Word: nakian
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...Atheneum exhibition should do away with one outworn illusion: that abstract artists are abstract because they cannot paint images. Esteban Vicente's portrait of his little daughter and the early sculptured heads by Sculptors Reuben Nakian and Louise Nevelson prove that these artists could have successfully stuck to representation had they chosen to. Other early works are not so reassuring. Mark Rothko's floating rectangles, controversial though they are, at least have an air of mystery, and many admirers have fallen under their spell. Had Rothko stuck to realism, as in his Two Women in a Window...
...Associated Press and the United Press, stamping on the "bleeding Cuban people." Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art picked the U.S. entries, which included 34 abstractions by Robert Motherwell, two figurative paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, a couple of Leon Golub monsters, engravings by Leonard Baskin, constructions by Reuben Nakian and Richard Stankiewicz...
...trouble was that Nakian felt he was crowding the "hairline between greatness and corniness." His work seemed too glib, too academic-and commercial. Nakian settled back to study his favorite masters-Titian, Rubens, Van Gogh, Cezanne-and read avidly through the Greek classics. The classics, he felt, had everything a sculptor could want, especially the story of how Jupiter disguised himself as a bull and carried the fair Europa off to Crete. Nakian spent five years pummeling and twisting the clay for a huge terra-cotta abstract of the Rape of Europa. "It was a tremendous, wild figure, more bizarre...
Last week, now 54 and getting grey, Reuben Nakian was in a Manhattan gallery with an exhibit he was certain was worth saving. Working at Newark's School of Fine and Industrial Art, the center of a group of noisy, eager students, he has turned out 15 large and small statues in two years. All are of Europa and the bull done in natural clay washed over with red, black and pastel glazes. The work looks rough and half-finished, is built of abstract masses of streaming, fluted clay with little or no regard for anatomy. The angry figures...
...Nakian calls his exhibit "The Voyage to Crete." It is a voyage, he says, that he has been on ever since he first started daubing in clay 40 years...