MANUEL NERI and the Assertion of Modern Figurative Sculpture by akohsassociates

& MANUEL NERI THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE

& MANUEL NERI THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE ANDERSON COLLECTION / STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

BruceESSAYAlexanderINTRODUCTIONNemerovNixon

PREFACE ix Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson FOREWORD xiii Jason MANUELOFINTRODUCTIONLinetzkyHUMANFRAGILITY:NERIANDAUGUSTE RODIN AT STANFORD xix Alexander Nemerov MANUEL NERI & THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE 1 Bruce Nixon 1 CIRCUMSTANTIAL TESTIMONY AND CATEGORIES 7 2 SECOND SELVES 43 3 PLASTER / A FUNCTIONAL METAPHOR 55 4 UNEQUIVOCALLY MODERN 65 5 THE SPIRITUAL TERRAIN OF MODERNITY 81 CONTENTS/

6 STRANGENESS THAT COEXISTS WITH THE FAMILIAR 95 7 AUTHENTICITY OF EXPERIENCE 103 8 IDIOMATIC COLOR / A REQUIREMENT OF THE ARTIST RATHER THAN FIGURAL REALISM 119 9 THE FIGURE IN RELIEF 135 10 HEADS: MOTIFS FROM THE GREAT FIGURATIVE TRADITION 181 11 A TALISMAN OF CONFRONTATION AND EXCHANGE 211 12 THE EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE OF MODERNISM / AN ALTERNATE HISTORY 231 EXHIBITION CHECKLIST 251 MANUEL NERI 259 BIOGRAPHY 261 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 277 MU SEUM & PUBLIC COLLECTIONS 291 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 295 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 321 COLOPHON 324

Our appreciation for gurative works began with early and mid-20th-century sculptures by Rodin, Matisse, Maillol, Arp, Giacometti, Lipchitz, and Ernst. These early works became the foundation for our collection and inspired our interest in contemporary guration. Eventually, this led us to appreciate and admire the work of Manuel Neri. While Neri was well aware of these artists, he is most known for his commitment to the gure in contemporary sculpture, and his impact on the sculpture of his time. His treatment of the gure presented something unique that was exciting to us. We built a strong connection with Charles Cowles and his New York gallery. Presenting solo exhibitions, Cowles was also a great supporter of Bay Area Figurative artists. In the fall of 1982, the gallery mounted an exhibition of Neri’s gurative works. After visiting, we were thrilled to add to our collection the plaster sculpture Standing Figure II , 1982. In early 1984, we purchased a Neri work on paper titled K.C. No. 2, 1982. Later, we added the charcoal, pastel, and gouache on paper Untitled, 1978.

ix Richard Olcott/Ennead Architects Design drawing for the Anderson Collection at Stanford University PREFACE

WE BEGAN COLLECTING MODERN and contemporary art in the late 1960s. At that time, we became great friends with Nathan Oliveira, who was a champion of the Bay Area Figurative artists and introduced us to a number of his contemporaries. Nate’s knowledge helped us to grow and focus our collection, as he encouraged a strategy of always collecting the best of the best.

HarrisonABOVE/BELOWxTruong, Photographer Mary Margaret and Harry W. Anderson at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University with Manuel Neri’s Standing Figure II , 1982 The Andersons with Standing Figure II , 1982, and David Park (1911–1960), Four Women, 1959 OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT Johnna Arnold, Photographer Galleries of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, 2014 Philip Guston (1913–1980), The Coat II , 1977; Sam Francis (1923–1994), Red in Red , 1955; Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Lucifer, 1947 Clyfford Still (1904–1980), 1957-J No. 1 (PH-142), 1957; Peter Voulkos (1924–2002), Untitled Stack , 1981 AdolphBELOW Gottlieb (1903–1974), Trans guration III , 1958; Franz Kline (1910–1962), Figure 8 , 1952

Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, 2017

Neri’s sculptures took guration to a level that we really had not appreciated previously. His works t tightly into our Bay Area Figurative collection, and we recognized the relevance of Neri’s position as a contemporary and colleague of Peter Voulkos, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, Joan Brown, and Elmer Bischoff.Weconsider these works by Neri to be ne examples of gurative sculpture and painting. We wish to thank The Manuel Neri Trust for gifting a signi cant group of works to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

