Alain lived large: Gregarious, epicurean, touchy, difficult, jolly, complex, learned, and silly; giving and greedy in equal measure; as voracious intellectually and culturally as he was in pleasures of the table; snobbish but never excluding anyone unfairly; relating to working people who might otherwise, indeed, feel overlooked; Jewish and secular; he was a character of Proustian multi-dimensionality. The way he faced off illness in his last years, with a lust for life in the face of mortality, making sure to pack every moment with pleasure and meaning, will remain a moral touchstone for anyone who witnessed it. Even when his full and open personality was at its most testing, he was totally adorable and impacted an extraordinary array of people of different ages and activities. He lived and breathed the arts, and most of the people he gathered about him were visual artists, musicians, and intellectuals. But they could include students and down-on-their-luck artists as well as powerhouses of influence and prestige, all valued as individuals and rubbing shoulders in the unique latter-day salon that the Kirili loft in downtown Manhattan became in legendary evenings of free improvisation and other forms of jazz, world music, or spoken word.

If I were more prudent, I’d stick here some insights and anecdotes of the fun and the friendship that Alain brought into my life. There is so much to recount—his maverick personality is a gift to any writer. Acknowledging his plentiful largesse is reason enough to recuse myself from a professional opinion of his artistic worth. I have no doubt that this Brooklyn Rail tribute will abound with testimony to his warmth, his solicitudes, his ability to connect artists in France and the United States, his deep knowledge and insights into art history, his pivotal role in bringing music and dance before an art world audience, his mentorship of young artists, and so on. Everyone will acknowledge, I’m sure, that his overarching commitment to sculpture bound all the rest together. But the actual product of that labor really needs fresh attention, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to resist this opportunity to offer it. It might even be, in fact, that his capacity for friendship, his busyness on many cultural fronts, and an avuncular personality that rubbed some people the wrong way, all distracted from just how strong, rich, resonant, and accomplished his actual achievements were in the studio, the smithery, the forge.

Kirili didn’t train in an art academy but studied privately with a Korean calligraphy master, learned on the fly with artisans who helped in the production of works, and—in his own telling—did his MFA by talking with downtown friends in the 1970s art scene. Conversing with the likes of Dorothea Rockburne on a SoHo street corner was better, in his estimation, than enrolling at Yale. And as for critical theory, he had been friends in Paris with the Tel Quel crowd, numbering Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes as mentors and supporters. Again: the university of life. The significance of all this for his work is that he was born as an artist and maker. His scope— relatively free of prevailing fashions—was global, deeply historical, and as close to jazz as to art. His thinking was innately abstract and his notions of form literally hands on.

In 2004, I curated an exhibition of Kirili’s sculpture at the New York Studio School. Rather than concentrate on one period or genre or his latest efforts within what was already a broad spectrum of achievement, I was determined, within the limited space available, to provide a chronological overview going right back to an early work from around the time he started to divide his year between Paris and New York. This was a similar piece, with the same title, to one held by the Museum of Modern Art: India Curve (1978). In its post- minimal restraint—a thread of steel wire suspended from the wall finding its way to a terracotta block on the ground—it was a somewhat aloof and intellectual ancestor of the more overtly exuberant, fulsome shapes and elaborations that would follow, with their insistent material presence, rich color, and sometimes monumental scale. But not so aloof, actually. What bound all the shapes and styles in the eclectic, whistle-stop tour of a then 30- year career on view at the Studio School, an evolution told in just ten works, was the overriding importance of gesture. Whether slight or mammoth, purely linear or demanding to be seen “in the round,” and whether a unique piece or an installation or grouping of pieces, a Kirili sculpture has striking singularity defined by gesture. Time and intention are frozen into their form. The originating hand, the impulse, the feeling behind the form, the feeling in and through the form, all constitute a vital presence. He was an “expressionist” in a pure sense, in a way that would make sense for Matisse, and not in any vulgar sense of the imposition of the artist’s suffering or overly examined soul. On the contrary, he gave expression to higher, collective experiences at a remove from quotidian individualism. The artist’s sensibility was as honed as its products.

Abstract could certainly mean linguistic: his “Commandments” series, like the example from 1980 in my exhibition, lent by the Jewish Museum and taking up the back half of the gallery, was a field of 17 elements, each around 15 inches high, in forged iron that has the aura of some kind of prehistoric stone circle, while also recalling an alphabet in the singular, yet schematic and consistent, complementary forms of each pictograph. There is a similar work on permanent display outside the Orangerie in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris where Kirili had famously curated outdoor displays of modern and contemporary American sculpture.

