'Big Phrygian' (2010-2014) by Martin Puryear -- The Glenstone Museum Potomac (MD)
From The Washington Post of December 22, 2021:
'Red, Right to the Liberated Heart' -- Martin Puryear’s sculpture at Glenstone is an invitation to reflect on freedom and coercion
By Sebastian Smee
I remember the first time I saw this sculpture by Martin Puryear. It was in the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, N.Y., in 2014. “Big Phrygian” (as the five-foot-high work is called) was surrounded by other Puryear sculptures, some of which took forms that echoed this one.
It was an amazing show, but none of the other pieces crystallized in my memory quite like this. So I was happy when it turned up in the collection of the Glenstone Museum in Potomac (MD)..
Was it the color that made this piece so memorable?
I’ve no doubt. That, and the solidity (most of the other forms were open). Sometimes color sits on the surface of things. You’re conscious that it’s for show — that beneath the fresh coat of paint lies some different substance. (It’s like in “Hamlet,” when Claudius asks Laertes whether he actually loved his father, “Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,/ a face without a heart?”)
When I look at Puryear’s sculpture, I feel that it’s red right to the heart. The color is so uniform, so drenching, that it can’t just have been slapped on afterward. I’m wrong of course. The sculpture is actually made from cedar. (Yes, it’s red cedar, but even red cedar is not this red.)
The sculpture’s distinctive form — at once soft and hard, taut and floppy — calls to mind a Phrygian cap. Also known as “liberty caps,” Phrygian caps can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, where they were the preferred headwear of liberated enslaved people. They also had associations with liberty during both the French and American revolutions.
Other works in Puryear’s 2014 show suggested shackles used on slave ships. In both cases the sculptures were abstracted and simplified. Some were hollow, others solid, and the materials (Puryear is a master craftsman) kept changing.
As you looked at certain works, it became difficult to tell whether the abstract shape was derived from the liberty cap or the shackle. You had to concentrate to see that if a form curved this way, it was based on the liberty cap, but if it curved that way, it was based on the shackle.
No such ambiguity exists here. The form is clearly a liberty cap. But the color red, and its association with revolutionary extremism, might remind us that extremes of freedom are never far from extremes of domination.
Phrygian caps became a kind of uniform for French revolutionaries during the Terror. When a mob broke into the residence of King Louis XVI in 1792, they placed a Phrygian cap on his head. And after the king was decapitated, the cap became a compulsory sign of fidelity to the revolution. Soon enough, all politicians were legally required to wear the caps, which women knitted while sitting beside guillotines at public executions.
Whether it’s guns or vaccines, wealth redistribution or education, it seems we can never get the balance between liberty and coercion right. When it banned slavery in February 1794, France was still in the grip of the Terror.
Puryear, who is African American and who worked in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, was working on “Big Phrygian” when he saw an engraving that had been made in 1794. It showed a Black man wearing a Phrygian cap and was labeled: “I, too, am free.” Unfortunately, the 1794 abolition was not enforced. As First Consul, Napoleon repealed the law in 1802, and slavery remained more or less legal in French territories until 1848.
Of course, you don’t need to know any of this, or come to any conclusion about what it all means, to love this work, which I consider to be one of the most successful sculptures by an American artist in our time. When you’re in the same space as it, it’s utterly magnetic. You can’t look away. It’s that red.
__________________________________________________
Per Wikipedia:
"The Phrygian cap or Liberty cap is a soft conical cap with the apex bent over, associated in antiquity with several peoples in Eastern Europe and Anatolia, including Phrygia, Dacia, and the Balkans.
During the French Revolution it came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty, although Phrygian caps did not originally function as liberty caps.
The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of manumitted (emancipated) slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty.
In the 16th century, the Roman iconography of liberty was revived in emblem books and numismatic handbooks where the figure of Libertas is usually depicted with a pileus.
In the 18th century, the traditional liberty cap was widely used in English prints and from 1789 on in French prints, too; but it was not until the early 1790s, that the French cap of liberty was regularly used in the Phrygian form.
It is used in the coat of arms of certain republics or of republican state institutions in the place where otherwise a crown would be used (in the heraldry of monarchies). It thus came to be identified as a symbol of the republican form of government. A number of national personifications, in particular France's Marianne, are commonly depicted wearing the Phrygian cap."
