Valerie Fletcher: Beverly Pepper was born in Brooklyn, New York, but after World War II she took herself off to Paris to study art with two masters of Cubism, Fernand Léger and André Lhote and the lesser-known sculptor named Ossip Zadkine. In 1951 she moved permanently to Italy, just outside Rome, partly because she could setup a studio and hire skilled assistance there at the time when the American dollar was worth a lot abroad.

She started out in sculpture in wood, but in 1962 there was a pivotal event in her life. She was invited along with nine other sculptors to make works in connection with the art and music festival in Spoleto, Italy. Among the sculptors invited were two masters of constructed metal sculptures, Alexander Calder and David Smith. Beverly Pepper did not yet work in steel, did not even know how to weld. So she apprenticed herself to an ironmonger, learned how to weld, and when she came to the festival to work, she created her first major steel sculpture and her first sculpture there was 18 feet tall. From that time on, she worked only in metal constructions. She went on to make sculptures that were in the minimalist mode, in which a simple basic component like a square was repeated in a sequence or progression. In this sense she is sometimes compared to Tony Smith.

However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, she had moved away from that idea of squares and was working in columnar forms; that is upright, slender, abstract forms and that is what this sculpture, Harmonious Triad, consists of. Three very slender, vertical elements, slightly different heights, proportionately placed on this very low pedestal. It is difficult to describe or interpret this work because when you confront it you immediately become conscious of how human sized these columns are at least two of them in height, but in terms of width, not even the most slender among us comes close to these. And so you’re forced to see them as abstractions, but abstractions that confront you as a standing element. Their relationship to each other is important. The title Harmonious Triad does not have any significant symbolic association. Rather Pepper was a believer that abstract language, abstract constructions help to convey a state of mind. In this case peace, calm, and stasis.