Literature

Lucy Lippard, "Ronald Bladen's Black Triangle" Artforum, March 1967, Volume V, No.7, pg.26-27, illustrated

Edition #1/3 of Black Triangle is in a private collection in New City, New York.

Mattison, Robert S. Ronald Bladen Sculpture: To Conquer Space. The Artist Book Foundation, 2018. Pg. 40,138:

Black Triangle was exhibited at Fischbach Gallery as the first of a series of important one-person exhibitions that the artist held at that gallery between 1966 and 1972. Irving Sandler remembers the opening: “People backed away almost frightened,” and sculptor Richard van Buren recalled, “He controlled the space. You were pushed to the walls. It was a very physical experience.”

Bladen’s discussion of his working procedures for such sculptures as Black Triangle is worth citing at length:
Unfortunately, it takes three or four weeks where I just lie in bed and work the piece out in my mind—all the engineering, all the safety factors. And by the time this period is over, the piece is all right. This period is very valuable. There is a lot of visualizing.... What I am doing is dreaming the sculpture.... After that I go into the studio, start building the jigs and order my material. The jigs are really drawings in a sense. I may make a drawing to determine an angle, but the dimensions are dimensions of fantasy....

Black Triangle draws on a wide range of additional associations. In vision, depth perception results from triangulation between the eyes, and the measurement of landscape is accomplished through surveying based on triangulation. Beginning in the ancient world, the relationship between star configurations was mapped with triangular patterns. The architecture of such ancient structures as Egyptian pyramids and Mesopotamian ziggurats is based on triangular design. In the ancient world, a frequently cited passage from Plato’s Timeus “describes the triangle as a basic building block of all matter: the four elements are products in their basic structure of different kinds of triangles.”14 In the history of art, the “Renaissance triangle” is a common stylistic device. “Textbooks tell us that the triangle reflects High Renaissance ideals and interest in geometry and that it provides stability, hierarchy, coherence, or focus.” Black Triangle reverses this standard art-historical trope.