Sculptures from a Marriage
WILKIN, KAREN
On Art SCULPTURES FROM A MARRIAGE By Karen Wilkin Sculpture can make people nervous. It demands to be perceived through our awareness of our own bodies—of how it feels to occupy space, to...
...if it is well done, is a different composition," an observation that couldn't easily be verified at the Guggenheim...
...Brancusi, for example, is represented less comprehensively than the Nashers apparently would have liked, but little is available...
...Although the couple continued to buy paintings, the collection now includes more than 300 pieces of sculpture and is still growing...
...The intimacy of the medium transforms this celebrated sculpture into a work in progress, while the pale, matte surface seems both to make its angular planes chunkier and more robust, and to sharpen their intersections, so that the sculpture appears weightier and more deeply articulated than it does in bronze...
...Initially, there were practical reasons for this shift of focus...
...There are other, less polite questions about the politics of installation in the rotunda...
...An astute businessman, Nasher quickly realized that "sculpture costs less than paintings of comparable quality...
...Important works rarely seen in this country include Medardo Rosso's wistful, introspective wax on plaster sculptures, the three-dimensional equivalent, perhaps, of Impressionist painting with their blurred, expressive features and restless surfaces...
...I wonder...
...Nasher maintains that "a great piece of sculpture is 360 works," since "each degree of view...
...The Nashers started out as collectors of pre-Columbian art and Guatemalan textiles, expanded their range to Modernist paintings and then, with the acquisition of a major Arp, began to concentrate on the works from which the exhibition was selected...
...The real strength of the Nasher Collection is its concentration on Rodin, Matisse, Giacometti, and David Smith...
...The eccentricities of the collection make for wonderful surprises: a brutal Gaudier-Brzeska marble portrait, like Cubism on steroids...
...A superb group of Matisse bronzes—and one rare plaster—document the clear-sighted logic with which he sought tactile metaphors for how the female body occupies space...
...In this century, when sculpture has increasingly refused to remain decorously isolated on a pedestal, it competes for the very space we inhabit...
...It is only by being sensitive to the courage and poetry of their struggles, and by suggesting the ways in which their explorations touch feelings and thoughts basic to many people, that Modernist sculpture can be effectively gauged...
...Surely not because of a parochial notion of uptown and downtown taste...
...This is generally detrimental, but it is absolutely disastrous for Smith, since it reinforces the grossly inaccurate cliché about his sculpture's being flat and "pictorial...
...That the Caros and the Smith Voltri survived these wretched settings is a tribute to their power...
...Each of Giacometti's three bottom-heavy, blade-headed busts of his brother Diego is compelling, but setting the trio side by side heightens their intensity and clarifies their shifts in proportion, inflection and mass...
...The strongest motivation, however, was pure enthusiasm...
...The selection also reveals the difficulties faced by even the most passionate and ambitious sculpture collectors in recent years...
...All are essential to an understanding of Modernism—the Degases because they rethink the figure as radically as anything by Rodin, and the Picassos and Gonzalezes because they announce a new conception of sculpture not as eloquent mass, but as expressive cage...
...Michael Brenson contributes a longer essay that uses selected works from the collection to illustrate a set of rather mystical "issues" of the language of Modernist sculpture—including "enchantment...
...a confrontational John Storrs bronze, at once an idealized cityscape and a cluster of slender, geometricized figures...
...Karen Wilkin, a new NL contributor is a New York-based critic and curator...
...No one could dispute the splendor of Wright's space, but installing sculpture in the rotunda means balancing works on awkward pedestals with disconcertingly cantilevered circular bases, while larger, ground-based sculptures are often set at strange angles against busy backgrounds, in the topmost bays...
...All of these are reasons to be grateful for A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection, an exhilarating exhibition seen last fall in San Francisco (where it was titled "Masterworks of Modern Sculpture") and currently on view, through June 1, at New York's Guggenheim Museum...
...Rarity probably accounts, too, for the conspicuous absence of Degas' urgently modeled dancers and women at their toilette, and of Picasso's and Gonzalez' pioneering iron and steel constructions of the late '20s...
...The Nasher Collection boasts a spectacular group of these heads...
...Sculpture is unequivocally there, physically present and unignorable...
...A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection is accompanied by a handsome, lavishly illustrated catalogue with uncommonly good photographs—uncommon because of sculpture's famous resistance to the medium—mostly by DavidHeald...
