and their contemporaries.

A visit to the museum is a half-day well spent. Families will enjoy "The Challenge of Modern Art," an interactive gallery that invites visitors to explore 20th century art. It is not yet fully functional, but it has innovative stations such as a video showing an artist creating a mixed media work with his comments, a timeline and an original size copy of Picasso's Guernica, possibly the most influential painting of the century, with an audio presentation that explains its history and importance.

REVIEW: "Ibram Lassaw: Deep Space and Beyond" is on view through June 16 at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, on the campus of St. Petersburg College at 600 Klosterman Rd., Tarpon Springs. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday (open Thursday until 9 p.m.) and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors and free to children and students with ID. Sundays are by donation. Call (727) 712-5762.

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