On Ibram Lassaw's Drawings of the 1940's

Denise Lassaw

As you look at Ibram Lassaw's body of work, a series of patterns that flow from one medium to another become obvious. I use the word "pattern" because my father's thought, both intellectual and artistic, was drawn to the living organic patterns of material and ideas. There are patterns of solid and void, patterns involving deep space, stretching the full spectrum from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic. These patterns of organization and relationship include and involve the organic and in-organic, from sand flies to solar systems.

My father loved the infinite complexities of space and both his three dimensional sculpture and his two dimensional works, including his drawings, play in this same realm. Although he was best known as a sculptor, from the very beginning of his artistic explorations he was intimate with the pencil. He loved to use a velvet black soft-lead pencil. Rubbed gently it could be smudged, pressed very hard it gave a coal-shinny line that bit into the paper. If you look carefully at these drawings, you can see that the forms, the over-all patterns, are not intended to be flat, but have dark ridges that are potentially structural.

Lassaw insisted that he did not make drawings for sculpture, which is partially true in some decades and completely true in others. In some of these drawings from the 1940's you can see that he worked out ideas for acrylic sheet sculptures, noting light densities, colors and the intersections of thick sheets of Plexiglas. The drawings are active thoughts, symbolic of potential three-dimensional works designed to be cut on the jigsaw and fitted together. In very few cases does any drawing completely resemble any living sculpture. He once told me that he made some drawings after the sculpture was created, not before it. This was in reference to a detailed drawing of one of his box sculptures.

These drawings from the 1940's play with the same patterns that would later actualize themselves in the sculpture of the 50's. It was a problem with material that kept the solid and void forms in two dimensions. He attempted to create these forms using wire and plaster but the structures were unstable and essentially weak. Milky Way, 1950, is the first really successful sculpture in the new direction. The material solution to the problem came about when Lassaw learned to weld in the army during World War II, but he was not able to afford welding equipment until 1951--twenty years after becoming a serious artist--when he made his first sculpture sale, Procyon, 1950. After that, the patterns that you see here leapt off the page and learned to dance in space.

The first welded sculptures were literally drawings in space--wire armatures bent by hand and then covered with molten bronze--so that there were two steps to the process, one spontaneous and one structural. In this aspect they were like the drawings where a form is fleshed out by additional modeling with the black pencil. In the 1960's Lassaw developed a truly direct and spontaneous method of working that some people call the "drip" method, although the term is technically inaccurate. With this method the first "act" was the finished form.

My father continued to draw nearly every day of his life until December 28, when he made his last drawing. Its thin lines and lightly pressed colors reflect how his eyes were failing him completely. He died on Dec. 30, 2003.

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Denise Lassaw is Ibram Lassaw's daughter and archivist. She grew up in the studio, where she learned welding and philosophy, and observed her father working daily.