Words Stephen Greco Photography Guzman

Published in No 17

Sporting an unfussy helmet of dark hair and attired for work in a sporty black top and slim black pants, Ursula von Rydingsvard looks a bit like a soulful superhero, beaming with the strength of experience but ready, willing, and able to face new challenges. At just over 80, she commands the enthusiasm of an artist decades younger. “Look at her this way — come around here,” she says invitingly to a visitor to her cavernous studio.

 We are standing in front of an immense sculpture of hers, an artwork much taller than we are, that is hulking over us, though in an unthreatening way — a work made of cedar that may in fact be immobile but seems nonetheless alive, its parts pulsing or squirming restlessly. From the oblique viewing angle that Von Rydingsvard is indicating, it is clear that what appeared in a front view to be a ridge on the side of the sculpture is actually more of a wing — articulating itself increasingly from a spot above us and reaching down to the floor as a semi-detached stalk, as graceful as a dancer’s leg. “See…?” says the artist, insinuating her arm into the space behind the wing, between it and the larger mass of the sculpture.

It is a space that is almost secret until discovered in the way the artist suggests — thoroughly engaging visually, a hollow defined by a profusion of cuts, incisions, and nubs that have been carved from the cedar. In fact, the space all around the sculpture is exactly this engaging — and not simply visually, but on some metaphysical level. If you’re paying attention, the work’s enormous presence is decidedly communicative, even enlightening.

Looking at Von Rydingsvard’s sculpture this actively brings to mind a line from a Leonard Cohen song: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Light is, in fact, one way to describe the vitality that seems to animate Von Rydingsvard’s work. And it reflects the urgent way she approaches her work every day, as giving her life. Working is an actual, visceral necessity of her continued existence, she says. “You just want to squeeze more out of yourself than ever. You want to make it better than ever.”

Widely praised and often commissioned, Von Rydingsvard’s work — largely fashioned from 4”x4” beams of cedar that have been cut, carved, and assembled into often massive forms — is included in major museum collections all over the United States. Permanent installations of her work are on view in prestigious sites from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. For years the artist has worked primarily in cedar, though she has used other materials and does have some of her works cast in bronze. In recent years she has had to entrust most of the detailed wood cutting — done primarily with a ten-pound circular saw — to one of her assistants, yet Von Rydingsvard today is working more strongly than ever, in concept, in scale, and in a masterful resolve that comes with age.

She was born into war, in Germany, in 1942, to a Polish mother and Polish-speaking Ukrainian father. The family were farmers, displaced by the conflict; and throughout the German occupation of Poland and then the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, Von Rydingsvard, her parents, and her five siblings lived in nine different refugee camps.

“It was hard,” says the artist. “As a child growing up, you were lucky to have a bed and something to eat. On the other hand, this is not the safe and secure world that any child deserves. Thank God for the Marshall Plan. We got powdered milk, though at first we didn't know that you had to put it in water. But the breads that they gave were fantastic. I've been looking for those breads in the United States ever since, and I can't find them. They were so big, and their skins were so hard and delicious. My father would be the only one that would cut them, and he would cut the bread against his chest with this big knife, in thick, thick slices, and he would put a little bit of szmalec (pig's lard), and we were in heaven.”

There were schools in the camps, sometimes. “The Polish schools were very, very tough in terms of their thoughts about the behavior of children. You had one thin little notebook and would be so careful with the paper and your pen and ink. So, you really thought a lot before you wrote something.” Then, in the late 1950s, with the support of the Marshall Plan and of Catholic agencies, the family came to the United States. “It was a military boat that took us. We slept in hammocks, and it took us to the place that everybody went — Ellis Island. And they had such good food there, but we couldn't really eat it, because we were seasick. And we saw oranges — so many fruits that we’d never seen. I mean, it was like a miracle.” The family settled in the small town of Plainville, Connecticut, and “the poverty was pretty intense,” but school brought the young Von Rydingsvard some welcome artistic opportunities. “I think I loved it ever since I started to do the art. It probably wasn't even art that I was doing at the beginning, but I loved doing it. I didn't even know what an artist was. I'd never seen an artist, and Plainville didn’t have one. In fourth grade I used to be the one that for any holiday they’d call on for whatever they needed for the corkboard. And I was kind of popular for that. Everybody just said "Oh…!,” and it helped me so much.” The idea of becoming an artist occurred later, gradually.

