Literature

Fritz Jacobi, Bladen Skulptur/Sculpture: Works from the Marzona Collection, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1998, p.83

Irving Sandler, Ronald Bladen:Sculpture of the 1960s & 1970s, Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York, 2008, p.7 (Garden)

Light Year has never been realized on a monumental scale. A garden scale wood prototype was fabricated and exhibited in the 1980s. This prototype was the centerpiece of the artist's retrospective at PS1/MoMA in 1991.

Light Year #1/3 garden scale in the collection of Case Western University, Ohio

Mattison, Robert S. Ronald Bladen Sculpture: To Conquer Space. The Artist Book Foundation, 2018. Pg. 86

Three midscale wood prototypes, Light Year, Black Saxon, and V, were produced during Bladen’s lifetime. While these works are unique like the maquettes, they are strictly proportional, on a scale of 1:3, to planned monumental works, and they are highly finished like the models. The midscale pieces show that the powerful presence of Bladen’s works is not entirely dependent on their monumental proportions. The artist had always insisted that “scale” not “size” was a determining factor in his art and that scale functioned as an intuitive relationship between the viewer and the piece. These three prototypes demonstrate Bladen’s exploration of different scale relationships. They also indicate that the artist was looking for different outlets for work in terms of patrons who could not afford and/or house the monumental sculptures.