ABSTRACT
One way of looking at the history of abstract art is to view it as a series of audacious attempts to achieve the maximum aesthetic results from the smallest possible artistic means. In all the arts, but most conspicuously in painting, sculpture, and music, the quest for some "final" essentiality has been adamant and abiding. The sculpture of open-form arabesques in slender, highly polished steel masses is quite as dazzling in its technical finish and formal perfection as one remembered it. Industrial tools and materials are employed in producing the sculpture, but the final result is an art that has been firmly removed from an industrial ambience. Mr. Jose de Rivera is sixty-seven years old, and the earliest pieces on exhibition date from 1930. For him, the materiality is something to be redeemed, transmuted, elevated, and transcended; the materials of sculpture are looked upon as the physical coefficient of an ideal.
