Audio Description

Full Audio Transcript (Expand)

Lever (#4)

Martin Puryear’s 1989 sculpture Lever (#4) is a study in elegant simplicity and effort. The sculpture may strike the viewer as minimalist, but the design is much too organic to be confined to the Minimalist movement. It is a massive, freestanding wooden lever made of matte black-stained red cedar. The piece spans just under seven feet along the ground, bends about 90 degrees, and rises eight feet high. It is just under four feet wide at its widest.

Coming in close, the detailed craft of this artwork becomes clear. It is made of long, uniform wood panels. The bottom portion is like a scuba diving flipper with a foot in it, straight and wide but pinched at the front. The very front fully contacts the ground. It becomes thicker and rounder as it goes back toward the heel, and the back third of it is raised to hover a bit off the ground. The portion jutting upwards is a cone made of the same type of panels, narrowing as it rises and ending in a rounded tip. It angles slightly forward in a way that resembles a calf in a human’s stride. Nearly all of the work is painted with thick brushstrokes. The occasional small patch of pale brown wood peeks through the black as if lightly scuffed from use.

While the planks of each section all go in the same direction, Puryear has added about a half-a-dozen diagonals. These diagonals are choppy and sometimes thin and wispy. Some appear to be only brushstrokes the same width as the planks. Others seem to be planks that have been shaved razor thin, making them easily able to bend over the rounded portion near the lever’s joint and to create the rounded tip at the very top.