Seeing Things.(Martin Puryear; Georges Seurat)

Coming upon sculptures by Martin Puryear, the subject of a strong retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is always an arresting pleasure, like entering a zone where time slows. I'm drawn into a relationship with something unique (the hardworking but unprolific Puryear almost never repeats himself, as if relaunching his career with each piece) which is both rawly physical and somehow fanciful. It's usually carved or carpentered wood, subtly evocative of animate, utilitarian, or architectural entities, and mysterious and friendly. As strange as a piece's form may be, it seems consolingly familiar, like a family friend who was often around in your childhood. It imparts a holiday feeling. In advance of the MOMA show, I wondered how Puryears, when displayed in quantity, could preserve their respective quotients of sweet surprise. Wouldn't they crowd one another? They don't. Each keeps its own counsel, cordially indifferent to its neighbors. Smallish works like "Mus" (1984), a reclining cone of black-painted spruce, domed with bent cedar slats and wire mesh, retain staunch authority, and big or even colossal ones--such as a new wheeled wagon of faceted lumber, whose uptilted wagon tongue is a slender ash trunk about sixty feet long--feel as intimate as whispers. The show reminds me that the frequent downfall of contemporary sculpture--since that art rashly abandoned pedestals and intruded on social space--has been the question of how anything can presume to be extra special just by showing up in a world that is already more than full enough. For Puryear, as for very few other sculptors who aren't overpowering minimalists, like Richard Serra--the gravely witty Englishman Richard Deacon, Puryear's peer as an inspired craftsman, comes to mind--it's not a problem, for reasons akin to personal charm and gravitas.

Puryear, who is African-American, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941; his father was a postal employee and his mother taught in an elementary school. He grew up relishing science, haunting museums, and making things. (He has said, "If I became interested in archery, I made the bows and arrows; if I became interested in music, I made the guitar.") At the Catholic University of America, in Washington, he became a painter. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, while he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, he learned woodworking from village craftsmen. Then, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Art, in Stockholm, he became alert to contemporary art, and studied techniques of Scandinavian wood design. In 1971, he graduated from Yale's School of Art and Architecture, with an M.F.A. in sculpture. After two years in Tennessee, teaching, and five in Brooklyn, he went to Chicago, where he also taught, and in 1990 he moved to his present home, in upstate New York. Starting in the late seventies, his fame grew internationally, augmented by such public commissions as a terrific skeletal lobe of stainless steel and bronze, "That Profile" (1997-99), at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles. Steeped in African and Asian art, as well as in the Baroque and the modern (including the work of Brancusi, Le Corbusier, and the minimalists), Puryear exercises a mastery that feels widely and deeply wise. His art is essentially abstract. He commonly eschews extrinsic meanings, despite the title "Ladder for Booker T. Washington," which was an afterthought to a wondrous piece--an undulant, tapering ladder, nearly thirty-seven feet high--suspended in MOMA's atrium. (For once, that wasteful space comes in handy.)

A typical Puryear is as tensed and silent as a held breath. Its form may seem more the idea of its materials than that of its maker. In "Thicket" (1990), square wooden shafts, pegged every which way, decide to mimic a shark's fin. "Brunhilde" (1998-2000), eight feet high, is a vaguely helmet-shaped, upside-down basket of ostensibly simple weave. But look: it's made up of glued cedar strips, fantastically labor-intensive. "Confessional" (1996-2000) presents a flat face of soiled wood, with odd bumps, holes, and a handle, on a ballooning shape of wire mesh smeared with tar, with a boat-shaped footprint. The work seems bent on going different places, physical and spiritual, at once. Its front is whatever side you're looking ...