GEORGE RICKEY: A LIFE IN BALANCE

A Biography Reviewed

George Rickey (1907-2002) stays in my head as one of the smartest visual artists I ever met. It was in West Berlin around 1982, when we were both guests of the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramme. Within an hour he told me what I should do with my book-art and then what he was planning to do with his kinetic sculptures. Unlike too many visual artists I’ve known, he not only thought about others but he thought before he produced. He exemplified for me an Intelligent Artist in the tradition of, say, Leonardo da Vinci. (No one judged Rickey as nutty as his younger second wife who predeceased him.)

   As a native-born American raised in Glasgow and educated in history at Oxford, Rickey was also a good writer who produced, in addition to essays, a major book on esthetic Constructivism (1967) that I admired before I met him. More than a half-century later, this book hasn’t been topped, which is no small feat, as he was competing with academic art historians.

   After painting conventionally, Rickey became in his forties a kinetic sculptor, making objects that move naturally, in the tradition of Alexander Calder, but differently. The distinguishing visual mark of George Rickey’s kinetic sculpture is shiny flat surfaces called “plates” that move while attached to a constraining anchor. To his biographer Belinda Rathbone, “Rickey’s work was all about balance, equilibrium, and quiet contemplation.”

   Some of the more famous Rickey objects survive outside in public spaces or museum courtyards around the world. His classic Four Squares in a Square (1969) has stood outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin since 1969. Other mobiles have straight moving parts, in contrast to the curves favored by Calder. Though finding his artistic signature late, Rickey fortunately lived into his nineties, overseeing the production of his art to his death.

   As history, George Rickey: A Life in Balance (2022) is most valuable for its digressions. Never before have I seen any record of the heroic attempts by Joseph Brewer (1898-1991), one of Gertrude Stein’s first American publishers, to transform a sleepy Christian central Michigan college named Olivet into an avant-garde institution, for a decade (roughly simultaneously with Black Mountain College, which is better remembered).

   The current Wikipedia entry on Olivet, no doubt edited by the institution, speaks of “a short-lived attempt at an Oxford-style curriculum from 1934 to 1944” without mentioning Brewer’s name and the distinguished faculty teaching there during those years–not only Rickey but the distinguished British novelist Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939). In their single return tour of the United States in 1934-35, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas spent several days at Olivet. “During the summer of 1937,” Rathbone writes, “Brewer held a writers’ conference–one of the first in the country–with Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon.” A culturally classy act Brewer no doubt was.

   Additionally, Rathbone says much about the highly hospitable West Berlin arts program that sponsored us both, establishing the city as more culturally fertile than, say, Paris or Rome. My German-born filmmaking partner Martin Koerber recently wrote me: “Thanks for reminding me of this brilliant artist. Wherever I run into his sculptures in Berlin I have a happy moment! Thankfully there is a bunch of them.” Otherwise, value this book for documenting Mr. and Mrs. Rickey’s hustling for collectors and commissions, which became necessary for an artist who was never “hot” (with the art magazines and museum curators) and who also lacked an effective gallerist or agent.

   The problem with this biography is that Rickey’s words rarely appear, even though he published much and his conversation was memorable. My assumption is that whoever controls his words, which by copyright law still belong to his estate, refused to grant permission to print them. (This is a delicate issue. I once saw an exhibition that included [under glass] Ernest Hemingway’s notorious letter in which he wrote that he wanted to “fuck Gertrude Stein.” Nonetheless, Hem’s widow forbade any writer from quoting it in print and, indeed, would now probably harass both me and this publication for quoting it, were she still alive.)

   I say “assumption” because Ms. Rathbone doesn’t acknowledge this limitation. Nor have any of the reviewers I’ve read. The book’s publisher wrote me about “an authorial decision. Belinda Rathbone wrote the book as she believed it should be written.” Since all other biographies of verbal people include their words, my further hunch is that the estate thought it either owned invaluable property (which would be delusional) or that it was favoring another “authorized” biographer. If the latter, the estate could be short-sighted, because if this biography bombs in the marketplace, publishers, always subservient to precedent, might be reluctant to issue another. Q. E. D.

   To someone like myself, who has admired Rickey’s writings and his talk, as well as his art, this defect diminishes Rickey, this book, the biographer, and even its publisher.

[an earlier version of this text appeared in the book-reviewing periodical Rain Taxi (summer 2022)]