Rickey Across Time

George Rickey installs Crucifera IV, East Chatham, NY, 1965.

George Rickey standing in boat floating on a pond, Germany, 1987

Five Lines in Parallel Planes, 1966.

George Rickey sitting with with Five Squares Horizontal (1981) at the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany, 1984

George Rickey began his artistic career as a painter. As an undergraduate at Balliol College, University of Oxford, he studied painting and drawing at the Ruskin School, under the leadership of Sydney Carline, who was best known for his faithful sketches and paintings of World War I aerial combat. Following his graduation in 1929, Rickey went on to Paris to study modern painting and drawing at the Académie Andre L’Hôte and Académie Moderne. A master of many modernist styles, in his own youth Andre L’Hôte had been heavily influenced by the work of Cezanne, and he passed this influence along to Rickey. Cezanne and the lessons Rickey learned from Carline and L’Hôte stayed with him the rest of his life.
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When Rickey returned to the United States in the early 1930s, he combined what he had learned in Europe with the social realism prevalent in American art at the time and worked his way across the country, painting still lifes, conducting portrait demonstrations at various colleges, and creating murals in public spaces for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. It was only after being drafted and serving in the Army Air Corps that Rickey began to move beyond painting. Following World War II, Rickey went on to study at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he experimented with painting in various abstract styles. Wanting to push himself further while making use of his natural mechanical aptitude, Rickey also began to create sculptures, first out of glass, then plastic, and, finally, metal.

Kitchen Chair

Portrait of Zona Ruml

Even as Rickey moved from painting to sculpture, from realism to abstraction, he drew on nature for his inspiration. His kinetic sculptures from the 1950s, such as Wild Carrot II, show Rickey’s direct reliance upon natural forms—both in their titles and the shapes he employed. In the case of Wild Carrot II, Rickey has captured the essence of the plant’s flowers by reducing them to rotors, an element with multiple fins on a double pointed pivot post (or pin), which spin and bob like the buds on the ends of delicate stems. Rickey continued to work with this shape, a direct reference to nature throughout his career.

Wild Carrot II

One Rotor with Cube and Gimbal

With rotors Rickey distilled a flower’s bud into its most basic geometrical elements. Moving away from depicting what was readily visible in nature, Rickey began to simplify the shapes he used to depict not the seen, but the unseen forces that drove his work. He began to work with lines or blades, sometimes one line alone, sometimes many lines in different configurations. As he wrote,

“Lines permit the most economical manifestation of movement I have found, a kinetic drawing in space.”

Rickey’s line sculptures are a combination of chance, provided by the breeze, and fate, controlled by the intricate engineering and craftsmanship that allows each line to move only as much or as little as the artist intended. It is no wonder that he titled one of his earliest series of line sculptures (begun in 1961) Atropos after the Greek goddess of fate and destiny. The two lines of Atropos IV depict the balance of the two competing forces inherent in all of Rickey’s sculpture–chance and fate. Column of Five Tapered Lines illustrates and then expands upon these themes by introducing the idea that a shape usually noted for its stability, in this case a column, can be simultaneously unstable.

Atropos IV

Column of Five Tapered Lines

Having found the most straightforward way to illustrate the essence of movement with the use of lines, Rickey began to experiment with other simple shapes, such as planes.In smooth sheets of stainless steel onto which patterns could be very lightly and randomly ground, Rickey found a way in which to explore not only variations of movement, but also the changing effects of reflected light and color. In these sculptures, it is easy to see how Rickey maintained his connection to painting. Single Plane (1967) is almost like a small ever-changing painting with Rickey using the motion of the sculpture to “paint” different combinations of light and color on its surface. As he had with lines, Rickey began to use various combinations of planes in different arrangements to create other geometric forms, such as cubes and squares. Both the Unstable Cube VI and Four Planes Hanging use combinations of planes to create two very different sculptures and experiences for the viewer.

Single Plane

Anatomy of a Cube of Six Hinged Planes

Four Planes Hanging

Having settled upon his medium and his method, Rickey quickly added other basic shapes to his vocabulary, all while emphasizing that they were the means to an end:

“Since the design of the movement is paramount, shape, for me, should have no significance.”

He explored the strength of triangles, adjusting the angles of each from piece to piece, thus finding another way in which to add variables to simple forms. The vertical equilateral triangles of Two Triangles come together to form a rhombus, while in the print Two Triangles Dihedral, Rickey places the emphasis on the angle at which the two horizontal isosceles triangles meet. In Cascade, Rickey has truncated triangles into trapezoids, which when stacked in sequence from small to large form another larger trapezoid. Rickey then further reduced the triangles to nothing more than angles in works like Conversation–Mondrian Meets Malevich.

Two Triangles

Two Triangles Dihedral

Conversation–Mondrian Meets Malevich

Three Right Angles Horizontal Variation I

Three Right Angles Horizontal Variation III

To add yet another level of controlled variables to his work, Rickey created “open” forms, in which instead of using a solid sheet of stainless steel, the shape is created by an open frame. In these “open” sculptures, the viewer not only experiences the movement of the sculpture and the reflection of light and color, but also the framing and reframing of the surroundings as seen through the opening within each form. This concept can clearly be seen in Open Parallelepiped and Cube, which is composed of open frames, designed to be looked at inside and out, and to be looked through. But it is the series of embossments of open triangles, Almost a Square, Family, Pythagoras, The Pyramid, and Tunnel, that perhaps best illustrates Rickey’s goal in using open shapes. Because of the nature of the medium—embossment on white paper— what is framed is as important as the frame itself since it is literally the same thing.

Open Parallelepiped and Cube

Almost a Square

Family

Pythagoras

The Pyramid

Tunnel

In addition to working with both sheets of metal and sheets of paper, Rickey also worked in wire, finding it sensitive enough to capture the slightest movement of air and supple enough to be used to create intricately detailed versions of simple shapes. It was also a medium with which Rickey could work in quiet, solitary moments, creating sculptures at a scale that did not require many studio helpers or loud machinery. With wire, Rickey could once again be the solitary artist. It is no wonder that he chose a portion of art historian and author Wieland Schmied’s 1981 poem “Freedom” to inscribe on his print of his wire sculpture Column of Eight Triangles with Spirals:

“We can remember
and we can forget
we can go
or we can stay
we can either speak
or we can be silent
but to see is a word without alternative like breathing”

Meander

Photo of Rickey’s hands

One Triangle with Spiral

Column of Eight Triangles with Spirals

As he moved into the final years of his life, Rickey continued to work, and again found pleasure and solace in the small works he could create on his own. Although welding and working with some hand tools had become painful for him, he could still draw and paint. Rickey combined the skills he had learned as a young man with those he had taught himself and created small sculptures on which he painted in a variety of styles. The intensity of the color palette Rickey used on his late painted sculptures matches that of his youthful paintings and, some seventy years later, the lessons he learned from studying Cezanne are still evident.

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Rickey Across Time

Rickey's Art

Rickey's Life

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