Ornette Coleman (1961). Like that free jazz innovator, whose music inspired a number of abstract artists in the early 1960s, Sugarman challenges us tocomprehend the underlying structure of apparently disjunctive works. The presence at Hunter of Two in One, offering the opportunity to compare it to the preceding Six Forms in Pine, was a reminder of the immense amountof esthetic ground Sugarman covered in the first half of the 1960s. This was a moment when sculpture was breaking with many traditions, old and new; oneof the first to go was sculpture's literal foundation. There's some debate as to who was the first artist to dispense with the pedestal, but certainly works suchas Sugarman's Four Walls, Five Forms (1961-62), a painted-wood work in which five individually complex elements appear to have collided on the floor,were instrumental. As one critic later observed: "Beginning in the early '60s, sculpture came down off its pedestal. Some give credit to Anthony Cato for thismove; a rougher, more dramatic, and perhaps more influential leap was accomplished almost simultaneously by an as yet-underacknowledged American,George Sugarman."(3) Interestingly, the curator of the Hunter College show, Stephen Davis, suggests that while Sugarman's elimination of the pedestal andhis use of bright colors were a striking departure from the practice of the day, "even more revolutionary was the radical decentering of the viewer" in workssuch as Two in One.(4) Revolutionary they may have been, but Sugarman's innovations also looked back to the history of sculpture, in particular to the Baroque era. This isespecially evident in works such as Bardana (1962-63) and Ritual Place (1964-65), a pair of polychrome, laminated-wood pieces in which part of thesculpture sits on a pedestal while other elements make drooping thrusts down to the floor. During his years in Europe (1951-55), Sugarman had beenimpressed by Baroque architecture and art, in particular Bernini...
