The Sculpture Garden:
Raising a Crop of Difficult Beauty

Picture a private sculpture garden in late winter with nobody around. The cool New England light falls on a sinuous piece of bronze, eleven feet long, artfully positioned in an evergreen hedge. The rough green needles provide contrast to the smooth gray metal and hide the structural supports creating the illusion that the sculpture floats. Titled Expansion, the sculptor Gio Pomodoro wished it to play with light. And it does.

In front of another hedge is a bronze titled Family Going for a Walk by the British sculptor Kenneth Armitage. The figures lean into the wind that keens around the corner of the eighteenth-century farmhouse, now empty, its owners having gone to New York City or perhaps Europe where they are probably at this very moment visiting an artist’s studio or a museum.

And so, the sculptures stay put, awaiting the arrival of spring when people will return, parties will be held once again in the barn, and visitors will wander the grounds, entranced to find at the far end of the property a sculpture titled Arch Brown by John Chamberlain made of crushed auto parts, its enameled colors bright against the gray outcropping on which it rests.

The sculpture garden in the above scenario belonged to Burton and Emily Tremaine and was located in rural Madison, Connecticut. Burton had purchased the property before his marriage to Emily in 1945. It consisted of a colonial house, outbuildings, and an old barn that had been renovated with stone fireplaces at both ends. Dark and drafty, the barn was unsuited for art. As a result, the Tremaines began to make changes to accommodate their growing collection including sculpture, which demanded not just space, but the right space.

Their partner was the architect Philip Johnson who had recently designed his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Sometimes he was hired outright, but at other times he simply made suggestions. In a speech at the opening of the Tremaine exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1984, Johnson said, “All I remember is we’d sit around in the evening and they’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a swimming pool here or a place to put pictures over there, or this living room is really awfully small, isn’t it?’ And so the pleasantest days an architect can spend are with friends, are with people who are sympathetic to your ideas.”¹

As he had done with his own house, Johnson used glass to open up the barn filling it with light. He reduced the size of one of the fireplaces to create more space, leaving the rough-hewn siding and wooden beams. He also added to the house a large glass room with a bluestone floor contiguous with the outside terrace. More of an outdoors person than Emily, Burton loved the place. Each year when autumn came, he wanted to stay instead of returning to New York.

The renovated barn was spacious enough to house large works. One of the first to be placed there was Raoul Hague’s Swamp Pepperwood. Born in Istanbul, Hague had turned to wood in the late 1940s creating sensuous forms, in this case a torso, taking advantage of the natural grain. By the fireplace stood Hilary Heron’s Girl with Pigtails carved from oak. There was also Neil Jenney’s painting Husband and Wife, which led to frequent discussion among the visiting Tremaine grandchildren as to what the argument portrayed in the painting was all about.

Heron was an Irish sculptor who sometimes imbued her work with an ancient Celtic quality as can be seen in the cross-hatched pigtails. Four and a half feet tall, Girl with Pigtails was small enough to be moved around; occasionally it was placed near the door as if she were looking out. Claes Oldenburg’s Street Head I hung from the barn’s high ceiling like a giant wasp’s nest. Made of papier-mâché, Street Head wouldn’t have lasted a minute outside. Because of its fragility, Oldenburg gave the Tremaines some jars of paint and a small brush for touch-ups.

Size was also a problem. It was prohibitively expensive to set a massive piece in place. Furthermore, a sculpture in the country was very different from one in the city. This can be seen with Gyre that was placed for a while in Penn Center before the Tremaines purchased it. Not only was the space different but so too was the energy. Surrounded by skyscrapers, it seemed to droop, whereas in Madison it seemed to bloom. In a speech in 1964, Tremaine told the audience that she had wanted to include a large sculpture for their consideration. “But to bring it would present as difficult a problem as Mark di Suvero did last week when he wanted us to install a new piece of his work that includes a 24-foot beam.”

Yet the Tremaines were willing to put up with the difficulty when a work was worth it. Such was the case for Robert Irwin’s glowing disk Untitled made of plastic on cast acrylic with electric lights, for which the Tremaines rebuilt their foyer. Of their efforts, Gene Baro, an art journalist, wrote in Vogue Magazine in February 15, 1969, “A secret of this success is that the Tremaines have in general a taste for works that create environment. But they are also alert to the art that requires special handling in order to come into its own. They are restructuring a room in their Connecticut house to accommodate the peculiar demands for lighting and space of a Robert Irwin painting they have recently acquired. Few collectors would be willing to go to this proper trouble.”

The only other art in the foyer was a sculpture by Jesus Rafael Soto and a drawing by Walter de Maria that he had given to the Tremaines in thanks for permitting him to use their Arizona ranch, the Bar T Bar, for the prototype of his Lightning Field (now owned by the Dia Arts Foundation). In an interview for Archives of American Art, the art dealer Leo Castelli observed that for certain artists, “nothing but the mountain or desert is big enough to place some work of theirs into.” Not put off by the demand for vast space, the Tremaines revamped the idea of what a sculpture garden was supposed to look like and provided a desert waiting for a thunderstorm.