Untitled

Artist Robert Morris American, 1931–2018

Date1964

MediumLead over composition board, with steel spring, hook, wire, and nails

Dimensions33 1/2 x 6 3/16 x 2 1/2 in. (85.1 x 15.7 x 6.3 cm)

ClassificationsSculpture

Credit LineGift of Rhett and Robert Delford Brown

Object numberG.76.26.1

On View

Not on view

Label Text
Robert Morris has spent a varied career unearthing the complications found in the simplest of shapes. He has always been as fascinated with perception and process as with artistic form. In the early 1960s, when he was making large, freestanding polyhedrons that would come to define minimalist art, Morris also produced small, wall-hung lead reliefs. The neo-Dada series, which includes this work, deals with measurement. A spring, a hook, a ruler-these are elemental and eminently useful items. Morris has turned them into a dysfunctional device, in which clarity and confusion humorously mirror each other.

This simplest of shapes invites multiple readings. Its narrow verticality, minimally articulated, makes a modern-day herm. A herm, an ancient statue type, consists of a plain rectangular shaft surmounted by a head-often representing Hermes, from whom the name comes-with a phallus in relief on the front of the pillar. (Herms were found in various locations, reflecting Hermes's multiple roles. Most often identified as the messenger of the gods, he was worshipped as a phallic fertility deity and later regarded as patron of roads and boundaries, for which herms served as markers.)
ProvenanceGreen Gallery, New York; sold to Robert Delford Brown, New York, 31 March 1964; given to NCMA, 1976.
Published ReferencesEdgar Peters Bowron, ed., Introduction to the Collections (Chapel Hill: published for the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, by The University of North Carolina Press, 1983), illus. (b-w) 278.

Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994) cat. no. 36, illus. (b-w).

Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in Association with Leo Castelli Gallery, 2013), cat. no. 81, illus. (color).
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Recent Acquisitions," September 25-October 23, 1977.

New York, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem," February 3-April 24, 1994, cat. no. 36, illus.(b-w).

Object Rights Statement

The North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) makes images of its collection available online to support research and scholarship and to inform and educate the public. Certain works of art, as well as the photographs of those works of art, may be protected by copyright, trademark, or related interests not owned by the NCMA. The responsibility for ascertaining whether any such rights exist and for obtaining all other necessary permissions remains with the applicant. To request images and/or permissions from the NCMA, please complete our online request form.