accompanied the Hunter show, Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr suggests that there is a resonancebetween Sugarman's work and that of younger sculptors such as Polly Apfelbaum, Charles Long and Peter Soriano. I agree with Storr in seeing an affinitybetween their work and Sugarman's (particularly his painted-wood sculptures of 1963-67), and would only add to his list three more American sculptors:Jeanne Silverthorne, Jessica Stockholder and Daniel Wiener. One quality of Sugarman's work that links it to the sculpture of artists 40 or more years hisjunior is that in the early 1960s he rejected the notion of "troth to materials," happily obscuring the "natural" properties of the wood he used with repeatedcoats of acrylic paint. Another is his Baroque-influenced fondness for extended forms that undertake unruly excursions from their bases.(10) Given these affinities with younger artists, it's surprising that Sugarman's achievement isn't more widely recognized and that it was left to Hunter College,rather than a major American museum, to offer this survey. No doubt, Sugarman's long focus on public art (rather than on gallery and museum work) hasbeen a factor. Also at play, I fear, is the profound indifference shown by large swaths of the art world to the kind of formal inventiveness and complex visualthinking on which Sugarman's art is based. I can only hope that the art students who made up a significant portion of the audience for this exhibition foundsome of their late-century assumptions about art-making challenged by the high order of visual invention on hand. (1.) Quoted in Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler, "Sensibility of the Sixties," Art in America, January-February, 1967, p. 51. (2.) Amy Goldin, "George Sugarman," in George Sugarman: Plastiken, Collagen, Zeichnungen, Kunsthalle Basel, 1969, unpaginated. (3.) John Perreault, "George Sugarman, Joslyn Art Museum," Artforum, Summer 1982. (4.) Stephen Davis, "Disparity in Sugarman,...