THE ANDERSON COLLECTION AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY takes great pride in sharing the work of Manuel Neri, a native Californian who has been long thought of as an “artist’s artist” among his peers. The museum is grateful to have added to its collection this past year a number of sculptures and works on paper by Neri, through a generous gift from The Manuel Neri Trust, all of which are included in the exhibition, Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure. As a university art museum dedicated to enriching the artistic, cultural, and intellectual pursuits of students, scholars, artists, and every visitor, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University strives to present artworks, exhibitions, and programs that stimulate the mind, hand, and heart. This impulse stems in part from the philosophy of the Anderson family, Harry W. (“Hunk”) and Mary Margaret (“Moo”) Anderson, and Mary Patricia (“Putter”) Anderson Pence, whose collecting criteria requires the existence and evidence of the “head and hands” in every work. Hunk, Moo, and Putter’s ve decades of unwavering support and passion for artists, collecting, and education led them on a path to assemble one of America’s nest private collections. Their transformative gift to Stanford University of 121 world-class modern and contemporary American paintings and sculptures, including a work by Neri, established the museum in 2014. Since its opening in a new building designed by Richard Olcott/Ennead Architects, the Anderson Collection has grown through additional gifts and Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1996

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FOREWORD/

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xv become a place of creative engagement, community programming, and active learning.Manuel Neri’s primary focus in his work has been on the gure, which he approached not only as a sculptural form, but also as a vehicle to convey his humanist ideas. Neri combines historical art forms with modernist ideas to create a viable, gurative form that he wants to be relevant in a contemporary context. His friendships with fellow artists Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Mark di Suvero, and Peter Voulkos, among others, with whom he shared conversations about art, social events, teaching experi ences, and attended exhibitions, created mutual commitments to maintain honesty and integrity in approaching their work.

Among the gifts of art received from The Manuel Neri Trust is a striking work from the early 1960s depicting the young artist, Joan Brown, who at the time was Neri’s model and partner. It is impossible for me to think of this work outside the context of the Anderson Collection. The balance of the dual qual ities of abstraction and guration, of attention to surface, mark, and gesture, are Joan Brown Seated , 1959; Unique Cast 1963; Patina 2016 Anderson Collection at Stanford University

Willemxvide Kooning (1904–1997 ) Woman Standing—Pink , 1954–55 Anderson Collection at Stanford University

xvii indicative of the impact Abstract Expressionism had on the Bay Area, united with Neri’s need to bring attention to the human form. In the context of our collection, this work brings to mindWillem de Kooning’s Woman Standing— Pink , 1954–55, or Nathan Oliveira’s Reclining Nude, 1958, works that, like Neri’s, carry with them traces of the past, of those who may have modeled for them, or who have lived in their presence. This publication, with its thoughtful and insightful essay by Bruce Nixon, accompanied by a trove of archival photos and images of Neri’s work shown alongside important works by Alberto Giacometti, Marino Marini, and others, presents the reader with an opportunity to consider Neri’s work in the context of Modernist ideas. I am grateful to Alexander Nemerov, Thoma Provostial Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, whose enlight ening Introduction considers Neri’s work in context with Auguste Rodin and Stanford University.

The Anderson Collection at Stanford University is deeply grateful to Anne Kohs & Associates and the Trustees, Max Neri and Anne Kohs ofThe Manuel Neri Trust for inviting the museum to select works for donation to its perma nent collection. These sculptures and works on paper expand the breadth, depth, and reach of this collection and provide Stanford students, faculty, and the public rsthand opportunities to think deeply and critically about Neri’s work and the world in which we live.

Jason Linetzky, Director Anderson Collection at Stanford University

Nathan Oliveira (1928–2010) Reclining Nude, 1958 Anderson Collection at Stanford University

HOW TO EXPERIENCE Manuel Neri’s sculptures at Stanford? Compare them to Auguste Rodin’s. Rodin (1840–1917) created The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais , and many other bronzes on campus. The two sculptors are very different, but they share a feeling for human vulnerability.

