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Volume I
Issue 6
12 October 1999 |
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Reuben Nakian - Yesterday and Today [Part Two] by Robert Metzger [Part One of this article, in the Newsletter of 8 September 1999, described Nakian's youth and artistic training, and his noteworthy portrait busts of leading figures in the arts and government, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, culminating with his bust of the artist Marcel Duchamp, in 1943.]
Nymph
and Goat, 1981 No other sculptor of the twentieth century, with the exception of Giacometti, has given us an image as haunting and insightfully penetrating. In this rugged likeness, the beauty of the subject's character shines through, uncovering the multilayered complexity of Duchamp's special qualities: the tormented rebel with inimitable insights, the conceptual theoretician with prophetic powers, the spiritual searcher with sober tenacity, and the humorous prankster of fabricated dreams. The prominent, deeply gouged eyes are set off beneath jutting eyebrows, a high forehead and a wild shock of hair, suggesting a superhuman depth of vision. The face proclaims the incessant struggle for artistic creation, and Nakian achieves a tremendous emotional pull without detailed physiognomical description while eschewing conventional standards of beauty. The extremely dramatic surface handling and openness of form foreshadow the direction his work would take for the next four decades. Nakian's portrait work led in 1934 to an eight-foot plaster sculpture of baseball hero Babe Ruth. The "contraposto" pose from Italian Renaissance and Baroque art catches the remarkable dynamics of the New York Yankees's champion home-run hitter. Never cast, this work was exhibited at New York's Downtown Gallery and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and is thought to have been destroyed. Completed just after the New Deal Cabinet busts and before the head of Duchamp, the work was energetic, ambitious, and extremely popular with the public. Four years after completing the Duchamp bust, Nakian made a romantic image of a woman's head, Ecstasy, 1947, which seems to hark back to his earlier portrait busts of the 30's. However, it is unlike any head study Nakian had done previously. Here he deliberately tilts the face to one side in a sensually charged romantic swoon. The blatant eroticism of this work is heightened by the subject's enigmatic smile and the elaborate coiffure. Nakian's copious natural modeling ability, combined with a fully assured mastery of technique, are dazzlingly displayed in the human sensuality of this work. During the mid-30's Nakian was acquainted with a group of experimental painters who became friends and mutual influences. In particular, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Stuart Davis helped introduce Nakian to European modernism. This new direction was tempered with Nakian's already deep feeling and commitment to the grandeur and elegance of traditional European art. In 1945, Nakian moved his family to Stamford, Connecticut, 35 miles from New York. For the first time in his life, Nakian had a kiln of his very own where he fired a series of exquisite small-scale terra cottas. In these works he found a subject matter and a style which was to prove potent and inexhaustible for the next four decades. The themes were taken from classical mythology - goddesses, nymphs, cupids, and animals which were rendered in a freely expressionistic and vigorously alive manner. Certain highly dramatic motifs were returned to again and again throughout his long career, especially Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, The Birth of Venus, and The Judgment of Paris (Juno, Minerva and Venus).
Nymph
and Goat, 1981 (detail) In the mid-50's Nakian achieved technical innovations that place him among the most important individual contributors to the advancement of sculpture in this century. He devised a new method of building sculpture by spreading thin coats of plaster over cloth, such as burlap, and attaching this to an armature of steel pipes or wire mesh. This difficult working technique presented a formidable challenge to the artist and he continuously perfected it throughout the 50's and 60's. The result was a brilliant group of monumental sculptures in plaster made for bronze casting: la Chambre à Coucher de l'Empereur, Birth of Venus, Judgment of Paris, Goddess with the Golden Thighs, Hecuba and Hiroshima.
