Joel Shapiro

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Paradoxically, the Holocaust seems to have given new life to Joel Shapiro's sculptures. This is perhaps most evident in the intense color and disturbing forms of the glorious drawings, meant to be preliminary studies but strong in their own right. Shapiro's sculpture had begun to look increasingly like a dry, formal exercise in which the minimum of simple geometrical means no longer worked to maximum expressive effect. Without the former tension between abstraction and figuration, the sculptures seemed dogmatically static, that is, they read neither as evocative mannequins nor as pure constructions, but as mannered versions of both.

But then Shapiro received a commission from …