I have to retell a story about the installation of the show, which speaks volumes about Kirili in so many ways. The building staff had already complained about how heavy and unwieldy one piece was, requiring three of them, wearing protective belts, to maneuver it into place in my initial layout of the show. This was a vertical, bifurcated slab of solid iron, Summation (1981). Alain had left me to install alone and then came in to give his approval or correct as required. (The seating plan for guests at the dinner received more agonizing and attention!) Only one work needed to move, Alain decided, and of course it was Summation. Oh boy, I’ll have to summon the super. Not at all, says Alain, who grabs his metal totem and in three or four defiant sumo moves, traverses the gallery with it, finding its optimum position. The physicality of his work, the “incarnatedness,” as he liked to call it, of his abstracted forms, was a true extension of his own compact, full, life- embracing personhood. It made it all the more tragic for him and his loved ones to see his body so diminished, so ravaged by cancer and heart disease and anemia in his last years. But his resistance to mortality, astonishing his doctors, was born of the vitality on display in happier times.

I gave some bias in my show to my own favorite idiom of Alain’s, the squat terracotta slabs punctured by tools at hand and left there as elements of the finished sculpture. Or sometimes it would simply be one colored clay thrust into a cube of contrasting color and fired. An extensive series of these terracotta pieces, where more overtly than ever gesture defined form, were titled “Ivresse” (drunkenness), evocations of the exalted, yet all-too-bodily sensation that personified not just his sculpture but his aesthetic philosophy.

Works in this series had been on display in the first show of his that I saw, curated by my college friend William Jeffett at the Sainsbury Center in East Anglia, England, in 1994. I’d actually been introduced to the Kirilis by another Courtauld classmate, Kenneth Wayne and his wife the musicologist Olivia Mattis, in Paris the previous year, and it was my offer to host an evening in my London apartment with sculptor friends that initiated the “banquet years” of our subsequent friendship. When I stayed in Alain’s studio one hot summer in 2017, he’d left examples of this series on stands in what was likely a curated welcome. The solid blocks of the “Ivresse” series, meanwhile, found ultimate expression in magnificent monuments he created to France’s Second World War resistance movement, including one in Grenoble specifically dedicated to women of the resistance.

In the period following his Studio School show many new, rich veins of sculptural exploration opened up. We see his sensibility meandering between wall and floor, open and closed form, linear and volumetric expression, bold color and no color. And still everything is bound together by his unmistakable, protean primacy of gesture.

Africa, and the arts of the African diaspora, were central to his aesthetic, but in a way that miraculously avoided colonialism, despite Alain’s fearless plunging in where his gut took him (or his ear: his lifelong investment in jazz came from hearing Sidney Bechet play in his parents’ kitchen late one night after all the restaurants had closed and his parents took the hungry musician home with them). Sarah Lewis, then an intern working with Robert Storr who recommended her to the project and who is now of course the leading voice behind the Vision & Justice project at Harvard where she teaches, contributed a deft essay to the Studio School catalogue that delved into Kirili’s rapport with Africa, a subject Maria Mitchell has also explored in tribute panels to Alain at the Rail and at artcritical. Rather than mimic or appropriate the look or feel of African artifacts—although as a student and collector of African art, the forms inevitably permeated his visual thinking, along with all the other stimuli in the unceasing curriculum of stimulation that was his life—Alain engaged with African smithery directly, making sculpture with acknowledged masters in Mali in a back and forth of artists getting work done. Segou (2004), a grouping of three vertical motifs, spectacularly nestled by the circular staircase in the Studio School (previously Whitney Museum) entrance foyer, is permeated with the fruits of his Mali collaborations. Fifteen years later Kirili titled his first show with Susan Inglett Gallery “Who’s Afraid of Verticality” (emulating Barnett Newman, whom he revered), and at a ceremony in his Tribeca loft at which he was awarded the highest rank in the French Republic’s Ordre des arts et des lettres in his penultimate year, Kirili spoke of verticality in ways that somehow insinuated it into the company of such abstractions as liberté, égalité, and fraternité, melding aesthetics and civics in a uniquely, provocatively Alain Kirili-kind of way.

David Cohen

A Tribute to Alain Kirili (1946–2021)
Edited by Carter Ratcliff and Robert C. Morgan , Published n the Brooklyn Rail, 2021