Robert Therrien's largest-ever museum show in Los Angeles is enduringly appealing

'No ideas but in things.'

That line from the early 20th-century poem by William Carlos Williams, so stubbornly American, hovers over the art of Robert Therrien at The Broad, the contemporary art museum in Los Angeles. Milk pitchers, oil cans, dishes, beds, hair bows, plates, mirrors, even coffins; things were the essence of and the inspiration for his art. ‘This is a Story’, as the exhibition is titled, includes 120 sculptures, paintings and works on paper, all variations on his common themes.

These things might be enlarged or reduced from their original size but each was rendered by the artist with particular care for enticing surfaces, whether velvety or shiny, that invite a longing to touch. Though the artist was represented by Gagosian gallery and the subject of many retrospectives, Therrien’s reputation has faded since his death at age 71 in 2019. This show, with works never before seen publicly, should change that.

Therrien developed as an artist in Los Angeles as minimalism was on the wane and sculpture was being reconceptualised. Eli and Edythe Broad collected his work in depth so the show at the museum they founded in 2000 is optimal though many other collectors and museums have lent works.

Among the many works by Warhol, Basquiat and Koons at The Broad, Therrien’s sculpture Under the Table is arguably the most popular. Adults and children alike can be seen smiling at the unexpected experience of walking under the artist’s gargantuan, ten-foot-tall table with four chairs, exaggerated replicas of originals from his studio. They are always on view. A brown metal folding-table version is in the exhibition.

Therrien incorporated the reductive heft of artists from an earlier era, such as Donald Judd or Brice Marden, with the idiosyncrasies of an increasingly open and flexible time in Los Angeles that produced artists also stretching ideas about sculpture, such as Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and Tim Hawkinson. Therrien, however, had a poetic rather than pop nature, so that his quotidian objects were enhanced in their transformations.

Ed Schad, curator at The Broad, observes, 'From his handmade and intimate responses to minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of LA fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over 40 years. However, the most important thing to know about Therrien is that he can evoke a sense of wonder. What starts in Therrien’s personal and closely guarded memories and passions becomes a mysterious place in which a viewer can think about […their] own.'

Therrien was born in Chicago in 1947, but his family moved to Palo Alto, California when he was nine, due in part to his serious asthma. The midwestern childhood and the illness can be gleaned in various recurring shapes. A painting of two blue panels, at first glance appearing as geometric abstraction, is a doppleganger for an open Dutch door, a memory from his grandmother’s house, that he makes as a sculpture. Three graduated spheres stacked vertically pivot from an idea of modern sculpture to a child’s snowman. The shape of a bent cone or a witch's hat is also a simple chapel, used 57 times by Therrien. 'Over time, the chapels come to be increasingly human and vulnerable because of how they have been shaped and how they have been touched,' writes Schad.

Therrien, who was over six feet tall, was a raw-boned, taciturn man with a dry sense of humour. He attended what is now the California College of the Arts in Oakland before studying photography at the Brooks Institute and painting at the Santa Barbara Institute. While earning a master of fine arts degree from the University of Southern California in 1974, he lived in a storefront studio on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, where he painstakingly honed his earliest works by hand. He began showing with galleries in LA and, by 1985, Leo Castelli in New York.

After building a large studio in downtown LA in 1990, where he lived alone for decades in the former caretaker's quarters, he began working with fabricators. His art lost none of its intimacy for that. The first piece in the show is an eight-foot tower of fat white china plates that appears to teeter, ready to fall. The plates are ordinary, as are all the kitchen apparatus used in his work, drawn from memories of that childhood in Chicago. Similarly, Revereware cooking pots are scaled up and stuffed into a nine-foot-tall cupboard lined with red fabric.

Such Alice-in-Wonderland moments are based on cartoons, his earliest influence as a young aspiring artist. 'I have an attraction to the animated aspect of a cartoon, that really factors into the work,' he told me in 2000, when such pieces were shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 'I think cartoons are part of a lot of people’s consciousness. Cartoons have really reductive body parts. They are reduced to the simplest forms. I end up with images like that.'

But those simple forms, recall another influence: Constantin Brâncuși. This drove him to create a number of massive beards in various scales and materials, all hanging on supports by their ear pieces to emphasise that they are for masquerade. They were made between 2007 and 2014, of metal or plastic or human hair, and he agreed that they wound up looking more like a hairpiece for Santa Claus than the Romanian sculptor. 'I wanted to make something figurative that I could approach in different materials,' he says. 'For some reason, I wanted them to be fake beards. The type of beard in a cartoon image. A beard from animation can have a life of its own, can start walking around. I don’t know if it is a search for that, but I end up with images like that.'

Of all the things made by Therrien, the beards are the most comic and perplexing, unless we remember the moustache drawn on a postcard of the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp, who was Brâncuși’s greatest promoter. L.H.O.O.Q, with its multiple references lusty and otherwise, is also a 'ready-made', the 1919 example of a method of art making that changed history. It is a model by which an artist like Therrien could operate, borrowing 'ready-made' inspirations for his eccentrically personal and inescapably appealing art. All based on 'things'.

‘This is a Story’ is at The Broad until April 5, 2026

thebroad.org