la
Chambre à Coucher de l'Empereur, 1954 Nakian's first monumental sculpture, la Chambre à Coucher de I'Empereur (The Emperor's Bedchamber) of 1954 is the precursor of the great monumental works which were begun in the next decade and which preoccupied the sculptor for the rest of his career. With la Chambre, the artist creates his most surrealistic work with teetering, atomized forms, simultaneously abstract and realistic. The sculpture is composed of dismembered anatomical parts and twisting forms which suggest bed sheets and drapery pierced by light and daring open passages within the composition itself. In comparison, Henry Moore's sculptural open spaces seem timid and predictable. The work is a metaphor for Napoleon, Josephine and their bedchamber. Bodies are merely suggested, entwined in the drapery, which wraps and contorts their anatomical features. The intercoiled bodies are suspended between heaven and hell and decidedly not of this earth. Their haunting love story is presented horizontally as they rapturously recline on an unbuttressed bed that displays them ecstatically twisting in space. Napoleon's identifying cornered hat is suggested by the form on the left side of the composition. Furthermore, Jacques Louis David's famous painting, Bonaparte Crossing Mount Saint Bernard, which was admired by Nakian, appears referenced in the composition of this sculpture with the lower portion of the rearing horse echoed in the bedchamber's structure. It was also in the late 50's that Nakian produced three highly original large abstract constructions in which he welded curved and diagonal painted steel plates on a complex arrangement of metal pipes. These ingenious masterworks were entitled The Rape of Lucrece,1958, The Duchess of Alba, 1959, and Mars and Venus, 1960. Most of the steel sheets or plates are machined to a geometrically precise edge, but on a few of the surfaces, Nakian left the edge jagged and torn so as to give the composition an added drama. The plates at first appear to be arbitrarily positioned, thus resembling forms of Abstract Expressionist collage and Surrealist automatism. These astonishing works again represented a radical shift in style for the artist, and with his new found skill as a welder, Nakian created a violent tension with the interplay of bold, light-reflecting sheets amidst a tangle of rods. The interwoven forms with their multiplicity of plane directions appear alternately flat and dense, for Nakian's approach to line and density here is fundamentally a two-dimensional one. In a closed competition held by the renowned architectural firm of Harrison and Abromovitz, Nakian won an important commission for decorating the brick windowless façade of New York University's Loeb Student Center on Washington Square South, the site of his former studio. Although the work is abstract, he caught the essence of the movement of wind sweeping through the square with images of flying leaves, billowing sails, and fleeting wings. Randomly placed along a diagonal line, the clusters of twisting aluminum plates curl away from the wall in opposing directions, delighting the passerby in Washington Square Park below. The metal pieces are immense and heavy in actuality, yet appear light and float gently across the wall of the building, reflecting the changing light of the sun and clouds. This work shares with the sheet and rod series the technique of welded metal sculpture. His intent was to create a sculptural metaphor for the University, and he felt that education is a freeing of the spirit. He commented that when students are educated and civilized, they fly away. Despite his experience and success with welding, Nakian is basically and affirmatively a modeler. His favored materials have always been clay or plaster, prepared as a basis for bronze. His fierce dedication to the passionate and the monumental and his belief that only the heroic can express true passion make modeling the ultimate recourse for him. Nakian certainly experimented and took enormous risks, but after testing the water, was more determined and confident in his own path. This path proclaimed the artist's hand at every turn. Few sculptors of the twentieth century matched his individual and human approach to mass. Other late-century sculptors labored at eliminating all traces of the human touch in their work, seeking instead an impersonal, fabricated and "finished" look. After completing his own masterpieces with industrial techniques, Nakian found the metalworker's material restricted him in making a deep and profound statement about life: "Sculpture has a human content, nobility - that's the only thing in art; without it, it is only decoration, a bland faceless wasteland." Juno was recently cast in bronze for exhibition in Reuben Nakian: Centennial Retrospective, at the Reading (PA) Public Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1998-99. The work was part of Nakian's ambitious Judgment of Paris series which also included Minerva, Venus and Paris. Unfortunately, the latter two works have not survived; however all four works in this series were exhibited in their plaster form at Nakian's 1966 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. These four individual segments were created in the first half of