Screen Shot 2019-02-25 V3
'Big Phrygian' (2010-2014) by Martin Puryear -- The Glenstone Museum Potomac (MD)
From The Washington Post of December 22, 2021:
'Red, Right to the Liberated Heart' -- Martin Puryear’s sculpture at Glenstone is an invitation to reflect on freedom and coercion
By Sebastian Smee
I remember the first time I saw this sculpture by Martin Puryear. It was in the Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, N.Y., in 2014. “Big Phrygian” (as the five-foot-high work is called) was surrounded by other Puryear sculptures, some of which took forms that echoed this one.
It was an amazing show, but none of the other pieces crystallized in my memory quite like this. So I was happy when it turned up in the collection of the Glenstone Museum in Potomac (MD)..
Was it the color that made this piece so memorable?
I’ve no doubt. That, and the solidity (most of the other forms were open). Sometimes color sits on the surface of things. You’re conscious that it’s for show — that beneath the fresh coat of paint lies some different substance. (It’s like in “Hamlet,” when Claudius asks Laertes whether he actually loved his father, “Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,/ a face without a heart?”)
When I look at Puryear’s sculpture, I feel that it’s red right to the heart. The color is so uniform, so drenching, that it can’t just have been slapped on afterward. I’m wrong of course. The sculpture is actually made from cedar. (Yes, it’s red cedar, but even red cedar is not this red.)
The sculpture’s distinctive form — at once soft and hard, taut and floppy — calls to mind a Phrygian cap. Also known as “liberty caps,” Phrygian caps can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, where they were the preferred headwear of liberated enslaved people. They also had associations with liberty during both the French and American revolutions.
Other works in Puryear’s 2014 show suggested shackles used on slave ships. In both cases the sculptures were abstracted and simplified. Some were hollow, others solid, and the materials (Puryear is a master craftsman) kept changing.
As you looked at certain works, it became difficult to tell whether the abstract shape was derived from the liberty cap or the shackle. You had to concentrate to see that if a form curved this way, it was based on the liberty cap, but if it curved that way, it was based on the shackle.
No such ambiguity exists here. The form is clearly a liberty cap. But the color red, and its association with revolutionary extremism, might remind us that extremes of freedom are never far from extremes of domination.
Phrygian caps became a kind of uniform for French revolutionaries during the Terror. When a mob broke into the residence of King Louis XVI in 1792, they placed a Phrygian cap on his head. And after the king was decapitated, the cap became a compulsory sign of fidelity to the revolution. Soon enough, all politicians were legally required to wear the caps, which women knitted while sitting beside guillotines at public executions.
Whether it’s guns or vaccines, wealth redistribution or education, it seems we can never get the balance between liberty and coercion right. When it banned slavery in February 1794, France was still in the grip of the Terror.
Puryear, who is African American and who worked in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, was working on “Big Phrygian” when he saw an engraving that had been made in 1794. It showed a Black man wearing a Phrygian cap and was labeled: “I, too, am free.” Unfortunately, the 1794 abolition was not enforced. As First Consul, Napoleon repealed the law in 1802, and slavery remained more or less legal in French territories until 1848.
Of course, you don’t need to know any of this, or come to any conclusion about what it all means, to love this work, which I consider to be one of the most successful sculptures by an American artist in our time. When you’re in the same space as it, it’s utterly magnetic. You can’t look away. It’s that red.
__________________________________________________
Per Wikipedia:
"The Phrygian cap or Liberty cap is a soft conical cap with the apex bent over, associated in antiquity with several peoples in Eastern Europe and Anatolia, including Phrygia, Dacia, and the Balkans.
During the French Revolution it came to signify freedom and the pursuit of liberty, although Phrygian caps did not originally function as liberty caps.
The original cap of liberty was the Roman pileus, the felt cap of manumitted (emancipated) slaves of ancient Rome, which was an attribute of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty.
In the 16th century, the Roman iconography of liberty was revived in emblem books and numismatic handbooks where the figure of Libertas is usually depicted with a pileus.
In the 18th century, the traditional liberty cap was widely used in English prints and from 1789 on in French prints, too; but it was not until the early 1790s, that the French cap of liberty was regularly used in the Phrygian form.
It is used in the coat of arms of certain republics or of republican state institutions in the place where otherwise a crown would be used (in the heraldry of monarchies). It thus came to be identified as a symbol of the republican form of government. A number of national personifications, in particular France's Marianne, are commonly depicted wearing the Phrygian cap."
Screen Shot 2019-02-25 V3