MAG’S SURPRISING HORSE
by Joan K. Yanni
MAG has a horse! A beautiful, graceful animal is now grazing near the driveway leading from University Avenue to the main door. Go closer to look at it. It is made of tree limbs and driftwood—or is it? Would the Gallery administration put a fragile sculpture out where the winter snow and summer rain could get at it? Of course not! This is a trompe l'oeil sculpture. Though it's hard to believe, it's made of cast bronze.
The larger-than-life horse is the creation of artist Deborah Butterfield, who named it Wailana (2000.18). It weighs almost a ton, and because of its top-heavy construction, Larry Fischbach and the facilities crew needed ingenuity to anchor it in place. First, a concrete foundation was laid in the ground about ten feet down. Four steel posts, which would eventually hold the legs of the horse at ground level, were embedded in the concrete. The ends of the posts, carefully placed to line up with the horse's legs, were fixed in steel plates with holders for the legs. The horse was raised with a crane, lowered into the holders, and bolted. It comes to MAG through the Clara and Edwin Strasenburgh fund.
Artist Deborah Butterfield was born in San Diego, California, in 1949. Always captivated by horses, she took riding lessons at a young age and considered a career as a veterinarian. Eventually the lure of the visual arts won out. She studied art at the University of California, Davis, where she received her BA and MFA. She bought her first horse and worked on a thoroughbred farm while still a student. Soon her love of horses and her art background merged, and she began to create three-dimensional horses.
As a visiting lecturer and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the mid-70s, her interpretations of horses were huge plaster mares, mainly representational. A move to teach sculpture at Montana State University, Bozeman, gave her the space to raise, train and ride her own animals as well as create them in sculpture.
Butterfield's work has evolved greatly over the years, yet it has always shown empathy between artist and horse that is transmitted from the art to the viewer. From early plaster sculptures she went on to a series of horses made of sticks and mud, abstract sketches around a wire armature. She presented the horse as inseparable from its environment. Gradually, influenced by the early junk automobile sculptures of John Chamberlain, she began welding discarded industrial materials and car parts—from junkyards, dumps, or barns—into horses. Finally she began casting her horses in bronze, whether they were originally made of trees and driftwood or discarded metal junk.
How does she do it? She works directly with her materials, without making sketches or maquettes, until her horse is complete. She then sends the work to a foundry, where it iscast in sections and a patina applied. Last, all bronze sections are welded into the original whole. The welding is done so superbly that it is invisible.
The horses of George Stubbs or the powerful equestrian statues in parks never interested Butterfield. Her horses have a distinct feminine quality. They convey “pro-creation and nurturing rather than destruction and demolition.” They have personalities of their own. Some stand, others recline. Though horses usually sleep while standing (Their legs lock into position and they sleep with their nose nearly touching the ground), they also lie down if they feel safe. Hers are self-assured enough to repose on the floor. "My horses lie down ... because they feel secure and confident in their environment. They feel safe," she says.
In Montana, her love for horses brought still another dimension to her life. She has become actively involved in dressage, the art of exhibition riding or horsemanship in which horse and rider work together to perform specific tasks. The horse is controlled by very slight movements of the rider. For her, this is a perfect illustration of communication between man and animal. "While horses are not intelligent at doing things that people do or that dogs do,” she says, “ they are very intelligent at doing things that horses do, and I'm interested in what that has to teach me." Through dressage, she sees that each animal, like each human, is different. It's like continually “dancing with a new partner. I don't think I'll ever get tired of ...it."
Her fascination with the horse, animate or inanimate, remains constant. She sculpts only horses, yet she has challenged herself not to repeat her work, but to bring new materials and perspectives to her art. She is interested in using objects that had another life and transforming them into something new. She continues to spend time in scrap yards and on beaches as she looks for objects whose lines appeal to her. She gives her sculpture a sense of energy, a magnetism that captures the onlooker and urges him to keep looking and wondering.
Butterfield produces only six to ten of her horses a year, some small, others life-size. Some have been placed in cities as public art and many are in the permanent collections of the nation's finest museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the UCLA Sculpture Garden. The Thorpe Gallery in New York City recently had an exhibition of her work.
Butterfield is married to artist John Buck, an Iowa native who is a sculptor-printmaker, and they have two sons.
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