OFINTRODUCTIONHUMANFRAGILITY:

MANUEL NERI AND AUGUSTE RODIN AT STANFORD

Take Rodin’s The Martyr, for instance. Splayed on her back, the poignant and disturbing bronze gure is among the works at the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford. Unlike her many big brothers and sisters at the Garden — great muscular beings descended from Michelangelo — she is a small woman, pain fully thin, who anticipates the body size of Neri’s plasters and marbles. Had Neri’s favorite model, Mary Julia Klimenko, lived in Paris in the 1880s she would have been perfect for Rodin’s gure. Resting on her left hip, her head tilted back and long hair puddled to one side, the young woman of The Martyr appears as if left for dead. Neri’s sculptures, such as Standing Figure II , 1982, a plaster at the Anderson Collection, likewise feel fragile, sharing The Martyr ’s smallness in space. The plaster woman is life-sized but pared down, eroded. Her attened face is eerily too small. Both Rodin and Neri created individual sculptures that feel like refugees from larger sculptural programs — and from grand explanations of life. The Martyr, lying alone on her plinth, literally comes out of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, having been adapted from one of the gures there. Her excision suggests that Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1980

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xxi she is an exile in other senses as well. No portals or domes or altarpieces frame her fate. Not even an executioner lords over her. She closes her eyes and purses her sensuous lips in bliss, but her demise — her ecstasy, whatever it is — plays out in a purely personal way. The individual is alone. The Stanford sun shines on the closed moons of her attened eye-sockets: that is all she knows of God.

La Porte de l’Enfer [ The Gates of Hell ], 1880–c. 1900; Cast 1981 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University Auguste Rodin (1840–1917 )

OPPOSITE Auguste Rodin (1840–1917 )

La Martyre, grand modele [ The Martyr, large version], 1899–c. 1900; Cast 1983 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

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Neri’s Standing Figure II is also a fugitive from a lost philosophy. Her plaintive stance, patience, and humility all suggest the Egyptian funerary sculpture that is one of Neri’s sources. Like a functionary of the pharaoh, she is ready to stand guard for eternity, deep within the pyramid. Yet she is without a kingdom, a pal ace, an epoch, a dynasty. With no necropolis to grace, Neri’s gure is set free from world views, left alone. With the implacable calm of a Giacometti man on his existential rounds, she is a stranger in the universe. Rodin’s The Martyr — so different from this cool endurance — writhes in a tumble of bones and hair. But Neri and Rodin both explore the pathos of a gure cut adrift.

Harrison Truong, PhotographerOPPOSITE Standing Figure II, 1982, on exhibit at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University,LEFT/RIGHT2014 Standing Figure II, 1982, and Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), Girl on the Beach, 1957, and Berkeley #26 , 1954 Standing Figure II, 1982, and David Park (1911–1960), Four Women, 1959

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917 )

La Martyre, grand modele [ The Martyr, large version] (Detail), 1899–c. 1900; Cast 1983 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

xxiv Curious how in each case tragedy is a mix of reality and make-believe.

Rodin’s The Martyr imparts a strong feeling of the real. The life-size body evokes that of a speci c person. It is not dif cult to imagine the pose having come to Rodin one day in the studio as he contemplated a tired model reclining on a blanket or pillows at the end of a day’s posing, as the Rodin scholar Albert Elsen conjectured. Yet neither this model nor the saint she portrays have names or stories or biographies. There is nothing to tether them to. Like a soldier dead without his dog-tags, or like the dog-tags found alone, minus the bones, Rodin’s sculpture is a whole fragment , a mystery without a solution. That mystery is what makes the gure so lonesome, so lost, like a stray animal. But it also sets her free, liberating her from allegiance to dogmas and truths.

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Neri also combines reality and invention. At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford is Carriona Figure No. 1, of 1981, one of the marble sculptures he began making after visiting the quarry at Carrara in Italy. Life-sized, the marble portrays not only the model Klimenko but Neri himself, establishing a “one-to-one relationship” with the roughly 5-foot-7-inch stature of his own body, as he has said. The feeling of the actual studio is likewise strong. As in Standing Figure II , where the spattered plywood base feels like it was cut directly out of the studio oor, the sculpture at the Cantor is true: true to the artist and model standing there, true to their body sizes, true to the situation, true in the way that the colors slathered on the marble are truly yellow and black. Even the patterned chips taken out of the gure’s smooth marble contours — indentations aked away to make little pockets like the porousness in pumice — are absolutely true to the gradina or other sculptor’s tool that dug them out, each a direct record of Neri’s technique and physical activity.

