Brian Wall

NEW YORK—Brian Wall ought to be far better known than he actually is. A lifelong and genuinely pioneering abstract sculptor, Wall has spent more than half a century working in some of modernism’s hotspots—he got started in the 1950s at St. Ives in his native England, where he worked as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth, spent time in London and New York throughout the sixties, and has resided in San Francisco since 1972. Along the way he fell in with such luminaries as Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon, and Roger Hilton in England, and Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and the Clement Greenberg circle in New York. Wall began making welded steel sculptures years before Tony Caro, once had the distinction of making the largest contemporary sculpture in Britain, and has earned a reputation as a charismatic and highly influential teacher in both London and California.

He currently has a career-spanning exhibition at Flowers gallery on Madison Avenue. He spoke to ARTINFO at the gallery the morning after the show’s opening party.

Brian, you became part of the St. Ives artistic community in Cornwall in 1954, and worked there until 1960. I’m not sure that the significance of St. Ives is really understood in the U.S. Can you try to explain it?

The difference between London and St. Ives [in the period after World War II] was that London was still in the control of the art establishment, whereas St. Ives was full of the fresh air of new ideas and new things. Everybody came down to St. Ives to see what was happening. It was a lovely little melting pot of creative ideas.

And the fallout from the war was an important part of what was happening?

It all had to do with the war really. Suddenly the working class were making all the art in England. All the guys coming back from the war had mixed with middle-class guys, and that evened everybody out. Hundreds of these guys went back to school—places like the Royal College were full of them. All working class, with no class pretensions, just making art. And that led the way for us slightly younger guys. They were really heady times.

When you first went to St. Ives, you thought of yourself as a painter. Why did you to turn to sculpture? And why welded steel?

I wasn’t a very good painter. The painter Terry Frost came round to my studio and said, “Have you ever thought of being a sculptor? You’re the worst painter I’ve ever come across!” So I thought, “Well, I’m open to anything,” and started making wooden constructivist sculptures. But making them was very complicated. The process wasn’t fast enough for me, so I started thinking about welded steel and whether that would be any quicker. I did evening classes in welding for about a month—it cost about two shillings a session—and bang! I just took to it.

And that led to you Barbara Hepworth?

Barbara had decided to do some sheet metal things, and someone said to her, “Brian Wall is the metal man—he’s the guy if you want to work in metal.” So I went round to her studio and she’d got these giant logs from Ghana. They were about 20 feet long and 10 feet around, and although I thought I was there to work with metal, she told me, “Descale this big log: Take all the bark and sap wood off it.” It was a hot summer’s day. I worked my guts out and I went back the next day and finished it off. I killed myself doing it. And her only comment was, “He’s got a good work ethic. I think we can work with him!"

Eventually I did the big metal strung sculptures for her. And in the end I did everything for her.

But by 1960 you were ready to return to London?

We fell out. It was inevitable. Barbara was a great intellect, don’t get me wrong. She was incredible, but she was one of those people who suck all of the blood out of you, slowly but surely. And when you worked for her you got thinner and thinner and thinner!

When you arrived in London you’d been making abstract welded-steel sculptures for years, well before Tony Caro, who—having taken a lead from David Smith—is normally credited with this particular “breakthrough.”

I’ll tell you how Tony Caro and I met. When I came back to London, Roger Hilton told me, “There’s this guy making sculpture like yours, and he’s getting rather well known. We’d better go and see him.” So we went to see him, and there were some of his early welded pieces there, like the yellow piece [Midday (1960)] that’s at MoMA. Roger said to Tony, “This guy is Brian Wall, and not only is he a better sculptor than you are, but he did this stuff before you did, and you’re just a big shit!” It wasn’t a very happy day.