A season of steel in the City of Light: the works of sculptor Mark di Suvero on display in Paris, France

Art in America, July, 1998 by Raphael Rubinstein

To finish the di Suvero roundup it remained only to travel to the 13th arrondissement in the southeast of Paris where Grace a Toi (Hommage a Michel Guy), a sculpture from 1992, stood among the towers of the new Bibliotheque Nationale de France. Sited along the Seine, the library, which was designed by Dominique Perrault, consists of four towers connected by a lower building containing reading rooms and exhibition spaces. Since the structure was completed in 1995, most of the books have been transferred from the old Bibliotheque Nationale on the right bank. The most unexpected aspect of the Grande Bibliotheque, as it is sometimes called, is a half acre or so of tall trees rising in the central courtyard; the most irritating feature is the flights of steep stairs -- reminiscent of an Aztec pyramid -- one must climb before reaching the escalators that lead back down to the reading rooms. Somewhere, I was told, there was an entrance with elevator access, but it certainly seemed well hidden. Apparently, Parisian readers are expected to possess not only intellectual curiosity but also considerable physical stamina.

Di Suvero's sculpture was placed on the wood-slatted roof of the reading-room budding, near a couple of the book towers. The rusted steel work was essentially a mobile of interlocking forms raised up some 60 feet on four slender I-beams. Free to rock and turn in the wind, the piece brought to mind a weather vane. A caplike steel circle near the top helped keep the beams together, as did two cross struts. Stretched between the cross struts were two irregular steel forms made from rectangular steel plates. The plates had been cut and pulled apart in a manner which recalled a child's paper chain.

Flanked by the four big book-filled towers and surrounded by the open skies, the piece stood like a sentinel surveying the river and the far bank where one could see the long, shiplike Ministry of Finance building, a large sports stadium and, mostly hidden behind the trees of the Parc de Bercy, Frank Gehry's defunct American Center. On the exposed roof of the reading rooms, in the chilly, weather of late autumn, few people seemed interested in either the view or the sculpture. Breathing hard after climbing the stairs, they headed toward the escalators. For an American visitor, however, especially one who had traversed the city in search of di Suveros, the sculpture was a welcome, presence, a tall, silent but not quite immobile compatriot with which to share the Parisian panorama.

The 10 sculptures in "Mark di Suvero Paris 1997" were on view from Sept. 15 to Nov. 15, 1997. The sculpture Joie de Vivre will remain at the St. John's Rotary exit of the Holland Tunnel in lower Manhattan until February 1999. From July 2 to Sept. 27, six di Suveros will be on view in Costa Mesa. Calif., and a seventh at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach.

(1.) See Elizabeth C. Baker, "Mark di Suvero's Burgundian Season," Art in America, May/June 1974, pp. 59-63.