Exercises in Erotica

...Rivers has had his creative ups and downs...

...More bravura and less bravado might be one answer...

...He has certainly eliminated the hauteur of bronze by applying paint (the same as that used for Rolls Royces) and by fabricating such accessories as hair and eyes, the latter made separately and placed in rather red-rimmed sockets...

...The sculptor's intention seems to be the expression of femaleness, rather than realism, though he meticulously models sexual features and elaborate hairstyles...

...Sacrificing liveliness of spirit and contour for archetypal significance, the proponents of this style have aimed for a humanoid mass...

...Butler makes no mention of any erotic intent, concentrating instead on the formal problems facing a sculptor trying to strike a balance between the "girl idea" and the "sculpture idea...

...Like Butler, he took reality as a starting point but used its fragments to make collage-like paintings that have, in the past, shown a flashy virtuosity...

...According to John Russell's introduction to the catalogue produced for the show, five years ago Butler began to look again "at the grass roots of the figurative tradition and see if they were still growing...

...Take, for example, his 4-foot-high silver-and-lucite platform shoe set on a black-and-white striped platform roughly 9 feet by 6 feet and repeated in back by a shadow of the same size and shape upholstered in a shiny scarlet substance...

...The two larger pieces, composed of figures approximately eight inches high, illustrate a folk custom of Sardinia, where the artist was born in 1911...

...except for brief hiati in the late '50s and again in the late '60s...

...Nevertheless, he has been exhibiting consistently since 1949...

...Prominent in the English Neo-Realist school that developed after World War II, Butler, now 60, moved from linear iron sculpture in the '50s to modeled forms cast in bronze the following decade...

...It is an occupational weakness of critics to overpraise work that is competent, out of sheer appreciation at finding something easy to apprehend...

...has created neither coherent masses of shapes nor, after the effect of nakedness in a laboratory setting has worn off, an especially erotic impact...

...Here he dithers between abstracting the figure into "interesting" shapes and specifying what the model is actually doing with her invisible partner...

...The influences of Picasso, via Henry Moore, and of archaic art have always been visible in his work, but mostly he has been part of the postwar attempt in Europe and the United States to use the figure in a "modern" way...

...Atmospherically similar is the painting of the crotch of a young girl in shorts, who is eating something out of a paper bag...

...The romantic distortions he had been making for some 15 years no longer seemed appropriate to him...

...Local widows gather around the patient's bed and perform lewd and humorous dances, hoping to make him laugh and to stimulate his "sexual renaissance...

...Dissatisfied with the female rump or perhaps unable to get enough of it, he enlarges buttocks obsessively into shapes that—depending on your angle of view—resemble anything from mammoth billiard balls to the heads of dinosaur bones to puns on the phallic shape...

...His plump playthings are set so uncomfortably on their bases—one has her legs in the air but no support under her rear to make the position possible— that they seem to be undergoing punishment for their sensual antics...

...Nivola's reputation is largest in the architectural field, where he has long been known for his fine abstract reliefs on office and apartment buildings, and for his playground sculpture...

...The modeling of one male figure lying supine on a bed is especially noteworthy: Two sausages have been quickly curved into arms spilling sideways over the soft contours of the bed...

...The legs of most of them are modeled into clusters of two or four cylinders, making the figurines less naturalistic than the reliefs and beds...

...Nivola handles clay as if it were a pastime, but his nonchalance could obscure for some the evidence of vast sculptural experience...

...Consisting of constructions and two-dimensional works in mixed media as well as paintings in acrylic on glossy vinyl, Rivers' current output is depressing because of its tackiness and its embarrassing, passe Pop shrillness...

...Though erotica is not exactly the word for Larry Rivers' latest work, there were strangled allusions to the subject in his recent exhibition at Marlborough Gerson...

...The study of a female arching herself to confront a disembodied penis about the size of her thigh raises the question of whether fantasy can be tackled at all in such ponderous terms...

...It contains no hint of struggle, physical or intellectual, and the artist gives no background material about problems set and solved...

...several reliefs of beach crowds, nude and viewed from above...

