Art of Steel

RICHARD SERRA tells a story from his youth, one that begins to take on the contours of a Greek hero-and-mentor myth.
It was the late 1960s, and Mr. Serra was in Jasper Johns’s studio, preparing to make a splashed-lead piece: red-hot metal flung forcefully and artfully at the wall and floor. Mr. Johns, who had commissioned the piece, wanted to open the skylight to let out the lead fumes. He got a ladder, climbed it, opened the skylight, descended, put away the ladder, sat down and gulped a shot of whiskey. Then he took up a brush and very deliberately made a mark on one of his paintings in progress.
“I asked him, ‘Did you like doing that?’ ” Mr. Serra recalled.
“And he said, ‘Which part?’ ”
“And I thought, ‘Ooh.’ ”