The Guardian - Leo Steppat

Biography

Leo Steppat was one of the first artists who sculpted welded metal. Steppat was born on July 10, 1910 in Vienna, Austria. He attended the Austrian State Academy of Fine Arts as an undergraduate student from 1928- 1932, and as a graduate student from 1932- 1936. Persecuted by the Nazi occupation, he left Austria and arrived in Washington D.C. in 1940. He quickly won second place in a national sculpture competition, and became a naturalized citizen in 1944. He taught at American University, Indiana University and the University of Mississippi, before he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 1955. He exhibited regularly, throughout the country, and often with his wife, Annelise, a weaver. He died of a heart attack on April 14, 1965.

Facts

Title of Work at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh: "The Guardian"

Location: Polk Library

About the Art

The installation of "The Guardian" in the summer of 1962, ultimately led to controversy. The sculpture, a highly abstract piece that stands 11 feet high, is a welded steel plate covered with bronze brazing. On Friday, September 28, 1962, The Advance featured a poem by Valene, titled "words from a bronze sculpture":

"I am the reason you must have for being here, a place of higher learning. I am an arch built of dimensional masses of lesson. Like an animal's belly, my surface is corrugated to increase the absorption of my environment.

"I am not perfection so I look as though I must fall. I won't. My monuments are fused at the middle of me where bodies of thought have joined. Nor does my keystone appear traditional. It looks like it is apart from me because it is focused on the distant ideal.

"Before I will surrender a glimpse of the Ideal, I will show you the turntable of mundanity, placed like a dark cloud on a mountain's highest tip, fabricated by your forefathers so as to be undefinable from me. This vertigo will challenge your determination to leave it in order to command the direction of the Ideal once again."

Valene's admiration for "The Guardian" is evident, although many students and faculty did not feel the same way. Some students felt that the art disrupted the social environment of the library. The Art Department also criticized the sculpture.

Photos