There is pleasure in this freedom but also pathos. Neri’s sculptures, like Rodin’s, seem wistful for the larger monuments — the known itineraries — that they sever themselves from. The solitary imagination, left to its own devices, discovers that to the outermost limits of its projections it meets with no secu rity, no guarantee, that would prove its gestures are anything except offerings to the void. The exhilaration of making a primitive totem, a rst sign, of creating a cosmos — personal and hard-won — makes each of these sculptures as volatile as a pennant rippling in the wind. But the wish to be answered back — as if by a grand echo that would con rm one’s laments and joys — is the

But those same chips give the work its strong feeling of make-believe. They evoke damage, wear and tear, possibly of the elemental kind, as if the gure has emerged from centuries underground or from the bottom of the ocean. And if the ancient civilization it came from never existed — if it is utterly up to us to invent what it was — so much the better. The gure is loosened from the hold of journeys and destinations, plummeted overboard from the navigational charts of discernible routes and real-life empires and rules. For once we are relieved of the need to determine the actual coordinates from which a work of the imagination has sprung. The sculpture cannot ever be brought back to the cargo hold of facts, to the nameable freight that the stevedores unload.

Carriona Figure No. 1, 1981 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, promised gift of Thomas J. Davis and Shirley Ross Sullivan, L.37.1.2004

The artist’s imagination is limitless, but this heady condition is also a tragedy. Imagination, left to its own devices, starts picturing the time when it did not have to do all the work — when the artist was not so alone, when a larger order made each stroke of the chisel, each slathering of the plaster, a rati ed and signi cant act. Back then, each bend of the body was locked into a cosmic and political order. In the absence of these certitudes, the imagination becomes an art of subtraction, a way of envisioning a sculpture’s dissociation from life. That is why Neri’s gures wear the cerements of a culture that never existed.

xxvi plaintive note that somehow shapes the sculptures’ very forms. It is like centu ries of breezes had eroded Neri’s gures until they could barely recall the parades and ceremonies and rituals they had once overseen with clear features and strong strides. Only patches of color remain on the painted beings that once were so life-like that they seemed to blink in the sun.

Alexander

Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities Stanford University

xxvii They strive to gain back a lost tradition, solacing themselves in pure acts of the imagination.Yet these imaginative acts are always forlorn, manifesting themselves as damage, deterioration, a kind of crumbling. Rodin, setting his gures adrift, marks an earlier moment of this wandering, this voyage cut off from the temple and the stars.

At Stanford and in Silicon Valley, the isolated individual is often held up as a thing of glory. The private intelligence, the singular fate, is the topic of many a secular sermon. Every life, no matter how digitally connected, is held to be precious unto itself, ful lled if not by a destiny of the heavens than by a glory of potential achievement and enduring personal fame. In this environment the sculptures of Rodin and Neri look on with curious detachment. Marking the fragility of the human body in different ways — a protuberant hip bone, an abdomen scored and scratched — each of these sculptures is friendless. Each occupies space blindly, acknowledging that it could be anywhere but, having wound up somewhere, it is powerless to control that environment except by acting its private drama to the indifference of the clouds, the gravel, the droop ing Therepinecones.isno moral lesson in this, no lecture to the masters of the universe. Wrought up in their own worlds, the sculptures have no time to make state ments. They are so absorbed in the equilibrium of their being — writhing, standing — that Silicon Valley itself must seem to them like a place very far off, a sound heard in a dream, a muf ed knocking at the door. In that quiet they hold their ground.

CarlDepartmentNemerov ChairandandMarilynnThoma

MANUEL NERI

Neri’s knowledge of the gurative motif as a history has enabled him to engage some of the most durable traditions ofWestern sculpture, from antiquity to the present, as he has continued to investigate the possibilities of the form in a fully contemporary voice. He accepts the dense thematic and emotional history of the gure as an available resource, and as he contemplates them in the sculptural vocabulary of his own time, an authentic “modern” gure

THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE

BRUCE NIXON M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006

1 &

MANUEL NERI IS A FUNDAMENTALLY MODERN, autobiographical artist, and a humanist by instinct and temperament. Throughout his career, he has been loyal to the sculpted female gure, constructed at human scale in a naturalistic formal language, a gure that uni es and then advances the promi nent gural modalities of his modernist predecessors. Neri’s work, whether in plaster, bronze, or marble, has remained idiomatic, inimitable, immediately recognizable — a gure whose delicate formal integrity and evocative gesture is submitted to a textural treatment of surface, a handling of the motif that recreates it as an articulate “speaking” subject indigenous to the artist — sculpture that captures the condition of the gure/artist striving to make itself/himself known in a world of time and spatial divide. The gures strive, always, to ascertain, as sculpture, how human beings express themselves across those divides, and to discover ways in which expression might be ampli ed through the means of the artist.

