Friday, April 15, 2016

George Sugarman Sighting

Robert Boyd

Hey Pan fans--you might remember a post I wrote six years ago about corporate sculpture. One of the things I wrote about at the time was how a large sculpture from 1971 by George Sugarman, called variously the Saint Paul Commission or the Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, had been purchased by commercial real estate firm Grubb & Ellis and dismembered. The firm used the dismembered parts to decorate various office properties it owned in Houston, Austin, and I believe in the Woodlands (north of Houston). (Grubb & Ellis went bankrupt in 2012, so I wonder who now owns all these scraps of Sugarman's sculpture.) Three years later, I happened across a piece of the Sugarman sculpture in Austin. And this morning, as I walked through back streets in Montrose, I found some more pieces of it.


George Sugarman, part of the Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, 1971

Unlike the other pieces I've seen, these two were not well-maintained or marked with a plaque. The black struts had bits of blue paint from what I assume was an attempt to repaint the circular elements. But they were permanent--they were bolted to the ground.



George Sugarman, part of the Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, 1971

So what did this thing look like when it was installed up in St. Paul? I have found a few photos online.


George Sugarman, Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, 1971


 George Sugarman, Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, 1971


 George Sugarman, Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, 1971

This last photo is quite interesting. It's from the website of Lippincott, a firm that specializes in the fabrication and conservation of large metal sculptures.  The man in the picture is George Sugarman.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Robert,

    The fate of this work is a real tragedy. Saint Paul was one of the public commissions of which Sugarman was most proud. The display of fragments like this, stripped of all meaning and artistic intention, is brutal and disturbing, especially to those like me who knew and admired George as one of the great American sculptors of his time.

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  2. This should be a warning to artists not to sell build permanent installations for corporate clients. It wasn't the case when Sugarman first created the Saint Paul Sculptural Complex, but nowadays almost no company owns their own building. They commission them, but for tax reasons they arrange for a buyer to own it and lease it back to the corporation. If they sell the building (as the bank did in this case), someone else will own your sculpture. In a way, Sugarman is lucky--the sculpture could have been sold for scrap. But maybe being melted down and sold to the Chinese would have been a better fate...

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