Reuben Nakian

(b College Point, NY, 10 Aug 1897; d Stamford, CT, 4 Dec 1986). American sculptor. He was the son of Armenian parents who emigrated to the USA from Turkey. In 1916 he was accepted as an apprentice in the studio of Paul Manship in New York. There he worked with Manship's assistant, Gaston Lachaise, with whom he later shared a studio. The subjects of his early work were free-flowing, stylized animals, for example Seal (1930; New York, Whitney). In the 1930s he produced a series of life-size portrait busts of artists, collectors and members of President Roosevelt's first cabinet. In 1934 he exhibited a plaster sculpture, 2.44 m high, of the baseball hero Babe Ruth. The piece was greeted by much fanfare but never cast in bronze and was subsequently destroyed. Long unrecognized and on the brink of poverty, he nonetheless gradually developed a unique style under the influence of his friends Gorky and Stuart Davis. His most significant work was done after 1945. Using methods which combined 'Renaissance studio practice and the immediacy of Oriental calligraphers', he created 'a land of his own', said the poet-critic Frank O'Hara (Nakian, 1966). Drawing was always central to Nakian's production. Inspired by ancient Mediterranean art, he preferred to execute his imagery rapidly in the wet media of plaster and clay. Beginning in the late 1940s, he articulated his surfaces with action and gesture, linking his work with de Kooning and Abstract Expressionism. He worked spontaneously and considered each piece complete at the moment of inspiration. He was his own harshest critic and destroyed much of his work. In most of the surviving drawings and sculptures, uninhibited, voluptuous women and animals cohabit in an atmosphere of lyric sensuality; Leda and the Swan (e.g. Leda and the Swan, h. 318 mm, 1963; New York, Egan Gal.), nymph and satyr, Europa and the Bull are repeated mythical themes. There are an outgoing eroticism and at times a pastoral innocence or comic abandon in the brush drawing or freely cut ceramic line.

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