Beverly Pepper
As early as the eighteenth century, American artists sought patronage and inspiration abroad. By going to England, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley escaped revolutionary fervor and American distaste for history painting, while in the nineteenth century Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers went to Italy where they found fine marble and skilled stonecutters. Later on, Americans filled the ranks of art schools in Munich and Paris, creating a veritable industry, and, in the 1940s and 1950s, artists went to Europe to study on the G.I. Bill. In 1952, the young sculptor Beverly Pepper joined the ranks of American expatriates, and has prospered in Italy for over six decades. Since 1963, she has returned annually to the United States, where most of her commissions and exhibitions have taken place.
Pepper was born in Brooklyn in 1922, and at the age of sixteen began studies in advertising design and photography at the Pratt Institute. [1] She studied further at the Art Students League, and in the evening at Brooklyn College, where her mentor was the art theorist György Kepes. In 1949, she moved to Paris and studied painting at the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and in the studio of Fernand Léger with André L’Hote; she also visited Constantin Brancusi in his studio, an experience that inspired some of her early work.
After moving to Rome in 1952, Pepper, impressed by the city’s large scale and its monuments, shifted from painting to sculpture. The early 1960s were marked by two turning points: her encounter with the ruins of Angkor Wat and, in 1962, an invitation to exhibit alongside David Smith and Alexander Calder at Spoleto Italy’s Festival dei due mondi. With Smith as a role model, she learned welding and worked alongside a crew in an old mill in Piombino. In 1972, she moved to Todi, a traditional Umbrian hill town in central Italy.
Pepper’s early welded works were freestanding and nonrepresentational, not unlike those of her mentor Smith. She became versatile in her ability to work with a variety of materials including wood, stone, polished stainless steel, and cast iron, and she was one of the first sculptors to experiment with Cor-ten steel, known as “weathering steel” as it never needs painting. Often her sculptures were severely geometric, similar to the work of other artists working in a minimalist vein. Gradually, her pieces increased in size, especially as she developed her totemic Sentinels in the 1970s. In the ensuing decades she turned her attention to large scale environmental installations, which combined earth, grass, stone, and sometimes steel and sand; for example, in 1977 Pepper completed a 130-foot long earth-hugging sculpture for Dartmouth College. Although her commissions have been largely for public or corporate spaces, she has also created an evocative series of more intimately scaled sculptures.
Thematically and indirectly, Pepper’s sculptures are reminiscent of ancient cultures, a sentiment she alluded to in a statement about her Umbrian Markers series, from 1988–2002: “I seek to expand our understanding of ancient roots as well as modern traumas. It is part of an ongoing series of memory sculptures—to remind us of something we have not directly experienced, and lead us to reflect on the past. They are not about history, they are not meant literally as memories. They are commemorations to the determining presence of the past in our lives, paying homage to a world we never knew.” [2]
Notes:
[1] Pepper’s date of birth frequently appears as 1924; www.beverlypepper.net cites 1922.
[2] Pepper quoted in Robert Hobbs, “Umbrian Markers,” in Beverly Pepper: Markers, 1988–2002 (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 2003), 10.
