Demigods from Stamford

"I hate this age," says Sculptor Reuben Nakian. "It's very cold here. So you have to train yourself to ignore it." For years, Nakian has been training exuberantly at his Stamford, Conn., studio by designing huge, flagrant evocations of Greek nymphs and goddesses (see color opposite). Modern U.S. sculpture in classical themes seems a bit like vodka martinis in Grecian urns. Yet Nakian's polylithic Ledas, Hecubas and Olympias are lusted after by some of the most adventurous contemporary curators and collectors in the country.

Last week, as Nakian approached his 70th birthday, his glowing and explicit Goddess of the Golden Thighs was adding a touch of lust to the Los Angeles County Museum's mammoth "American Sculpture of the Sixties" exhibit. The work, he says, is meant to symbolize "the birth of the universe; like coming out of woman, all life comes out of the female." Also last week, the Art Institute of Chicago opened a 27-sculptor summer exhibit called "A Generation of Innovation." Curator A. James Speyer noted that "works of virtue by many noted sculptors are not included be cause of adherence to traditions earlier than our period." Still, Nakian's four-piece plaster Judgment of Paris (consisting of Paris, Minerva, Juno and Venus) is prominently displayed. To Speyer, the undercurrents of the exhibition are "the romantic trends that emerged in the '50s, both in abstract and figurative work." Nakian's work fits both categories.

Last summer Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art staged a one-man exhibit of Nakian's work that illustrated how his style, as he says, "grew out of me as a tree grows." Born to Armenian immigrants on Long Island, Nakian studied during World War I with Manhattan's Sculptor Paul Manship. By the 1930s, he had won some renown for his idealized, 8-ft.-tall statue of Babe Ruth, his heroic busts of F.D.R., Cordell Hull and other demigods of the New Deal. In the 1940s, he moved on to more remote Greco-Roman themes, explaining that "myths are good because they give you form and a grand story. I don't want only form; I want philosophy, love. You can't make a statue of a man and a woman copulating, but you can use a woman and a swan. Then it becomes poetry."

Gradually, his statues become more nonobjective, jumbled, full of more suggestive, less descriptive shapes. Poetry, perhaps, but energetic poetry. "My things have action," he says proudly today. "They're moving, quivering." To get this effect, he and his assistant, Larry McCabe, build his pieces on a frame of chicken wire, wood and metal, cover this with burlap drapery and swathe the whole in rough plaster. As a rule, the work is cast in bronze and finished in patinas of brown, green or gold only when a customer looms on the horizon, for casting costs can run up to $20,000 per piece.

Nakian has nothing but contempt for young sculptors, of both pop and minimal persuasions. Nonetheless, he shares many contemporary traits with them. His work is massive, blunt, coarse, vulgar, infested with deliberate clumsiness --like much of pop. At the same time, it can be cryptic and withdrawn almost to the point of paranoia, challenging the viewer to discover much of its earthy sensuality for himself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.