Centrifugal

Photograph by Bob Handelman

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When the conceptual artist Bernar Venet created the steel sculpture that has graced Luce Hall’s lawn for over 20 years, was he imagining a giant spring? A cosmic vortex? An unstoppable force? Who can say? The best clue we can offer is that in 2018, Venet told Forbes, “My goal is to free sculpture from the constraints of composition and to criticize the utopian principle of an ideal order.”

Venet, considered one of the greatest living French artists, used a crane to bend and twist the long steel rods he formed into this and other works in his Indeterminate Line series. Marion J. Lebworth ’48 donated the sculpture in the late 1990s, in honor of Henry Luce III ’45W.