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Volume I
Issue 5
8 September 1999 |
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Reuben Nakian - Yesterday & Today [Part One] By Robert Metzger
The powerful legacy of Reuben Nakian has earned him a coveted place in the history of American art. No other sculptor of the 20th Century has matched Nakian's heroic grapplings with the grand themes of Western art, returning classical mythology to the foreground of human consciousness. His instinctual yet inventive sculptures are ennobling, exploding with maximum emotional intensification. The dynamic sensuousness and voluptuous elegance which characterize his work mark a high point in the long tradition of sculpture from the ancient Greeks to the present. His erotic mythological figures exude a joyous energy of gesture and movement which places them among the seminal sculptural achievements of the past one hundred years. Nakian was still working when he died at the age of 89 in 1986. In his latter years he broke new and fertile ground and greatly extended the range of his life's work. Few artists have been as spectacularly successful in creating climactically significant work at the end of their careers. In old age his work witnessed a profound expressionism and heightened grandiosity. There is in these works a definitive and transcendental summation of the very essence of life. Nakian had numerous New York gallery exhibitions from the early 1920's through the mid-30's. His first one-man show in New York was at the Whitney Studio Club in 1926, followed by several exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Grand Central Gallery. Museum recognition came with work included in the 1924 and 1929 exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1930, and the Whitney Museum in 1932. His first one-person museum exhibition was at the Corcoran Gallery in 1935. Nakian began having regular New York gallery exhibits from 1949 through the mid 1980's. In 1961, he was selected to represent the United States in sculpture at the VI Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil. Frank O'Hara, the brilliant late poet and curator of the Museum of Modern Art, presented a major retrospective survey of Nakian's work at MoMA in 1966. During his lifetime, O'Hara, along with Thomas Hess, Gerald Nordland, and Hilton Kramer, was a major scholar of Nakian's work. In 1975, several years after O'Hara's untimely death during Nakian's MoMA exhibition, the artist paid tribute to the late poet in a New York exhibition, dedicating one of his Dance of Death works "to the Memory of Frank O'Hara." (The only surviving work from this series is now entitled Moonlight Goddess.) Nakian was born in College Point, Long Island, New York in 1897 of Armenian parentage. He lived in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut all of his life with the exception of a year in Washington, D.C. in 1933-34. From 1912 to 1915 he underwent a thorough academic training with Solon Borglum at the Art Students League, the Independent Art School under Homer Boss and Robert Henri, and the Beaux Arts Institute of Design with Jo Davidson. During this period he also worked for the great American illustrator Will Bradley as a designer of magazine covers. His training continued when he became a studio apprentice to Paul Manship in 1916. Manship's chief assistant at this time was Gaston Lachaise, and he and Nakian shared a studio from 1920 to 1923 in New York on Sixth Avenue near 10th Street. While Lachaise was modeling large sculptures of gargantuan, bulbous females, Nakian concentrated on a series of animal works which he did almost exclusively until he returned from his Guggenheim grant European tour in 1931-32. Manship, a mentor to both young artists, had excelled with human nudes and animals, and it appears that Nakian and Lachaise had each agreed to follow in a different path of the master's work. Lachaise felt that a sculptor had to make a choice between two subjects - either the human form or animal form - but that one shouldn't attempt to do both. Both artists mastered the stylized simplification of form, pushing it toward greater and greater abstraction, but stopping short of Brancusi's extreme abstraction of form in space. Nakian had met Brancusi in New York in 1926, helped install his one-man exhibition at the Brummer Gallery, and later visited him in his Paris studio in 1931. It wasn't until after Lachaise's death in 1935 that Nakian felt the freedom to immerse himself in the female nude. Both Nakian and Lachaise worshipped the female form and brought renewed vitality to this time-honored subject. Both had a worm's-eye view of women, with their emphasis on the glorification of her monumentality, yet each took a different approach to the eternal female. Lachaise's women were on an unattainable pedestal, while Nakian's women were indisputably earthbound and unequivocally approachable. Neither artist was overly concerned with anatomical details, since they were more preoccupied with the expressive qualities of the human form. Their sculptures were giants of "every-woman," bounteously full-figured in the Amazonian tradition of Rubens and Titian and, like their predecessors, exuded an uninhibited flair for the dramatic. However, Lachaise's females were the more symmetrical and evenly proportioned with their slender waists serving as a mere transition for abundant breasts and hips. By taking his goddesses off their pedestals and often further weighing them down by the sheer mass of their lower torsos, Nakian distanced himself from Lachaise's more predictable formulated mathematical approach. Furthermore, Nakian reinforced their raw physical beauty with a shattering inner drama of unequaled intensity, recapturing the true grandeur of Michelangelo and Rodin. In the first half of the 30's, Nakian was engaged in portrait sculpture and did a series of portrait heads of New York artists, friends and intellectuals. These studies were influenced by the Roman portrait busts he had seen at the Vatican Museum in Rome, as well as by the work of Lachaise and Rodin. They included likenesses of Alexander Brook, with whom he had shared a studio, Peggy Bacon, George Overbury, Pop Hart, Raphael Soyer, Gaston Longchamp, Concetta Scaravaglione, and playwright Elmer Rice.