the 60's, the same time period as The Goddess with the Golden Thighs, and the works relate to one another in spirit and in tenure. They share a certain ambiguity of anatomical reading, and in all five pieces the legs appear to be the most prominent feature of the body. The upper portions are usually interpreted as headless torsos, although there is a slight suggestion of human heads and, for all practical purposes, the arms are nonexistent. The suggestion of a head is strongest in The Goddess with the Golden Thighs. Although still nonspecific and uncertain, the head appears to have been partially vaporized. The Judgment of Paris has for centuries been one of the grand themes of Western art, and often was used as a convenient excuse for artists in more conservative times to depict the unclad female form. This ancient beauty contest has traditionally shown beautifully proportioned nudes uninhibitedly displaying their charms. Nakian has taken a more sophisticated and serious approach to this subject, and while his focus is still on the nude female body, he somehow manages to convey the brooding portents of war and destruction. According to Greek mythology, after Paris awarded the apple of discord to Venus, the Trojan War would soon begin. Nakian's massively jagged forms are simultaneously contemplative, fatalistic, ribald, and bawdy. Juno, in particular, with its elaborately articulated surfaces is a masterful meditation on the interrelatedness of love and war, abstraction and reality. Nakian views Juno with her high ranking position among the gods as a casualty of the Hellenic-Trojan tragedy. In The Goddess with the Golden Thighs, the image of an aggressive Earth Mother was ahead of its time in terms of candor, even in the open decade of the 1960's. This work coincided with the beginning of the so-called sexual revolution and advanced de Kooning's monstrous women of a decade earlier. The disjointed fragmented forms of this sister goddess of Juno and Minerva are metaphorical musings on the pleasure of ruins and life itself, bringing to mind ravaged Hellenic civilization and the mysteries of Stonehenge. The central torso of the goddess is set off by the dramatic diagonal spread of the goddess' legs. The four pedestals that support her massive form are classical and geometrical. Nakian revisits this general composition fifteen years later for his Garden of the Gods series. This series consisted of three maquettes, two of which were recreated in monumental form and represent Nakian's largest sculptures. Garden of the Gods I, created in 1980, was obtained for the permanent collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and exhibited at the 1987 inauguration of The Iris and H. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden overlooking Central Park. This colossal work represents the fallen stones of Greece and Rome, the ragged remnants of war and remembrance. The figurative forms appear to grow out of torn and battered edges of past splendor. There is a strong anthropomorphic quality in these forms, as the ruins of great architecture correspond to the ravages of time on the human body. The fifteen years separating Garden from Juno and The Goddess with the Golden Thighs reveal Nakian's philosophical growth from an adoring homage to a female goddess to a summation and testament to the sweep of human creativity and history. It was with Herculean effort that Nakian created his powerful masterpiece, Descent from the Cross, after two years of enormous toil. In 1970, the sculptor mounted scaffolding where he used an ax to shape the unformed burlap-spread plaster on an armature, completing this work in 1972. Five years later, in 1977, Descent was cast in bronze for outdoor display at St. Vartan's Armenian Cathedral in New York.
Venus
(Goddess), 1984 Resources: The Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC includes sculpture by Nakian in the museum's website. The following link takes you to a listing of exhibitions; once there, click on the link to the Reuben Nakian Centennial Retrospective. Then click on the "Virtual Gallery" link. By clicking on "More" at the right-most end of the title bar, you can cycle through an illustrated series of four major bronze sculptures by Nakian: Anahid, 1960; Nymph and Goat, 1978; Europa and the Bull with Cupid, 1951 and Garden of the Gods, III, 1982. http://www.corcoran.edu/cga/exhibit/past.htm The Sheldon Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln includes a major Nakian work, Birth of Venus, 1963-66. The following link takes you to an illustration and description on the work. To see a larger image, click one of the "The Object" links. http://sheldon.unl.edu/HTML/ARTIST/Nakian_R/SG.html
[This essay is the second 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 - 10 January 1999) and at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (6 February 1999 - 4 April 1999). Part Three of Four continues the exploration of Nakian's work with religious themes, and will appear in the November Newsletter.]
About the author: Robert P. Metzger, Ph.D. is Director, Chief Curator and CEO of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania. 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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