LOOK! IT’S MOVING! George Rickey’s Kinetic Sculpture
by Joan K. Yanni
It looks like shiny antennae, gracefully moving and bowing with the air currents. It is eye-catching, fascinating, and absolutely absorbing. It's MAG's kinetic sculpture, which was installed in front of the Gallery entrance in 1994.
The acquisition, Two Lines Up Excentric—Twelve Feet (94.44), was given to the Gallery by Richard F. Brush, Chairman of The Sentry Group, member of our Board of Managers, and long-time friend of the Gallery.
The work consists of a 10-foot-high stainless steel column topped by two 12-foot-long blades that move independently of each other as the wind nudges them. (No, they never collide!) The stationary shaft of the sculpture is made up of four pieces of steel, welded together to form a hollow column and set in concrete. Lead was poured into the hollow arms, or blades, until a desired balance was achieved. Ball bearings in the sculpture joints permit movement. The piece is the creation of George Rickey, major American sculptor and pioneer of kinetic sculpture. It was made during the past year and installed by members of the artist's studio.
George Rickey was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1907, and educated in Scotland and England. He showed an early aptitude for mechanical devices, inherited perhaps from his father, a mechanical engineer, and his grandfather, a clockmaker.
While studying modern history at Balliol, Oxford, (he earned a BA in 1929 and an MA in 1941), he also attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Attracted to painting, he later traveled throughout Europe, studying with cubists Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger before returning permanently to America as a painter. He worked in both the manner of Cezanne and in a social realist style, supporting himself by teaching history at Groton, then as a copy reader at Newsweek.
During World War II, Rickey served with the U.S. Air Corps, teaching the maintenance of computing instruments used by bomber gunners. Here he learned welding and gained a knowledge of the effects of wind and gravity on ballistics. His artistic interests turned from painting to sculpture, and through welding he made his first mobile in 1945 to entertain his army friends. He created his first kinetic sculpture in glass while studying at the Institute of Design in Chicago after the war, and his first work in stainless steel in 1950. He was influenced by the work of Alexander Calder and encouraged by sculptor David Smith, a friend.
In 1947 he married Edith Leighton; they became the parents of two sons. He taught at various colleges and universities, including Tulane; UC Santa Barbara; Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; and Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
In 1960, he and his family moved to a farm in East Chatham, New York, near Albany, and his work became larger in scale, often using simple, elegant blades that oscillated with wind currents. The design of his sculptures lies in the motion rather than the form of each piece. His constructions, he says, "have more in common with clocks than with sculptures."
Rickey's sculpture draws on the tradition of constructivism, non-objective art based on space and time; and his book, Constructivism, Origins and Evolution, published in 1967, remains a major source for that movement. He prefers smooth, slow, changing motion, which the viewer contemplates over time, much as one watches the movement of waves or clouds. Many of his works are in stainless steel, which he or his assistants burnish with a disk grinder in short, random stokes, as can be seen in MAG's piece.
Rickey has been the subject of many exhibitions, the first at UCLA in 1978, the latest in celebration of his 85th birthday, with simultaneous shows in Los Angeles, Osaka, and Berlin. He and his wife divide their time between Santa Barbara and East Chatham.
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