Barbara Lekberg, artist with a blowtorch, dies at 92

Where some artists work with paint brush and palette, Lekberg often wielded a blowtorch, welding steel, bronze and other materials into works featuring dancers, trees, contemplative figures and more.

Moving to New York from the Midwest in the late 1940s, she began studying and working at the Clay Club, soon to become the Sculpture Center, making a strong impression in shows there and elsewhere.

“Barbara Lekberg is an out-and-out romantic whose welded figures are made from thin, flowing sheets of steel, here and there adorned with color in vitreous enamel,” Stuart Preston wrote in The New York Times in 1955, reviewing a Sculpture Center exhibition.

“She creates figures,” he went on, “whose high emotional temperature might have been thought inexpressible in solid sculpture but which find an entirely suitable vehicle in this flexible medium.”

In 1956, Mademoiselle magazine named Lekberg to its annual Merit Award list of young women who, in the words of the editor, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, “have already distinguished themselves in their fields and are expected to achieve even greater honors.”

Also on the list of 10 that year were Julie Andrews, Doris Day and novelist Diana Chang.

Blackwell’s words proved prophetic: Lekberg went on to receive numerous grants and awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, and to exhibit all over the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Italy and other countries.

She was born Barbara A. Hult on March 19, 1925, in Portland, Oregon. Her father, Melvin, was involved in running a family lumber company. Her mother, the former Mildred Anderson, was a music teacher. Barbara eventually took the last name of her stepfather, Sven Lekberg, a music professor.

She grew up in Oregon, Illinois and Iowa and received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture at the University of Iowa in 1946. A professor, the sculptor Humbert Albrizio, steered her toward the field in her freshman year when he saw her work in a drawing class.

“He explained that sculptors and painters draw differently; sculptors accent contours, and painters accent light and dark values,” she said in an interview with the National Sculpture Society in 2002. “I drew like a sculptor.”

She headed for New York after receiving a master’s in art history at Iowa in 1947. At the Clay Club, sculptor Sahl Swarz was teaching students how to weld, a technique Lekberg embraced.

“The old struggle with plaster and coat hangers ended when I began to weld steel,” she said, referring to her early, unsatisfying efforts to make sculpture. “Steel held its own when projected into space and seemed to do everything I needed. This is a primal joy in sculpture: that a mineral from the earth can be a vehicle for expressing one’s innermost thoughts.”

Lekberg and her husband, Victor Tamerlis, a rare-books dealer whom she married in 1956, were part of a cooperative living arrangement in the late 1950s that was unusual enough that it drew publicity. They were among 13 people — 12 adults — who lived in a Greenwich Village building that they had purchased collectively after incorporating.

The residents bought their groceries cooperatively, had a group scheduling system for things like cleaning, and set up an assortment of sometimes whimsical committees (one was called the Anti-Contempt Society) to keep things running smoothly.

“The major grievance outlet is the Emotional Board,” a 1957 article in Pageant magazine said, “which meets to debate anything that comes up concerning the whole house, from ‘who didn’t wash their lunch dishes’ to ‘nobody appreciates me.'”

Lekberg had her first solo show in 1959 at the Sculpture Center.

“Such pieces as ‘Pieta’ and ‘Deposition’ are moving modern religious interpretations,” Howard Devree wrote in his review in The Times. “The ‘Revelation’ group is strikingly rhythmic, and her hurdling figure ‘Till Eulenspiegel’ compasses violent movement successfully.”

Lekberg continued to create new works into her 70s and 80s. Her “Infinite Refuge I,” a 1995 work in bronze, was part of a 1998 show mounted by the Sculptors Guild at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. A bronze sculpture she made in 2000, “Remembering Arcadia,” was included in a group show at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she had exhibited often.

In 2013 she was among the artists featured in the annual “Small Works of Art” exhibition at the Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples, Florida.

“There is a sense of movement in many of Barbara Lekberg’s works,” the curator Jonathan P. Harding once wrote, “but it is a sense of movement that often challenges traditional understandings of the idea.” She has, he added, “expanded our ideas of motion to include time, reflection, and memory.”

Lekberg’s husband died in 1992. Their daughter, Zoe Tamerlis Lund, a model and actress known for a role in the film “Bad Lieutenant,” died in 1999. Lekberg leaves no immediate survivors.

In an interview published in Sculpture Review, Lekberg said her creative process included a lot of daydreaming, to tap into ideas and feelings she had not realized were there.

“Something may affect you and months and even years can pass before it surfaces as an idea for sculpture,” she said. “It may seem like a jolt of sudden inspiration, but a lot of work has already been done unconsciously.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Barbara Lekberg, artist with a blowtorch, dies at 92

Her friend Toni Danilevsky confirmed the death. She said Lekberg had Alzheimer’s disease.

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