At White Cube

The sculptor​ Richard Hunt was nineteen years old when he looked into Emmett Till’s casket. It was September 1955. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had called on mourners to witness and grieve for her son and, over three days, thousands of people filed past Till’s body at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a short walk from the Hunt family home. The sheriff of Money, Mississippi, where Till had been lynched, tried to insist that the casket remain sealed on its return to Chicago, to prevent the public and press from seeing Till’s mutilated body. Till-Mobley defied him: ‘Let the people see what they did to my boy.’

Like most African American families in Chicago, the Hunts and the Tills had arrived as part of the Great Migration. And like many such families, they returned to the South every summer: Till had been staying with a great-uncle and aunt at the time of his death. The tension between the rural South and the urban landscape of Chicago would find expression in Hunt’s sculptural works. He sought, as he put it, ‘the reconciliation of the organic and the industrial’, imagining the forms that ‘nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her’. Steel, bronze and copper represented possibility, and metallurgy not a denial or rejection of nature, but an extension of it. The future for African Americans was, as he put it, ‘in the steel mills, the stockyards’.

‘Man on a Vehicular Construction’ (1956).

The Great Migration didn’t insulate African Americans from racist aggression. What happened to Till ‘could have happened to me’, Hunt later said. Like James Baldwin (‘It was him, but it was all of us’), Hunt thought Till’s death had universal significance; it symbolised not only suffering but also the hope of redemption. He had begun experimenting with welding equipment that summer, in the basement of the family home. Just under a year later he had completed Hero’s Head, a grisly model, not much larger than a clenched fist, of a blighted head wearing a soldier’s helmet. It could be a handful of shrapnel, the twisted metal debris of some recent conflict. The piece is at the centre of Metamorphosis: A Retrospective at White Cube (until 29 June), the first exhibition of Hunt’s work since his death in 2023 and his first major European survey. The steel helmet is cracked, a fissure running straight down from its centre, and the head seems to be collapsing in on itself. One eye is missing; the other stares out blankly. Two sharply welded lines on the right cheek emphasise the head’s skeletal aspect. At first glance the piece suggests 20th-century warfare, but Hunt was also influenced by Greek myths, as the titles of other works – The Chase (Actaeon), Arachne, Prometheus (a lithograph responding to Till’s lynching) – show. In the years after Till’s funeral, Hunt also made several prints and drawings depicting the Stations of the Cross.

Hunt wasn’t the only artist to respond to Till’s murder. Photographs of the casket viewing and the funeral were widely circulated by the press; the image of his mother standing next to the open casket became one of the most influential photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. It retains its power today: in 2017, the white artist Dana Schutz exhibited Open Casket, a distorted portrait of Till’s dead body, at the Whitney Biennial, sparking a debate about appropriation and opportunism. It didn’t help that Schutz had painted Till in a naive and colourful style, with the suggestion of a yellow halo around his head. Hunt’s sculpture has a different attitude. It isn’t a straightforward depiction of Till and there’s no attempt to turn him into a martyr, a saint in waiting.

Alongside his interest in mythology, Hunt drew inspiration from his close study of African sculpture. Over the years he amassed a large collection of African art and artefacts, and although he trained in the US and Europe, including at the Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando Marinelli in Florence, where he learned to cast bronze, he often looked to Africa and the African diaspora for inspiration. Enslavement and migration were longstanding preoccupations, as were notions of sacrifice and heroic death. Hunt explored ideas about freedom and constraint again and again in welded works that resemble birds in flight. The White Cube show doesn’t follow a chronological arc, which makes sense for an artist who seemed to arrive fully formed. (The pieces are grouped according to material.) It’s hard to believe that Man on a Vehicular Construction (1956), like Hero’s Head, was made when Hunt was only twenty. Hunt had started young, joining the junior school of the Art Institute of Chicago at thirteen. In 1953, the institute hosted the travelling exhibition Sculpture of the 20th Century, which exposed Hunt to sculptors including Julio González and Giacometti, from whom he took not only a visual language but technical ideas – how to solder metal in a way that didn’t disguise the effort involved, but allowed him to suggest a different weight and heft. (He also saw Picasso’s Death’s Head (c.1941), an important inspiration for Hero’s Head.) The ‘man’ on the vehicular construction is a bag of ‘animated bones’, in LeRonn P. Brooks’s words, scrap metal pieces piled and ordered and welded together in what could seem a grotesque metal skeleton suspended above a wheeled contraption; yet the overall effect is light, even lively.

Hunt was taught by the sculptors Nelli Bar and Egon Weiner, both refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. They encouraged his formal experimentation as well as his belief that sculpture had something to say about the present moment. Hunt was always looking for methods and techniques that would expand his understanding of metal’s sculptural properties. He began his ‘construction’ series on this impulse, in an attempt to evoke planes of negative space. His description of these pieces – ‘abstract surrealist drawing-in-space’ – is apt. They transform in appearance depending on the angle from which they’re viewed, seeming to take up more or less space, to move or incite movement. And although he found his materials in junkyards, in combination the awkward and angular pieces resolve into diaphanous forms.

‘Hero’s Head’ (1956).

Many of Hunt’s pieces are animistic and anthropomorphic. Organic Construction, Number One, an insect-like creature with hyper-extended limbs, is tricked out in gunmetal grey. Linear Sequence looks like the swirls and swoops of cursive handwriting. Coil, from the Tube series, made in copper, features a tube-like structure from which organic forms emerge. It was exhibited at MoMA in 1971; Hunt was the first black artist to be afforded a retrospective there. Most of the sculptures on display at White Cube were made in Hunt’s Chicago studio. In the same year as the MoMA show, he bought a decommissioned electrical substation that once belonged to Chicago Railway Systems. The space, with its towering 45-foot-high windows, provided plenty of light and came equipped with an overhead bridge crane – essential for the larger works he would go on to make. Aside from a brief stint in New York, Hunt spent the rest of his life in Chicago. Of his more than 160 public sculptures, almost half of them are still in Illinois and a fifth are in Chicago.

In one of the final rooms at White Cube, the 11-foot-tall bronze Reaching Up (2022) stands alone, extending in two directions from its metal stem, like a dancer stretching out into an arabesque. Hunt manages to make metal into taut muscle, a poetic distortion of his material from a heavy lump of bronze to the rapture of flight and ascension. Steel Garden, from 2013, is similarly exuberant. Like many of Hunt’s commissioned works, it was intended to be displayed outside – in this case at the entrance to a United States Steel Corporation site by Lake Michigan. The steelworks was itself a sort of garden, where metal was forged into all manner of products, and Hunt’s work, with its tendrils and foliate forms, seems to be bursting into life. In the sunshine outside White Cube, its highly polished surface gleams silver-white and seems to ripple like water.

Hunt came of age during the postwar boom, when the factories of Detroit were thriving and Black communities were growing prosperous. Metal was the material of the age, and Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and contradictions of industrial expansion but to its decline, not to freedom as movement and opportunity but to the more ambiguous freedom of precarious work and displacement. Or perhaps they are a continuum, different ways of looking at our ‘liquid’ modernity, as Zygmunt Bauman calls it, and its characteristic ‘lightness’ and ‘weightlessness’. Bauman wrote that we associate these terms with ‘mobility and inconstancy’ and yet ‘we know from practice that the lighter we travel the easier and faster we move.’ Hunt spoke about the importance to him of making art as a ‘free person’; his works continue to show what that might look like.