REUBEN
NAKIAN (1897-1986)
Reuben Nakian was a giant of twentieth-century
modernist American sculpture. His art-historical stride extended
from an apprenticeship with Paul Manship and a studio assistantship
with Gaston Lachaise, to his role as a major participant in the
discourse surrounding Abstract Expressionism, particularly with
Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning. During his seventy-five year
career as an artist, he established a profound oeuvre based almost
entirely on energetic, daring, and often-erotic abstractions
of the female figure. A prolific sculptor in stone, terra cotta,
plaster, steel, and bronze, Nakian remained a vital creative
force until his death in 1986.
While Reuben Nakian's work has been shown
in museums and galleries around the world (the Reuben Nakian
Centennial Retrospective exhibition was on view at the Reading
Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania until January 10, 1998,
and moved in early February to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington D.C., for a two-month stay), this exhibition was his
first solo show in Boston. An important modernist sculptor who
favored mythological themes, his work was featured in a retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966.
The earliest work include animal studies
from the 1920's, which reveal Nakian's stylistic relationship
to direct stone carving. This popular style, which emerged from
the more linear Art Deco style, stressed mass and volume over
line, but retained Art Deco's stylized surfaces and suggestively
abstracted forms. Related works on paper reveal that the issue
of drawing, however, was always central to Nakian's aesthetic.
Nakian's freestanding figures and figurative
groups represent the work for which he is best known. These gestural,
Abstract Expressionist sculptures are based on the radical abstraction
of the female form as a way to transcend mere appearance to address
more primal, essential issues. They are often erotic, sometimes
tragic and always passionate engagements of deep emotional and
spiritual states. The titles, appropriately, refer to characters
and stories from classical mythology, which underscores the deep
psychological underpinnings of the work, and reveals Nakian's
undying allegiance to Mediterranean history and culture. These
sculptures also exhibit Nakian's consistent preoccupation with
drawing, through their insistent linear thrust into space.
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