The creator of some of the biggest, most prominent, and sometimes controversial sculptures of the last half-century, Richard Serra, died on March 26 at the age of 85. Serra spearheaded a change in the nature of sculpture, from small items that stood on pedestals to installations that fill cavernous galleries or anchor vast outdoor sites. Serra burst into the public consciousness after his "Tilted Arc" was installed in the plaza of a federal building in Manhattan in 1981. The sculpture made it difficult for workers to cross the plaza, and in 1985 some 13,000 people signed a petition demanding that it be removed. The work was denounced at a public hearing asgarbage, an irritant, and a calculated offense.
In 1982, Mr. Serra told an interviewer that art was the scapegoat for political uptightness in the country. He found the idea of what this country consumes as art reprehensible.
The Manhattan sculpture was taken away by the General Services Administration in 1989. Most of the world's best art museums have his pieces in their collections. Mr. Serra told Rose that as a young man he wanted to be respected for his work and not for his personality.
It was raised in fear and deceit.
The Serra family migrated from Spain to San Francisco. Serra's work "The Drowned and the Saved" was exhibited in Pulheim, Germany, and he wrote in the accompanying catalogue that when he was five years old, he asked his mother "Who are we, where are we from?" She said that if she told me, she would never tell anyone else.
Mr. Serra was told not to admit who he was, not to admit what he was.
He began to draw as a way of competing with his older brother, Tony, who was taller and stronger.
He told Rose that his father took him to the shipyard to watch the launch of a vessel. Mr. Serra went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied English literature, and then to UC-Santa Barbara, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1961. Mr. liked the scale of the rivet gang and the sound of it all.
He was offered a scholarship to attend Yale, where he met some of the most successful painters of the 20th century. He received a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1962 and a master of fine arts degree two years later. He settled in New York in 1966 after traveling through Europe, where he mounted a show of live and stuffed animals as a way of declaring his freedom as an artist. Jasper Johns commissioned one of Serra's first pieces. He tried to execute many of the verbs in rubber, but his wife told him it was not art.
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He told Rose that they were divorced within a year.
Mr. Serra filled the Pasadena Art Museum with redwood logs and threw molten lead against the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mr. Serra made a series of pieces in which slabs of steel and lead were balanced on top of each other so that they were not heavy. He was taken on in 1966 by the Manhattan gallerist. Mr. Serra said that Mr. Castelli would say, "Richard, make me a small piece that I can sell." He said that he was inspired by the dome of a Baroque church in Rome. Jerry Saltz, an art critic for the Village Voice, was enraptured by the sculpture of six 50-foot-long curved steel plates called "Switch." One of the rooms in the museum was too large for most of the works, despite their collaboration on that and other projects. He told Rose that architects use the most progressive art of the time. He said that he was never interested in becoming an architect because he didn't care about practicalities such as plumbing.
Serra's art had real-world consequences, like the death of a man crushed to death by a steel plate outside the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Serra told the French publication Artistes that the reaction against him was vicious. I was put into analysis for seven years and sent to wherever I could find support, which was in Japan, Canada, Italy, France, Holland, and Germany.
The 1968 short film "Hand Catching Lead" is a perfect example of what its title promises. At the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Serra showed a crayon drawing of an Abu Ghraib prisoner with the caption "Stop Bush."
Mr. Serra married German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf.