Artists: How Do They View Their Work?

Ronald Bladen is today one of the foremost sculptors of the Minimalist style. The Minimalists implicitly idealized the contemporary industrial landscape. While Pop artists responded to the mass-media images of American culture, the Minimalists responded to the forms of the urban environment. They used industrial materials and processes much as the Pop artists used commonplace media images and advertising techniques.

A Canadian, Bladen studied at the Vancouver School of Art and at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. During WW II he worked as a ship welder while devoting his free time to painting and gaining a knowledge of steel construction, which he would later apply in his massive sculptures. By 1962 Bladen's bas-relief painting already showed an affinity to sculptural form; by 1965 his transition to sculpture was complete when he exhibited three pieces at New York University's Loeb Student Center. One of these pieces "The Rockers" proved seminal to his later sculptural ideas because it represented Bladen's first "attempt to capture space." His most recent works are a sculpture for Hammarskjold Plaza in new york City and a place, "Untitled", to be placed in front of the Henry Wallace Agriculture Building in Des Moines, Iowa.
Part of the National Affairs Series: Art in America Today - A Public Matter.