Sculpture: Welding Their Way Up

When the two artists arrived at West Berlin’s Borsig machine-tool factory to use the company’s huge cutting and welding facilities, they were met with scorn. “We start work at 6:45 a.m.,” the factory hands pointedly declared, fully expecting them to saunter in each day at noon. But German Sculptress Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff and her husband, Martin Matschinsky, are made of sterner stuff. Up each day at 5 o’clock, they continued working long after everyone else had gone home. Six months later, the commission—a 16-ft. stainless-steel sculpture—was completed. The workers gave the artists their highest accolade, offered to take them on as professional welders.

Basic Grammar. Today the sculpture they welded at the Borsig factory stands outside West Berlin’s Free University, a soaring monument to the country’s postwar technological strides. Similar commissions by the pair, along with a large exhibition currently traveling throughout West Germany, reveal a technical facility in touch with the times. Most of the acclaim goes to Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, 43, today ranked as Germany’s leading sculptress. Her collaborator husband does not mind his relative oblivion. A former actor, he figures that she was already well on her way before they became a team in 1955. “We’d like to change the use of my maiden name,” Brigitte confesses, “but it’s probably too late for that.”

Brigitte had struggled long to reach the top, in her early student days was even expelled from a Munich art school for lack of talent. Fortunately, British Sculptor Henry Moore saw at least a spark, in 1947 admitted her to his studio for study. “I executed a madonna in stone for him, and every minute was wonderful,” she recalls. After learning sculpture’s basic grammar from Moore, Brigitte was ready to leave traditional materials behind, sought out the Russian-born constructivist Antoine Pevsner in Paris, put in another year of apprenticeship with him.

Oblique Allusions. Independent and stubborn, Brigitte was soon steering her own course, combining something of the totemic power of Moore with the welding techniques of Pevsner. In 1959 she received Paris’ coveted Prix Bour-delle from a jury that included Giacometti, Arp, Lipchitz and Moore, went on to represent Germany at the 1962 Venice Biennale.

Today she and her husband have a well-equipped machine shop of their own in Paris where they arc-weld great quantities of stainless steel and brass tubing into abstract sculptures that exude a confidence in the mechanical world and at the same time, from certain oblique angles, suddenly open up all manner of allusions to nature. With success, their concepts and commissions have grown steadily bigger. “Using our welding technique,” says Brigitte, “there is no limit.” For Germany’s Tubingen University, they are now putting the finishing touches on a 49-ft.-long commission, their largest to date. Says Martin: “We want people to be able to enjoy our sculpture—not with their eyes alone, but to be able to walk through them, and feel an enveloping physical experience.”