Available Colors: Black
Available Sizes:
Leda
and the Swan 4 Etching: *Etching with Chine Colle *Signed in the plate
*Limited edition of 75 Reuben Nakian (1897-1986) was born in College
Point, New York. He studied at the Robert Henri School with Homer Boss
and A.S. Baylinson. He also studied at the Art Students League and from
1917 to 1920, apprenticed to Paul Manship and Gaston Lachaise. He taught
sculpture at the Newark Fine Arts and Industrial Arts College and at
Pratt Institute in New York City. Reuben Nakian was a giant of
twentieth-century modernist American sculpture. 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. 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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