‘Storm King Wavefield’ (2007-08) by Maya Lin

How many New Yorkers know that Eden is only an hour away? Storm King Art Center, a sculpture park draped across 500 acres of the Hudson Valley, is a paradise of greenery and painted steel. The fields, forests, hillsides and lawns harbour some 100 sculptures, from towering behemoths like Alexander Liberman’s “Adonai” to Nam June Paik’s humble, grass-encrusted faces peering up from the soil. Works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson and Mark di Suvero nestle among trees or soar over meadows.

In May, the park inaugurates Maya Lin’s mystical earthwork “Storm King Wavefield”. The designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, has transformed an 11-acre gravel pit into a field of green waves, as if the ocean had migrated to the mountains. The crests, coated in clover and grass, rise up 15 feet before dipping into tufted green valleys. Visitors can wander over and between the swells, scrambling up to panoramic views or secreting themselves within the crevices.

‘Iliad’ (1974-76) by Alexander Liberman

Lin has conjured a new topography, expanding the estate’s physical and psychological boundaries. But such spectacular ambitions result in a tame, pastoral enclave. In the weeks before its official opening, the area remained a meditative retreat; when children begin scampering across the slopes, it may feel more like a wobbly playground.

“Wavefield” lies in a far corner of the grounds, close to Storm King’s reigning masterpiece: Andy Goldsworthy’s drystone “Wall”, which snakes around trees and across meadows with rococo abandon, dipping down into a pond to emerge on the other side and straggle up a hill. Both “Wall” and “Wavefield” come to grips with the landscape, but Goldsworthy’s work is at once humbler and more affecting. He harvested rocks from the property and stacked them so as to reveal subtle shifts of altitude and vegetation. Winter daubs the rustic border with delicate skeins of white; autumn garnishes it with scraps of red, yellow and orange.

From Lin’s heaving meadow, the wall leads to a slope impaled with Richard Serra’s monumental “Schunnemunk Fork”, in which four massive walls of steel jut out of the hillside like a giant’s razor blades. Yellow wildflowers and tall grasses cluster beneath the great black plates, softening and reinforcing their impact at the same time.

It’s just a short trot from the low-slung Serras to a field where Mark di Suvero’s gargantuan structures soar. Set on Storm King’s expansive meadows, di Suvero’s muscular shapes lighten and stretch, assuming the grace of swift animals in repose, the delicacy of gothic traceries.

“Pyramidian”, welded and bolted, like most of di Suvero’s sculptures, out of industrial I-beams, is a pyramid without the bulk or opacity of stone. It’s open, transparent, sensitive to weather. A cable hanging from the vertex grasps a single horizontal beam, a massive body-like form that twists slowly in the wind, threatening to fall at any moment. Yet the work has none of Serra’s implicit hostility: it muses on human vulnerability.

Nearby is “Beethoven’s Quartet”, a reddish contraption holding up a colossal brushed steel pretzel, or musical clef, or abstract arabesque. Touching is generally forbidden, but di Suvero encourages people to pick up one of the rubber-headed mallets lying on the ground and whack the art. The slow-dying vibrations thrum into the surroundings, validating the sculptor’s observation that “Storm King is a place in musical harmony.”

Storm King opened to the public in 1960, when monumental sculpture was just beginning to stake its claim to the landscape. It was founded by Ralph E Ogden and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, joint owners of Star Expansion Company. These makers of industrial fasteners bought the swath of valley between swelling mountains, a sweeping outdoor gallery between natural walls.

In 1967, Ogden purchased 13 sculptures from the estate of David Smith, an acquisition that forged the future identity of Storm King. But the abiding genius of the place is Isamu Noguchi, whose 40-ton granite “Momo Taro” (1977-1978) crowns the summit. The sculpture strikes the perfect balance between roughness and gloss, pocket and protuberance, daintiness and brawn. Brute rock mellows into velvety smoothness, recapitulating the process of nature being shaped and tamed, of order infringing on chaos.

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Details
Storm King Art Center
Mountainville, NY 10953; tel +1 845 534 3115
www.stormking.org