José de Rivera’s abstract sculptures contributed greatly to the development of kinetic art in the US. His knowledge of motors evolved from early work with machines and as a mill operator in Louisiana where his father was employed as an engineer on a sugar plantation. Growing up around these production techniques influenced his sculptural inventions made of steel, aluminum, and other metals. Before his career as an artist, which began with night classes in commercial art at the Studio School of Fine Art in Chicago, de Rivera worked in New Orleans and Chicago as a mechanic. He would also later work on WPA commissions of large-scale public sculpture, often in industrial materials, and eventually served in World War II primarily as a model-maker for training simulations in the US Navy.

The exposure to drawing de Rivera received at the Studio School sparked his interest in so-called “fine art” forms, which he continued to incorporate into his works even as he moved into three dimensions. Along with the great range of architecture he witnessed during travels to Europe and Egypt—from the grand pyramids to “rational” Greek architecture and Antoni Gaudí’s undulating designs—attention to elements of drawing such as line quality, depth, and surface led to the artist’s devotion to sculpture emphasizing sinuous and elegant plays of negative and positive space as seen in Form, 1953. 

Made about a decade following his first New York solo exhibition in 1946, Form represents a mature example of de Rivera’s abstract experiments in shape, color, and form. Like many of his twisting sculptures meant to be seen in the round, Form did not derive from a sketch so much as the sculpture constituted a drawing in real space with its profiles cut flat before being hammered into three-dimensional form, much like mechanical plans. Here, the abstract space around the silhouette and its movement in real time remained as central as the object itself. As de Rivera described:

I assume that if I am going to make pure form in which the space is allowed to participate as well as the material that I have to conceive of them both together; that I can’t think up the material to make the space, or the space to make the material. I’m personally convinced that I have to conceive of them both together. They exist simultaneously. And I’ve found that I have more satisfaction if I think so. And of course I’ve been thinking so for so many years that that’s it. And you do it subconsciously. 

In these ways, all components of Form (in addition to the work’s overall gestalt) are highly considered, from negative space to the motion of each element, made of aluminum and wood. With the matte black and white pedestal treated with such precision as to become part of the overall design—topped by a swooping red curve—the work physically and conceptually moves into the viewer’s space as it literally moves with the power of an electric motor, anticipating certain aspects of Minimalism.

This turn away from representation to the “actuality” of an art object was an important aspect of kinetic art, which privileged the experience of viewing impression and structural effect of the final work as it appears in space—an amalgamation of Impressionism’s emphasis on movement, Cubism’s deconstructions of form, and, earlier, Dada sculpture that challenged divides between art and the so-called outside world. Through its smooth monochromatic surfaces, and seamless constructions, Form likewise embraced changing understandings of architecture and new technologies at a time when everything in society moved quickly. Unafraid of ornament, de Rivera’s gestural “marks” in space eschewed the strict rectilinear geometries most often associated with modernity and machines, welcoming in loops and curls in a dance of form.