Richard Serra has a story he likes to tell—as he did recently to a group gathered for a preview of this magisterial, museum-quality survey of his works made between 1966 to 1971 mounted at David Zwirner’s imposingly soign. new digs on West Twentieth Street—about a formative moment in his life as an artist when, traveling around Europe while on a Fulbright, he encountered Las Meninas for the first time. His experience at the Prado was a revelation, he said, because he felt Vel.zquez had somehow managed to make him feel “implicated in the space of the painting,” something the fledgling painter simply could not imagine accomplishing with his own wall-based work. Serra was obviously not the first viewer to be wowed and confounded by Velázquez’s masterpiece—by the “subtle system of feints,” as Foucault described it, that produces the work’s “pure reciprocity”—but for the young Californian, it was a true watershed moment: When he got back to Florence, he chucked the contents of his studio into the Arno and decided to become a sculptor.
One hardly need argue for Serra’s centrality to the trajectory of postwar art—or the importance in that trajectory of the brand of psychospatial implication he and his post-Minimalist contemporaries tracked in their diverse practices. But this show does provide an instructive elaboration of his evolution from overmatched grad-school pictorialist to august pronouncer of the colossally architectonic diktats for which he was to become famous.