Alexander Liberman
born 1912, Kiev, Ukraine
works in Warren, CT
Cardinal Points, 1965, welded steel, 8' 11" x 9' 5" x 7' 11", DeCordova Permanent Collection 1968.33, Gift of the Artist
Alexander Liberman is one of the most prominent and prolific outdoor sculptors in America. During the 1950s, he pioneered and helped to popularize the creation of large-scale sculpture with assembled and welded bits and pieces of junk steel. He then painted his compositionally dynamic sculptures a single color—usually red-orange, or, as in Cardinal Points, black—to visually unify their disparate parts. Liberman eschews preparatory drawings. He works intuitively, directly manipulating the large steel parts into their final composition.
