Ivan Chermayeff Sculptures

“These objets trouvés, found in the gutters of New York, or in the office mail, or on trips, take on new meanings when juxtaposed to each other. The blue sky on a stamp relates to a square of flat blue by implying celestial depth, and the depth punches a hole in the otherwise flat colors surrounding the blue square.”

“This master of collage backed into his art through a fear of drawing, ‘a neurotic fear,’ he says. In the early 1950s, Chermayeff decamped from Harvard to study instead at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design. He attributes his attraction to what the French call trouvailles the unexpected find, to the photographs of Aaron Siskind, a member of the ID faculty, whose lens sought out peeling paint in the cityscape. ‘I liked to make the same kind of discoveries.’ ”

“Chermayeff is one of the enthusiastic epicures of New York’s rubbish, a devoted collector of the confetti of daily life that rains on the city regularly but unpredictably. In Ulysses, James Joyce made a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom into an epic of mundanity, and Chermayeff is Joycean in the same ability to collect the small talk of daily life and transform it into tableaux of surprising beauty and meaning. He makes art out of the very ordinary.”

“Chermayeff builds character both in the portraits, and in the quality of his art. He never starts a portrait with a specific kind of person in mind, and he does not try for the ideal or the generic but, buoyed by a process of discovery as he relates piece to piece, he shapes eccentric and exceptional character. A few loops of strings might suggest a mouth, and the mouth might suggest a cigar:

‘I do think about these personalities with a certain amount of comic realization,’ he says. ‘It’s funny to see a character emerge. I push it.’ What results is a menagerie of eccentrics, over-the-top, slightly preposterous characters who are fluttery, enigmatic, lugubrious, repressed-the sluggard, the boulevardier, the school girl, the spy. Like a playwright, he invents people, and his dramatis personae are endowed with humor and bonhomie.”

“Having cultivated spatial depth in several ways in his collages, Chermayeff has inched off the surface with objects that turn the collages into reliefs: he breaks the plane of the two-dimensional sheet with gloves and other flattened objects that start to move into the space of the viewer. Recently, he has taken the next logical step into real space, producing collage sculpture, free-standing figures that are equally as charming, and deftly drawn, as his collage portraits. As in his paper collages, he uses an economy of means and witty juxtapositions of odd materials and objects to create character-old toys, mallets, river stones, sandpaper, brushes, and gourds usually attached to a torso or head of antique barn beams. The texture of the wood, its grains, whorls and knots, forms a background whose energy and variation bind all the addenda that define the character of his slightly mad eccentrics. The wood confers a sense of age and authenticity.”

Quotations: Joseph Givannini