...They portray the traditional "cure" for men suffering from malaria...

...So it is possible I have made this work sound too accessible and sweet, too Manzu-like, for some tastes...

...Oregon I and // are virtually cruciform canvases of a girl in a neglige holding her arms outstretched, fn both versions an eye is obliterated and, in one, a breast is squared off by a cerise line as if with surgery in mind...

...pectorals, genitals and some strands of hair fanning out from the head, complete the figure...

...two more are shaped to suggest bony legs, then continue on up to the armpits', the musculature of the abdominal cavity has been filled in by flattened pellets of clay...

...and two more ambitious compositions of standing figures on a horizontal surface...

...moreover, the Thalidomide scandal had made them tasteless...

...Apart from these and such constructions as a theater seat...

...Contemporary sensibilities might reject his contribution in favor of Butler's idees recues, or even Rivers' accurate renderings of some aspects of urban sexual frustrations...

...If all this has little or no artistic merit, it is nevertheless remarkable for capturing the trendy aura of savage desperation and cruelty that pervades most modern pornography, whether movies, magazines or novels by Philip Roth...

...The sculptor's technical freshness is such that one can easily visualize him at work, pressing the small sausages of clay into body forms...

...The words are Reg Butler's, and some of the girls he has made were displayed recently at the Matisse Gallery...

...There were also a number of terra-cotta beds—each about 10 inches long—bearing couples in various attitudes of affection...

...To be precise, the six painted bronzes on view all represented the same girl—a Caucasian beauty of mushroom pallor with a doll-like face and a flaxen wig...

...Unlike Butler and Rivers, Nivola equates sex with pleasure...

...Some are equipped with four tentacle-like arms, two raised behind the head, for instance, and two proffering breasts as if on a platter...

...The result is part nymphet, part earth mother, with vague intimations of pregnancy...

...Demons is perhaps the word for them—as imagined by a Minoan...

...Yet the finished product remains a shaky compromise between sculpture and waxworks, while his distortion of certain forms in the interests of high art has led him to a peculiar amalgam of Playboy and Balthus, with a touch of Francis Bacon...

...Frequently, their compositions, whether in painting or sculpture, have suggested archeological fragments—the equestrian figures of the Italian Marino Marini are a famous case in point...

...One suspects these physical dislocations are symptomatic of psychic ones, which are easier to see in the drawings...

...Possibly his facility as draftsman and painter has held him back from stylistic completion...

...And it offers a significant contrast to the workmanlike earnestness of Butler, who at least reveals some benevolence toward the subject, as well as to the approach of Constantino Nivola, who formerly taught painting and sculpture at Columbia University...

...My impression is that the sculptor, in trying to have his formal cake and eat it too...

...Now 50...

...Rivers deals in a random and unfriendly way with sex, as in the sizable panorama of a movie house, empty save for an embracing couple and an unzipped youth contemplating himself (he appears in other works under the title Fairly Stoned...

...His just concluded exhibit at the Willard featured small figurative pieces, a genre he slips into effortlessly, and they were exquisite...

...It lies heavy and peaceful on the bed, having been put together, one feels, in the space of 10 minutes...

...That his seminal contribution to Pop art seldom receives more than a passing mention in modern art history is not entirely fair...

...Even the archaic references seem to come naturally to Nivola, as if springing from an inherited cultural memory...

...Nivola's figures stand around the bed exposing themselves with considerable ingenuity...

...Life-size and over, the figures disport themselves on free-form pads, also of bronze, that simulate striped upholstery...

...others are flattened into the background, creating a near-abstract design of ripples', still others include perspective, making them really seascapes with figures on the beach and in the impressionistic water...

...While applauding his sensitivity, one wonders why civilian mutilation of children should have proved so much more affecting than that inflicted by war...

...Some of the reliefs are quite high and detailed...

...That would be a pity, however, for Constantino Nivola is stating no less of a truth...

...In an effort to reach complete figuration, the artist started exploring what he calls the "incredible, tiny world between actuality and kitsch"—a course fraught with esthetic shoals, all itemized by Russell...