“I taught art in a lot of places, but it wasn't real, because I had my daughter to take care of and I had the full-time job. But even for my daughter I would sew three-dimensional things and stuff things in them. I also started painting, but it wasn't until I got to New York City that I just opened up. In 1975, armed with two degrees from the University of Miami, Von Rydingsvard arrived in New York for an MFA at Columbia.

“There were these people that would come and speak, and the art was something that was consequential, so I just loved it. I would sit on the stone bench at Columbia University with burning cheeks, I was so happy. You could see exhibitions that were so amazing — and I saw them all. And I started to know artists and people who were interested in art. It was like an awakening. I just woke up because I knew then that I could be an artist.”

Von Rydingsvard’s pieces are often monumental, but the process one sees in the studio, taken as a whole, is almost as flexible and responsive to the moment as drawing. Thinking in three dimensions about an idea, von Rydingsvard might tape out a shape on the studio floor to suggest the footprint of a sculpture. But she does not work from sketches or drawings of an intended direction or finished product, since she resists being “trapped” by these things. Rather, her work, as she once described it in an interview, is “the wandering through the possibilities and the record of that wandering.” She makes cut marks on the raw cedar 4”x4” beams she has selected for a work, then after the cutting she supervises the gluing of the carved beams together, as well as the application of the graphite powder that sometimes inflects the surface of her works, and the introduction, if the piece requires it, of a steel armature. Sitting throughout the studio, among works both finished and in progress, are palettes of raw cedar beams; forklifts and hoists; structures of scaffolding, and stores of tools, graphite, glues, and other materials. For her work in bronze, like the one at Barclays Center, an original version is first created in wood, and then cast in bronze.

The result may be beauty, but, as art critic Peter Schjeldahl said in the New York Times in 1979, “Von Rydingsvard's work consents to be beautiful but keeps its secrets.” She says she never thinks about the camps when doing her work, but it’s tempting to imagine some of those secrets being spiritual connections between the artist’s creations and the pain of a wartime childhood and early refugee-camp memories of materials and objects: piles of firewood, wooden walls and stairs, simple wooden furniture, and hand-carved kitchen utensils like bowls and spoons; secrets perhaps connecting the work to the landscapes in which the camps were located, to nature itself in Eastern Europe, and even to the spiritual conditions of those dark years of world history.

In the studio, Von Rydingsvard seems delighted by a comment that one of the most imposing pieces there seems to have been formed by nature itself, as an ancient limestone cliff might have been — by eons of weathering and the wind.

“The wind…!” she says, appearing delighted, her eyes widening.

Nature these days for Von Rydingsvard includes a pastoral stretch of Rondout Creek that flows directly past her house in Ulster County, near where the historic Delaware and Hudson Canal used to run. For her, says Von Rydingsvard, the house is a “haven.”

“When I go there, I just get so full of peace, because it's all about... you.”

Lovingly displayed about the house, as well as in some of the more private spaces of the studio, are objects that Von Rydingsvard collects, including antique household utensils in wood, metal, and ceramics — bowls, spoons, stools, and several examples of an old-fashioned Polish “mangle board” — a wooden, paddle-like tool with a handle and corrugations, known in Polish as maglownica, that housewives would use to smooth their damp linen after it had been laundered.

The artist has spoken movingly about visiting Poland decades after her childhood. Were these objects collected during world travels? “I collected, not particularly on my travels,” she says. “Anywhere I can collect, I collect.”

Von Rydingsvard points out several of her favorite objects, which sit neatly on shelves and on top of a rustic chest, then admits with a quiet smile, “and we make all the furniture.”

For some reason, though the artist works in wood all day, the admission is surprising. Though the furniture, plain and simply designed, looks very different from the sculpture, the obvious question arises: What does the practice of making furniture have to do with her practice of making sculpture?

 “Nothing,” says the artist.

“Nothing?”

“It's nothing to do with it. Compared to my work, it’s nothing.”

“Then pure utility?

“Not utility. It's pure love of something. I just want to come into a home that I feel comfortable in. And I sure do. It's just because I wanted it that way.”

Ursula von Rydingsvard is represented by galerielelong.com

Stephen Greco’s most recent novel is Such Good Friends (Kensington), about the friendship between author Truman Capote and socialite Lee Radziwill.

Guzman are regular contributors to UD and are represented by veronique-peresdomergue.net @lesguzman