Excerpt from Ibram Lassaw
Unpublished Essay by E.C. Goossen
Ibram Lassaw is an American sculptor who was born in Egypt in 1913 and was brought to the United States by his parents at the age of eight. He is one of the six or eight sculptors in America who have participated from the beginning in the sculptural revolution which began a little less than twenty years ago in that country. And he is responsible for several important innovations in the sculptural art, not all of them as yet widely understood.
Though once seen Lassaw’s sculpture is easily recognized, it is not always as easy to fathom. It is not possible, for example, to unravel these labyrinths of form and space simply by identifying a series of more or less clear-cut symbols. With an Arp, a Brancusi, a Giacometti, or a David Smith, there is usually a “line” one can take to rationalize the forms. This is true even if one finds only the smooth roundness of the human body or the suggestion of a previous cultural style or the literal presence of everyday non-art objects within the work. While Lassaw does not ordinarily go quite as far as the Constructivists with their spirals of plastic and wire, he nevertheless keeps his distance in the matter of the identifiable, the recognizable formal or psychological element.
This distance would not necessarily prove him a superior artist, but it does make him more of a problem for some viewers. One could say he was more resolutely abstract than most of his American contemporaries. But since this suggests to many people that nature has been eliminated from the work, it would be better not to dwell upon that. For Lassaw as much, if not more than many sculptors, has sought to do what all the great artists have done. He has sought to discover and work in conjunction with the structure of nature. The sculptor, after all, working as he does with concrete, materials, whether they are wood, stone or metal, can hardly break very far from natural laws without producing nausea. And all discrete forms, as science and art daily demonstrate, have their counterparts somewhere in nature.
