Reuben Nakian, Mentor

(from program of Nakian's 1985 show at the DiLaurenti Gallery)

Reuben Nakian today is the country's oldest living sculptor. Yet, at 88, the originality and bouyancy fo the work of this venerable pioneer of modern American art is undiminished. Nakian continues a personal avant-garde history of making deep incisions into our perception of the possibilities of form and surface, gracing our world with creatures that are more sensed than represented, confirming that the importance of his abstract-expressionist influence on sculpture parallels that of de Kooning's on painting. Indeed, the crowning achievement of his later work lies in the simplification almost to abstraction of his nymphs that, unlike de Kooning's women, dance with mischief and melancholy simultaneously, and whose forms are contrasted and idealized into an emphasis on columnar legs that would have delighted the late George Balanchine.

Anthony Triano (right) with his mentor, artist Reuben Nakian

The strong and innovative individualistic expression that is undeniably Nakian's, derives from an honesty to material, and an ability to capture his sponteneity in works of remarkable tactility and sensuousness. Of late, like Matisse, Nakian has adjusted to the impositions of advancing years by adding a new medium – styrofoam and plaster – and changing the scale of his modeling. With this first showing in New York of these most recent works, the artist demonstrates his command of the expressionist tone of rough surface and silhouette, conflicting qualities joined in an "action" of intensity.

Maquette for Garden of the Gods II (1980). Photo: Thor Bostrom

Not since the Museum of Modern Art major retrospective exhibition in 1966 has New York been given the privilege of seeing a full spectrum of the work of Reuben Nakian. The DiLaurenti Gallery exhibition begins with Nakian today, and ranges over more than one hundred sculptures and works on paper that date back to 1915, and to the artist's beginnings as a technically accomplished traditionalist. It provides for the first time a reexamination of the career of a master, born in 1897 in College Point, Long Island, who has consistently been subject to his own uncompromising criticism, and who has been isolated by his resistance to the trends and promotion of contemporary values in art. A man whose inventions have anticipated those of more than one generation of internationally recognized artists, and whose influence is now really beginning to be fully appreciated. A solitary position. One that, in the ebb and flow of creating a remarkable oeuvre, has led him to observe: "When I work in a piece, I just want to make a work of art. I have no concepts, I have no rules. An artist has to reach the stage of Zen."