1. Mary Julia (Cast 1/4), 1990; Cast 1991; Painted 1992 Private Collection

Taken together, Neri and his predecessors demonstrate the renewal and indeed the continuity of the sculptural gure amid the vicissitudes of the past century and into the contemporary moment.

2 emerges to meet the needs of a “modern” sculptor, a gure that draws on ideas from the past without repeating them verbatim.The gure, for Neri, is a resilient form, capable of embodying humanness under almost any circumstance. Neri has devoted much of his career to the problems of communicability — the human need to be known to and to know one another — and to learn how, and if, such an exchange is even achievable. The spread of gures across the full span of Neri’s career constitutes the artist’s own answer to the inquiries bequeathed to gural sculpture by other humanist sculptors of the Modern era.

The work of Giacometti and Marini is thoroughly familiar to us now, but in its own time, it met with tremendous resistance. At mid-century and well into the postwar era, the dominance of abstraction among artists and critics alike created a climate antagonistic to guration, a situation that did not really end until the early 1960s. And yet, when we look back from our vantage today, we can readily see that beneath the surface of events, the gural motif had tenacity as a valid, ef cacious form within the tumultuous environment of late modern ism. In sculpture, especially, commitment to the naturalistic gure during the second half of the last century would establish the basic terms of its durability in art, the terms that would enable it not only to survive, but to retain its place within the contentious discourse of modern and contemporary art.

In the wake ofWorld War II, sculpture in Europe experienced an expansion at once gural and profoundly humanist, led by a group of artists that included Kenneth Armitage, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, Marino Marini, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Germaine Richier, among others. For the most part, it took place just outside the main currents of European art at the time, in deliberate response to sweeping, catastrophic wartime events and to social shifts that threatened the life of culture. Most of these sculptors were building on developments that had occurred elsewhere in art, chie y in the formal distortions of late expressionism and, of course, abstraction, and would continue to pursue those modes of working. Giacometti and Marini were two who remained loyal to a naturalistic sculptural gure.

In essence, Giacometti and Marini had developed sculptural gures whose thematic substance proved congenial to the temper of progressive art in the postwar era. As a matter of strategy, neither artist attempted to refute abstrac tion or its rationales, or to undermine its real advances. Neither did they ignore the cultural atmosphere in which abstraction was emerging around them. Their work does not evade its historical moment. It argues, rather, for the durable signi cance of the gure, and its ability to address some of the most problematic conditions of the modern present. Giacometti took up, as art, questions raised by phenomenology, using stylized form, scale, radical attenuation, and surface to study the subjective variability and instability of visual perception; in Marini’s work, on the other hand, forms drawn from the long history of the sculptural gure are employed to address the diminshed circumstances of the culturalThesepresent.artists had reestablished the gure at roughly the time that Neri was beginning his career on the American West Coast, and as we now gaze over the length of Neri’s career, we can readily observe how he extends them. Neri recognized that their work was not nished — that more remained to be said with the sculpted gure in our time. Though he represents a subsequent gen eration in art, Neri negotiates the similarly dif cult landscape, one that includes the challenging cultural shifts that register the passage from late Modernism toward post-modernity as well as all the social discontents of the era. Neri values the centrality of the gure in the history of art and its immense eloquence as a form, but at the same time, he is always aware that, in the atmosphere of the late twentieth- and early twenty- rst centuries, he will be required to establish himself as the authority in his work, the source of both its authenticity and its communicability, that he cannot claim the cultural common alities that once informed sculptural building except as personal reference. It is in this sense that his gures, we might say, are utterly autobiographical. They speak for him in, or as, his language — and he is driven to make that language accessible in sculptural terms, literally from work to work. In Neri’s sculpture, we encounter the artist’s unequivocal conception of the gure as sculpture, as, that is, an organized three-dimensional structure, a compositional harmony of parts, means, and effects. He is not constructing a

2. Mary Julia (Cast 2/4), 1990; Cast 1991; Painted 1992 Private Collection

3–4.4 Mary Julia (Cast 3/4), 1990; Cast 2005; Painted 2006

5 representation or a surrogate of the human, or producing a narrative depiction based on the body. He wants sculpture that happens to be derived from the human model. And it must affect us as a sculptural object that shares our space, that stands alongside us, with us, and we must respond to it on those terms.

