At age 89, it's a small world for Haverford sculptor of colossal public works

Decades of hammering on his massive metal sculptures have cost Robert Engman much of his hearing, but not his artistic passion.

The 89-year-old Haverford artist worked smaller from 2000 to his 2016 "final piece," creating tabletop sculptures instead of public works such as the 28,000-pound, 20-foot-high, interlocking bronze curves of Triune, installed at 15th Street and South Penn Square in 1975, a week before the Philadelphia Flyers won the Stanley Cup.

Engman was pleased when celebrating Flyers fans climbed all over his sculpture and raised their "We're number one!" forefingers to the sky, just as pennant-waving baseball fans did after the Phillies won the 1980 World Series.

Both events provided rare public exposure for a sculptor who is little known, even in his home territory, because he decided long ago to dedicate himself to his art rather than self-promotion.

Recently, Engman and Nancy Porter, his wife of 37 years, spent a couple of hours at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, enjoying his first one-man gallery show since 1978.

"Shifting the Limits: Robert Engman's Structural Sculpture," which will run through Feb. 5, invites visitors to immerse themselves in the light reflected off dozens of sensuously curved, highly polished bronze surfaces, some in natural gold, others in patinas of blues, greens, blacks, and browns.

A cobalt-coated bronze cast of Engman's After B.K.S. Iyengar, which captures in connecting circles the spiritually inspired moves of the late Indian yoga master who was his friend, stands in the outdoor sculpture garden fronting the museum.

"The day the Iyengar was installed in October, people were taking selfies in front of it, so you could see they were really responding to it," said Kirsten Jensen, the Michener's chief curator.

"It was a wet day, and all these yellow leaves, half-a-finger long, were falling onto the blue patina surface and sticking to it. I thought, 'What will that piece look like in the snow? How will it be transformed in the spring?' "

Engman is an enigma, Jensen said. "He's one of the important voices in late 20th-century sculpture, yet many people have never heard of his work."

The son of Swedish immigrants, Engman was born in 1927 near Boston, educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, and found his artistic vision while earning his master's in sculpture at Yale University in the early 1950s. He said his student work was too similar to the creations of master sculptors, and his mentor, Josef Albers, told him, "You can learn what they're about, but you can't become what they became. Find your own voice."

Engman was hammering on a thin, square-foot sheet of brass when he saw the edges curve until two opposing corners met, while the other two corners bent backward and touched.

"I said to myself, 'Wow! This is different!' " Engman recalled. Albers told him, "Now, you're on your way."

Engman was an artist on the rise in the 1960s and '70s, with sold-out New York gallery shows of his twisted, touching bronze circles and squares. But by 1978, he tired of gallery owners urging him to keep doing more of the same because it sold.

He devoted himself to teaching sculpture at the University of Pennsylvania, which he'd done since 1964 and continued until he retired to his Haverford workshop in 1992.

Engman said he's had no regrets since his major public commissions ended nearly 30 years ago.

When Triune, commissioned by Girard Bank and Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Co., was cast in huge sections at the Crown Foundry in Chester, "different thicknesses shrank and warped differently when they cooled, so when we tried to put them together, the pieces didn't meet," he said.

The process of building Triune was so nerve-wracking that it left him unable to eat and sleep.

"Triune is the biggest thing I've ever done," Engman said. "It's the first of its kind and the last. You pay a price. If you want to grow your reputation, you have to continue to do these things. They take so much time, you say, 'I have to start a factory.' I never had a team of people who worked for me. I created things by myself."

Engman's son, Anders, 25, the youngest of his five children, said, "As far as the art world was concerned, my father dropped off the face of the Earth."

Anders remembers his vision-driven dad sculpting 12 hours a day "not neurotically, but obsessively."

Unlike artists who sell their proofs - the sketches and scale models they make before creating the finished work - Engman kept his.

Determined to reintroduce Engman to the public, Anders and his mother worked with Jensen to organize the retrospective.

Jensen said Engman's sculptures have a spiritual quality. "You commune with the piece," she said. "As you're exploring it with your eyes, you follow the contours and you, the viewer, actually become one with it."

She hopes that after experiencing the exhibit, people will see Triune not just as a familiar part of Center City, but as an ever-changing source of light, as fresh as each new day.

geringd@phillynews.com

267-443-3540

@DanGeringer