Sugarman is a modernist of the type whose exuberance has come to seem almost old-fashioned. Until , that is one stumbles on the work itself. This, quite literally, can happen. His low-lying polychrome wooden floor pieces of the 1960s are boobytraps for the serious souls with their heads in black clouds, just as his exfoliating metal ribbon works of more recent years are bramble bushes for those used to safely circumambulating four-square machine-shop blocks. Outside his former downtown gang – that of Ron Bladen, Al Held, and Yvonne Rainer among others – the aesthetic company he keeps includes Stuart Davis and Fernand Léger, both of whom were convinced that vitality required no justification, only economical and contagious expression.
ROBERT STORR
Curator of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art
Excerpt from:
Storr, Robert, “George on My Mind,” George Sugarman, 1998, Hunter College of the City of New York, p. 6
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Stuart Davis Quotes from Sketchbook:
“One must learn to see the space not simply the boundaries of objects. One must see the ‘shapes’ of the space not the shapes of the objects that occur in it.”
Sketchbook 13, 1932
“The color is never the cause of the interest because it is only the means by which ideal space relations are made visible.”
Sketchbook 13, 1932
“A Line is a sweeping generalization regarding the relative positions of an infinite number of static points.”
“Nothing is more Abstract than a Line and nothing is more Real and Concrete.”
6 June 1940, Reel 2
“A Line must always be thought of as a place where something is going on.”
13 July 1940, Reel 2