From the beginning of his career twenty-five years ago the figure of Mark di Suvero has loomed large on the artistic landscape. Indeed, he is one of the few sculptors of his generation to have become something of a myth. In i960 he made a dramatic debut at the Green Gallery with an exhibition of oversized sculptures. In the same year he was in a near-fatal elevator accident which for some time dramatically limited the range of his artistic activity. By the late Sixties, however, he was back in full possession of his powers, making sculptures on an even bolder scale than before. In the early Seventies he caused a sensation by going into self-exile, to protest the Vietnam War. And when he returned in 1975 he was greeted by a triumphant retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum. All of this by now has helped to confer upon di Suvero a legendary status. Even his media image is that of the artist-superman—bare-chested, hard-hatted, working the controls of a crane or battling a resistant work-in-progress.

The Whitney Museum’s retrospective was really the crest of the wave. It marked the return of the artist-exile at the moment when America was ending its commitments in Southeast Asia. It also presented di Suvero as both the legitimate heir of David Smith in the tradition of constructed sculpture and a younger, brasher rival to the Englishman Anthony Caro, whose own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art had closed only a