COMMUNITY

“Trinity” by Richard Lippold (Photo: Jack Heller)

Readers may wonder how topics are selected for this monthly Artists of the Abbey series. This happens in various ways: it may stem from what The Current staff finds to be “current” or seasonal. Some artists have been researched and profiled when a trove of information about them, old or new, surfaces in the Archives, or when mention of them is found in books or the popular press. In the case of living artists, the opportunity might arise for us to interview them in person here on campus if they visit. Such a situation provided us with in-depth conversations with Adam Heller (September 2021) and Bob Kluge (September 2022), both men having traveled from nearby Connecticut. Adam was in-residence for a week during which time he updated the requisite inscriptions, both lettered names and numbered dates, on the slate tombstones in our monastic cemetery. Bob had simply planned a cordial call on the monks last spring, along with his wife Gail, but ended up regaling us with anecdotes about his blacksmithing projects at PAS and filling us in on the backstory of his career in “heavy metal.”

Inspiration for this month’s subject, Richard Lippold (1915-2002), came about in a different way. His name has always been on our short-list of artists since his singular sculpture at Portsmouth is the cause of much curiosity, speculation and interest among students and families, visitors, and art historians for whom the trip to Aquidneck Island constitutes a pilgrimage. Two recent last-minute visitors, this October 24, both architects, provided the impetus for this story to finally see the light of day. While not art historians, per se, Louisa Hutton and Matthias Sauerbruch of Berlin are well-versed and were excited by what they were seeing over the three hours they spent in the church and monastery (i.e. Durer, Della Robbia, Nakashima …and Lippold). Their pilgrimage began that morning on Long Island and brought them to Portsmouth upon the recommendation of their friends at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As husband-and-wife architects, they were keen to experience the built legacy left behind by Pietro Belluschi, especially in his collaboration with Lippold whose own legacy here is a gift that never stops giving. The couple was due in Cambridge that evening but were surely late in arriving, not wanting to leave Portsmouth so quickly.

Br. Basil Piette lighting candles at Vespers

Lippold’s wire sculpture, titled Trinity, is contemporaneous with the 1960 abbey church. It is a site-specific sculpture, meaning that it was designed for this space and not meant to be moved elsewhere. It will never be de-accessioned, sold, and reinstalled in a Las Vegas gambling casino, say, or in a ski lodge or a (large) private home. Lippold is known as one of the preeminent site-specific artists of the 20th century in this country. An excellent website maintained by the Society of Architectural Historians explains that “the church is also notable for its fittings by major craftsmen at a time of revival for modern design in the liturgical arts.”* (See also the topic of liturgical arts in the Major Superiors report elsewhere in this issue). Of the Trinity, it goes on to say that, “most conspicuous is Richard Lippold’s gossamer environmental sculpture of gold and silver rods and wire in gold and silver. A small figure of Christ floats above the altar in this shiny web, which radiates outward above the congregation as a shimmering, slightly trembling presence in the colored light and shadow of the space.”

Having said all that, how many times have we been warned by parents and teachers over the years to “never say never”? Although Portsmouth’s Lippold is safely in situ, his 5-ton, 190-foot-long, 39-foot-high “site-specific” sculpture titled Orpheus and Apollo has gone missing in Manhattan. Designed for Lincoln Center’s Promenade of David Geffen Hall (formerly Philharmonic Hall and Avery Fisher Hall), it was removed in 2014 and put into storage despite being considered his most important work in New York, admired by many as a masterpiece, and an integral part of the Lincoln Center’s landmark central plaza. Finally, on April 7, 2021, The New York Times reported that the piece “will be suspended in flight once again” in an article headlined, Lippold’s Soaring Lincoln Center Sculpture Lands at La Guardia. An architecture critic was quoted in the story as saying, “There are not a lot of places you can put a 40-foot-high sculpture” weighing five tons.

Despite the loss of Orpheus and Apollo on the island of Manhattan, which Lippold called home in the 1940’s, still remaining there are two other of the three of Lippold’s major New York works. In 1957, the noted architect Philip Johnson (designer of a modern addition to St. Anselm Abbey in Washington, D.C., another English Benedictine house), invited Lippold to create a sculpture for the Four Seasons Restaurant in his Seagram Building. Located in the bar and apparently untitled, it consisted of 1,500 bronze rods of uneven lengths. Of this installation, Johnson said that it was “so tied up with its space that you couldn’t pull it out of there. If you did, both the sculpture. and the architecture would suffer.” In mid-2016 the storied restaurant closed. Although all of its furnishings were auctioned off, the bronze rods are safe because, being landmarked with Johnson’s architecture, they cannot be altered or removed.

Interestingly, Lippold rates only a single mention among 347 pages in the 1979 First Vintage Books Edition of The City Observed: New York, A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan. Tucked at the very end of the six paragraphs on the Seagram Building, the author, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic at the time of The New York Times, adds, “The wood-paneled bar [of The Four Seasons restaurant] with its Lippold sculpture is at once warm and dignified.” His 1960 Flight is in the Vanderbilt Avenue lobby of the former Pan Am (now Met Life) Building. Lippold’s friend and the architect of the Abbey Church, Pietro Belluschi, is one of the three architects-of-record for the original 1963 Pan Am Building, along with Walter Gropius and Richard Roth.

As for Portsmouth’s Trinity, I shall never forget the first time I ever saw it during my initial visit one summer on a side trip upstate from Matunuck. It continues to mesmerize me and to draw my focus and thoughts upwards. In the 50th Anniversary Bulletin from February, 1977, in an article titled Art and Architecture at Portsmouth Abbey, John Walker, former Director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., puts into words the thoughts of many:

“Shafts of light, falling from an opening above the altar, irradiate a crucifix hanging high above the celebrant. This crucifix, supported by myriads of thinly drawn gold wires, strung in a pattern designed by Richard Lippold, seems at High Mass to float on clouds of incense rising from the thurible swung below. To see this marvelous work of art is an extraordinary visual experience. It is as though God’s grace, transmitted along a web of shining beams of light, is drawn to the altar by the head and outstretched arms of the crucified Christ. When the church is filled with boys and monks singing, the effect is sublime and unforgettable.”

Lippold’s “Trinity” above the altar

* For information on Portsmouth Abbey’s architecture, see this site 
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