George Rickey, Sculptor, 95

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George Rickey, a sculptor widely known for his abstract kinetic
sculptures, died on Wednesday, July 17, 2002, at his home in St. Paul,
Minnesota, at the age of 95.

Mr. Rickey was one of two major 20th-century artists to make movement a
central interest in sculpture. Alexander Calder, whose mobiles Mr.
Rickey encountered in the 1930's, was the other. After starting out as a
painter, Mr. Rickey began to produce sculptures with moving parts in the
early 50's, but it was not until a decade later that he achieved the
kind of simplicity and scale that would make him an important figure in
contemporary art. At that point, he began to produce tall
stainless-steel sculptures with long, spearlike arms attached to central
posts. Rotating on precision bearings devised by the artist, the arms
were balanced so that slight breezes would cause them to sweep like
giant scissor blades, tracing graceful arcs or circles against the sky.

In the ensuing years, Mr. Rickey set in motion all kinds of geometric
configurations -- wavering stacks or grids of flat squares, shifting
open rectangles, zigzagging beams, spinning shell-like forms. His work
was often compared with Calder's, but while Calder's abstract mobiles
had playful, organic qualities related to Surrealism, Mr. Rickey's
geometric forms and machinelike engineering harked back to
Constructivism. That was the early-20th-century Russian movement about
which Mr. Rickey wrote a scholarly book ("Constructivism: Origins and
Evolution," George Barziller, 1967).

His work was also in step with new sculpture trends toward abstract
simplification. Unlike the Minimalists, however, whose elementary
structures tended to bore or mystify many viewers, the fascinating
movements of Mr. Rickey's sculptures appealed to a wide audience, and he
received commissions from all over the world to create public works.

Mr. Rickey was born on June 6, 1907, in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 the
family moved to Scotland, where his father, an engineer for the Singer
Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. While studying modern
history at Oxford, Mr. Rickey also took courses in painting and drawing
at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went
to Paris, France, to study art at the Académie Lhote and at the Académie
Moderne, where he worked under the Modernist painters Fernand Léger and
Amédée Ozenfant.

After teaching history briefly at Groton School in Massachusetts, Mr.
Rickey devoted himself to painting full time. He had his first solo
exhibition at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in New York, New York, in 1933, and
a year later he moved to New York and set up a studio. His early
paintings reflected the influences of Cézanne and Social Realism. During
the late 30's, Mr. Rickey taught art at several schools, including
Olivet College and Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Knox College in
Illinois and Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Rickey served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was assigned
to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry,
an experience that reawakened earlier interests in science and
technology. After the war, he resumed his peripatetic teaching career. A
year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of
Design in the late 1940's was decisive, for it was there that he
seriously began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form
and movement. In 1949, while working as an associate professor at
Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture using window
glass.

In 1960 Mr. Rickey moved to East Chatham, New York, which remained his
home base until the end of his life. He retired from teaching in 1966
after five years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York,
but continued to make sculpture and to travel incessantly. To keep up
with his public commissions and exhibitions, he maintained studios in
Berlin, West Germany, and in Santa Barbara, California. His last
sculpture -- his tallest, at 57 feet 1 inch -- was installed at the
Hyogo Museum in Japan on March 30.

It is a curious fact of contemporary art history that Mr. Rickey left no
significant artistic heirs. Perhaps because movement in art is now found
mainly on video screens, no sculptor has adopted his innovations with
comparably persuasive ambition or elegance.