In the spring of 1933, Nakian had the good fortune to be asked to come to Washington and create portrait busts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Cabinet. The chance to sculpt these "democratic" subjects greatly appealed to the ambitious and idealistic young artist. The first Cabinet member to pose for Nakian was arranged through Robert Straus of New York's Macy's Department Store. Straus asked Nakian to create a portrait bust of General Hugh "Iron-Pants" Johnson who was retired from the Army and now headed up Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration (NRA).
Although Nakian was given the use of a large studio in the Department of Commerce building, he sculpted the majority of these portrait busts in the administrators' own offices. In addition to General Johnson, Nakian sculpted his chief assistant and legal officer, Donald Richberg. The most successful and sensitive bust in the series was that of Roosevelt's closest personal advisor and chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Harry L. Hopkins. Hopkins' idealist character and utopian imagination are superbly captured, conveying the weight and dignity of a Roman statesman. Other cabinet members who posed for him in their offices included: Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace, Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Unfortunately, Postmaster General James Farley declined to pose for the artist as did President Roosevelt himself who claimed to be too busy with matters of state. Subsequently, Nakian sculpted a masterful likeness of F.D.R. from photographs.
Nakian's old teacher from the Beaux Arts Institute of Design, Jo Davidson, was also in Washington at this time. Davidson had a reputation as a tireless self-promoter and referred to himself as a "plastic journalist" whose goal was to sculpt more famous people than anyone in the history of art. Although their paths did cross in Washington, Davidson snubbed his "lowly former student" and was successful in getting the President to pose for him in the Oval Office and in bed the next day after reading the morning papers. Seven years later Roosevelt posed for Davidson a second time for the Fourth Inaugural Medal. Unlike Nakian, Davidson had specialized in the portrait bust throughout his long career, sculpting everyone from Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude Stein, Albert Einstein, and James Joyce to Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet Davidson's head of Roosevelt lacks the rigor and vitality of the younger artist's. Nakian presents F.D.R. as an imposing figure: strong, focused and confident with a powerful neck, whereas Davidson's head presents a more pensive President with downcast eyes, looking almost asleep, with little insight to his inner character. Nakian also narrowed the eyes of the Commander in Chief, yet they are alert and suggest the intense concentration of a visionary leader. He also made the President appear slightly more youthful and forceful than Roosevelt was at the time. He stresses the characteristically serious expression of Roosevelt's face, minimalizing less important details of hair or clothing. Davidson made one version of Roosevelt with the face emerging from the uncut marble, a technique he borrowed from Michelangelo and Rodin. Nakian's head is unfettered and more aggressive, forcing the viewer to accept it as an actual personality, rather than a cold frozen visage in stone. He captured Roosevelt's political energy which subsequently guided America's transition out of the Depression and isolationism, through the war years to the United States' emergence as the most powerful nation on earth. While Roosevelt is arguably the most influential political leader of 20th-century America, the same might be said of Marcel Duchamp's impact on out country's visual arts. Nakian succeeded in making the head of Duchamp just as powerful and heroic as he had earlier done with Roosevelt and his cabinet. Considering the myriad photographs of both men, it is significant that Nakian captured aspects of their personalities which eluded the lens. American society has been caught up with a whirlwind pursuit of celebrity throughout this century. There has been a mass elevation of the nation's heroes to mythic proportions expressed through biography, film, tabloids, and television. It is all the more remarkable then that Nakian was able to achieve such reverberating force with these two sculpted heads. Nakian's 1943 interpretation of Duchamp's visage becomes a flickering surface of lights and darks consisting of spontaneously modeled features distorting the facial planes and exploiting the fall of light. He presents us with a head on which the ravages of time are clearly depicted on the wrinkled, battered, and emaciated face. The extreme roughness of the surface risks offending the subject and the viewer. At mid-century, Nakian seemed to be depicting in an utterly new way the romantic 19th-Century notion of the poet-artist as somehow superior to ordinary men, but tragically misunderstood and unappreciated by society. Except for the representation of this artist as reedily slender, as was common in the 19th Century, this work is closer to the caricature heads made by Daumier and Dantan jeune. In this most subjective of Nakian's works, the painter of Nude Descending a Staircase, inventor of the "ready made," and the leading exponent of the Dada movement in the United States, is revealed in all of his psychological complexity. [This essay is the first of four parts, adapted from Robert Metzger's catalogue essay for the exhibition, Reuben Nakian: Centennial Retrospective at the Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA (10 October 1998 &endash; 10 January 1999) and at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (6 February 1999 &endash; 4 April 1999). Part Two of Four, covering Nakian's explorations of monumental sculpture as well as new techniques and materials, will appear in the next Newsletter.] Resources: Nakian's portrait of Marcel Duchamp is in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. All Nakian sculpture illustrated in this article is from the Nakian Family Collection. About the author: Robert P. Metzger, Ph.D. is Director, Chief Curator and CEO of the Reading Public Museum. Prior to his current position, he served as the Director of the Center Gallery, Bucknell University and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Connecticut) and as Director of Art at the Stamford (Connecticut) Museum. He was a Professor at both Bucknell University and Pennsylvania State University and an Associate Professor at the University of Bridgeport (Connecticut). Robert Metzger received his Doctoral Degree in Art History from the University of California at Berkeley. |
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