5. Mary Julia (Cast 4/4), 1990; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Yale University Art Gallery

It may go without saying that Neri mistrusts verbal language and its dubious proclamations of authority. The gure provides him with the authenticity of the expressive body and its gestures, which in turn has sustained his dedication to the processes of sculptural building as a route of escape from the confusions instigated by speech and by the potential for misunderstanding that lurks within it. He wants the sculptural form to speak for him, and to be understood in just that way. His delity to the expressible has rarely been more boldly stated than it isWehere.can justly say that after more than fty years of devotion to the gural motif, Neri’s work speaks for itself, or perhaps more precisely, it speaks for his faith in the durable vitality of the motif at the center ofWestern art history. Still, his use of the sculptural gure — his reliance on the standing female gure and on various canonical poses, and his scrupulous attention to truncated and partial forms — reminds us that Neri’s engagement with the art-historical will always return him to his abiding concern with the relevance of the form in contemporary sculpture.

Those gures, and some that followed soon after, have been invoked as circumstantial testimony in art-critical efforts to t Neri into the regional milieus from which he emerged: the Beat artists in San Francisco, on the one hand, with their love of the funky, the discarded, the ephemeral, and the improvisational, and on the other, the Bay Area gurative painters of the mid-1950s, David Park and Elmer Bischoff especially, whose gures are delineated in muscular, intensely

MANUEL NERI’S CAREER PROPERLY BEGINS during the late 1950s, with a series of plaster sculptures that would include Chanel (1958; re-worked 1964), Hombre Colorado (1958), Standing Figure with Red Arm (1958), the striding Beach Figure (1958), and Armless Figure (1959). All are upright gures of full human scale, substantial in mass, physically awkward, their surfaces rough-hewn and heavily worked. Each is at least partially painted in brash, non-descriptive, seemingly random colors applied with an evident urgency. Only Chanel and Hombre Colorado are complete as gures, though Chanel is fractured, its surfaces opened here and there by seams and ssures. The others are without arms, heads, or feet, and one, Standing Figure with Red Arm, asserts itself with willful de ance, for it is an unlovely thing that challenges the viewer’s empathy.The feet are gone and it leans forward slightly, giving the bulky upper body a menacing tilt. Bare lath thrusts like a bone from one of its shoulders, and the paint on the torso and legs is a blaring collision of sienna, red, black, and silver.

6. James Mitchell, Photographer 9 Mission Street Studio, 1959

CIRCUMSTANTIAL TESTIMONY AND CATEGORIES

8 constructive brushstrokes. Neri could hardly have escaped the in uences of his immediate environment, nor did he ever reject or negate them, or attempt to extricate himself from association with them — indeed, he spent much of his career in the Bay Area, and in time played a central role in the development of a postwar aesthetic there. Nonetheless, as a view intended to encompass and explain either Neri’s methods or his ambitions for the gure, critical af liations limited to the Beats and the Bay Area gurative painters impose severe, nally misleading restrictions on him, particularly as his work expanded after the 1970s.During those early years, Neri empathized with the means with which other West Coast artists dealt with their materials and with gural forms, and although this relationship produced visual echoes among his initial gures, in truth he was by temperament neither a follower nor a joiner. Further, the gure is not merely an aspect of Neri’s work. It is the basis of all he has done. 7. The Bathers , 1958 Private 8.OPPOSITE,CollectionLEFT/RIGHT Chanel, 1958; Re-worked 1964 Private Collection 9. Hombre Colorado, 1958 Private Collection 10. Standing Figure with Red Arm, 1958 Private Collection

13. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Head of Woman (Flora Mayo), 1926 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 14. Seated Female Figure, 1961 Private Collection

His pursuit of the form across the entirety of his career can be typi ed by a trans-historical curiosity regarding the gural sculptors who preceded him, the intricate networks of tradition, in combination with his interest in the possibili ties for the form in the present. Neri’s imaginative conception of his motif embraces its history in art with a freedom and a thoroughness that simply does not exist among the Bay Area gurative painters of the 1950s. By the same token, although he shares some of the material practices of the Beat artists who were his colleagues and friends — Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Wally Hedrick among them — his restless art-historical curiosity, his willingness to study the gural past at length and to learn from it, detaches him from the programmatic investment in an outsider aesthetic that characterizes many of the Beat artists in San Francisco, as his subsequent production amply demonstrates.