...The path mapped by the exhibit leads rather erratically through Modernist conceptions of figuration and their abstract alternatives...
...The exhibition's curators, Carmen Giménez and Steven A. Nash, have provided, respectively, an elliptical, extremely personal meditation on sculpture and an interesting interview with Raymond Nasher...
...David Smith's evolution can be followed in an impressive selection ranging from a small, Gonzalez-inspired head made in 1938 to the glorious Voltri VI, 1962, an exuberant thrusting chariot that pays homage to—among other things—the Victory of Samothrace, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, and Etruscan votive offerings, all without looking like anything but itself...
...Picasso's plaster Head (Fernande), 1909, stops you in your tracks not as a Cubist icon, but as an extraordinary object...
...Although the exhibition is organized more or less chronologically as you move up the museum's spiral ramp, specific pieces ultimately seem more important than whatever narrative they collectively suggest about the course of sculpture over the last hundred years or so...
...The disproportionate emphasis on Raymond Duchamp-Villon's swoopy, streamlined efforts—sculptures better described as Moderne than as Modernist —is a case in point...
...Why does the Guggenheim persist in uncomfortably jamming painting and sculpture exhibitions into Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda on upper Fifth Avenue and using Arata Isozaki's elegantly proportioned, generous galleries in the downtown Guggenheim on Prince Street for video and conceptual art...
...Did practical consideration of, say, size and physical properties alone determine which works merited the level-floored, self-contained spaces of the Gwathmey-Siegel addition to Wright's original building, or did their placement encode messages about which sculptor's stock is highest at the moment...
...Each is represented brilliantly and in depth by impeccable, key examples that enhance one another—a model of intelligent, audacious collecting and sensitive installation...
...Raymond Nasher's real estate development business provided him with opportunities for what he describes ( in an interview included in the show's catalogue) as "linking art with commercial projects"—in other words, installing large sculptures in public spaces...
...Patsy didn't think that Duchamp-Villon was an especially important artist," her husband explains, "whereas I happened to think that he was one of the greatest...
...A Matisse sculpture might be a tenth the price of a Matisse painting but could be every bit as good, if not better...
...Serious sculpture collectors are rare beasts, and museums think long and hard before organizing sculpture exhibitions, given the logistical problems and expense of moving and installing large, heavy objects that, despite their heft, are often fragile...
...A remarkable plaster of Rodin's Age of Bronze, c. 1876, similarly makes a familiar work seem utterly new...
...There are also a number of quirky side roads, which provide an engaging glimpse into the taste— or rather, tastes—that shaped the collection...
...one of Anthony Caro's first, muscular constructions in steel, Sculpture Three, 1961, plus his more elusive Carriage, 1966, with its overlapping, transparent mesh planes...
...What many of these sculptors accomplished is generous and moving," Brenson writes...
...Among other pleasures: a delectable, pre-1914 plaster cast of Brancusi's 190708 The Kiss—the version in which the embracing arms have not yet been re-absorbed into the block...
...The 100 or so works on display at the Guggenheim serve as both a celebration of particular artists and an overview of Modernism in sculpture from Rodin to the present...
...Special thanks are due Raymond Nasher and his late wife, Patsy, for having been sufficiently obsessed with sculpture—especially Modernist sculpture— to have started collecting it passionately about 40 years ago...
...Worse yet, the "shop-window" sequence of exhibition spaces along the narrow ramp denies all but a single view of many sculptures, as if the other views were expendable...
...She totally disagreed...
...and a sturdy transitional William Tucker from 1978, like a vigorous, stuttering diagram of a schematic and oversized torso...
...Giacometti's entire career is traceable at the Guggenheim, from his early abstract fusions of Surrealist ideas with African-inspired forms to the anxious, compressed, self-effacing figures of his last decade...
...It demands to be perceived through our awareness of our own bodies—of how it feels to occupy space, to move, to resist gravity, to touch...
...I just thought he was wonderful...
...The show offers so many delights that it seems churlish to complain, but questions keep intruding...
...Mostly it was because we loved the physicality and presence of sculpture," Nasher says, an assertion borne out by the thoughtful installation of the best of the collection throughout the interior and grounds of his Dallas home...
...Rodin's plaster Head of Balzac, 1897, a potent near-abstract mass that also reads as a convincing likeness, becomes even more arresting in proximity to a final study for the looming monument to the novelist...
Vol. 80 • April 1997 • No. 6
