Ursula von Rydingsvard, Who Carved Monumental Cedar Sculptures, Dies at 84

Ursula von Rydingsvard, the sculptor who answered Minimalism's welded steel with monumental cedar forms, died in New York on Tuesday after a battle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 84, according to the New York Times.

Von Rydingsvard built her towering sculptures primarily from 4x4 cedar beams. Cut, stacked and reworked, the beams produced forms that appear to undulate and shift — organic masses that at times looked alive, spinning through the air like mysterious animals on the move.

Why cedar, and why 4x4s?

When von Rydingsvard turned to cedar in the mid-1970s, Minimalism dominated New York sculpture. Sculptors welded steel and other metals into imposing forms that loomed above viewers. She rejected both the theory-driven approach and its cold sensibility. "There was no sexiness, and there wasn't even any humanity," she once told the curator Mark Rosenthal, who organized a 2018 exhibition of her work at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

She did learn to weld. The method was "more frustrating than imaginable," she told the critic Jason Farago. Her workaround: applying a hot rod to a sheet of steel and letting it form a droplet on contact. "The heat made the sheet organic in a beautiful, delicate way," she said. "That I liked."

The painter Michael Mulhern supplied her first cedar, purchasing many 4x4s for her. She took the wood to a metalworking studio and sliced through it, delighting in obtaining "forms that felt like the earth, or felt fleshy."

The beams were not negotiable. Tree trunks, she often clarified, were a no go — they retain their form too well. "These are neutral. They don't ask anything of you. They're like a blank piece of paper," she said of the 4x4s.

Cedar was not her only material. Her arsenal came to include silk, hair and cow intestines, all sculpted into large-scale objects that never felt domineering despite their size.

What did critics see in the work?

Writing in Art in America in 2018, critic Rachel Wetzler observed: "The wood's standardized format offsets the primordial qualities of her sculptures, which loosely suggest, among other things, fossils, rocky canyons, or cresting waves; her best works tend to exploit the animating tension between the underlying gridded structure of the stacked wood and the ragged, irregular forms she unearths."

Some critics read biography into the work. Zakopane (1987), one of her most famous pieces, features sacs of wood beneath spiky protrusions; its title names the Polish town where her mother was born. Von Rydingsvard herself insisted the connection to her life was only implicit. "I have this feeling that I have this strong link to a past that I never experienced, the peasant farmer past," she told Farago. "Not that I want to experience it; I never asked for it. But it sort of runs through my blood, whether I want it or not."

A displaced childhood, a late start

Von Rydingsvard was born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father, both peasant farmers. The Nazis conscripted her father and forced him into a labor camp. After the war, the family lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving in 1950 to Plainville, Connecticut, where her mother worked in a restaurant and her father in a factory. She later recalled that in Plainville there was "no such thing as an artist."

She earned a bachelor's degree at the University of New Hampshire and a master's at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, then moved to Oakland, California, with her first husband, Milton von Rydingsvard, with whom she had a daughter, Ursula Anne. After divorcing in 1973, she moved to New York with her daughter and enrolled in Columbia University's art program.

Money stayed scarce. She lived off food stamps in an apartment on 125th Street in Harlem that she described as "dangerous." Yet she also found being a single mother in her early 30s liberating — finally, she could do what she wanted. At Columbia she heard the critic Max Kozloff lecture on Marcel Duchamp and studied with the art historian Meyer Schapiro and the artist George Sugarman. After graduating in 1975, she bought a SoHo loft and set up a studio. In 1981 she moved to Brooklyn, where she remained for the rest of her career. In 1985 she married the neuroscientist Paul Greengard, who died in 2019.

Scale, and its limits

Her sculptures have been shown widely, from the Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England. Exposure fed ambition, and the commissions grew larger. In 2013 she premiered Ona beneath the oculus of Brooklyn's Barclay Center: a rippling array of cedar blocks weighing 12,000 pounds and standing 19 feet tall, its title translating from the Polish for "she" or "her."

She welcomed touch. "I would actually love people to touch it," she told the New York Times at Ona's debut. "The acid from fingers polishes it, like the Buddhas getting their bellies rubbed." But she worried about preservation — she wanted her work to feel permanent and immovable. "I don't want my work to rot," she told Farago. "Even after I'm gone." With her cedar monuments still standing in Brooklyn and beyond, that wish now falls to the institutions that hold them.