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 11–12. Carla III , 1958–60BELOW

One could certainly argue that beyond their otherwise dissimilar projects and visual interests, the Beat artists and the gurative painters in the Bay Area shared a devotion to individualistic, incontestably human content, and in this respect both were harmonious with a more general humanist challenge to the frightening political and social climate of the Cold War era. It was a response to conditions that came from various sectors of American intellectual life, and the Bay Area artists can indeed be viewed as a regional manifestation of the dissident cry against larger trends in the society. Because both the gurative painters and the Beat artists in San Francisco were so insistent about validating the human basis for the various symbols and metaphors in their work, they provided an af rmative and nourishing artistic atmosphere for Neri during those years.

15.LEFT/RIGHT Wood Figure No. 1, 1956–57 Private Collection 16. Wire Figure No. 2, 1956–57 Private Collection 17. Wire Figure No. 1, 1956–57 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

LEFT/RIGHT1318. Untitled (Bird ), 1957–60 Private Collection 19. Hawk , 1957–60 Private Collection

14 For Neri, the gure has provided a consistent, exceedingly sturdy scaffold on which to organize his various sculptural and thematic concerns, and as his work developed after the 1950s, it would display an increasing sensitivity to the ways in which so dense and uent a visual referent can catalyze fresh readings around its many different associations — cultural, social, religious, and so on, contem porary as well as art-historical. Over time, then, the gure became for him a formal motif quite congenial to the critically querulous climate of late modernity, capable of accommodating a spacious range of interpretations, intuitive as well as analytical. To go a further step, Neri’s career will be regarded more pro tably — and more appropriately — in conjunction with the wave of gurative sculpture that emerged in Europe in the decade following World War II, work unequivocally humanist in orientation, a stubborn reassertion of the form that occurred in the shadow of abstraction’s ascension in both Europe and the United States. 20–21. Beach Figure, 1958 Private 22–23.OPPOSITECollection Armless Figure, 1959 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

24.LEFT/RIGHT16Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme qui marche [ Walking Woman I ( Woman Walking )], 1932 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 25. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Venere [ Venus], 1942 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

17 In Europe, this body of gurative artists would include Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini, as well as Germaine Richier, Giacomo Manzù, Eduardo Paolozzi, César, Kenneth Armitage, and Henry Moore. During those years in America, where the doctrines of abstract painting had become virtually a rule of law among artists, sculptors of gural inclination tended to embed the form in totemic structures. It was a strategy that enabled them to establish a plausible association with the atavistic, sacral themes of archaism, spirit, and ritual that were being advanced by a number of prominent abstract painters, while at the same time minimizing allusions to older academic traditions or even the speci cities of gural correspondence: here, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, and David Hare come to mind. In his allegiance to a naturalistic, historically referential, yet unmistakably contemporary human form, Neri stands almost alone among American sculptors of that era, and by now his connection to concurrent trends in European sculpture seems virtually self-evident. We only have to place his work alongside gures by Giacometti or Marini to feel the intimacy of their kinship, a kinship born of a need to maintain the gural tradition in the visual language of modern sculpture.

LEFT/RIGHT 26. Germaine Richier (1902–1959) Die Kröte, 1942 Kunstmuseum Bern 27. Untitled [Armless Figure IV ], 1974 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

28–29.18Seated Female Figure with Leg Raised , 1959 Private 30.OPPOSITE,CollectionLEFT/RIGHTAlbertoGiacometti (1901–1966) City Square, 1948 The Museum of Modern Art, New York 31. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta (Nuda femminile) [ Young Girl (Female Nude)], 1938 Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

If we look across the whole of Neri’s career, we can readily observe the single-mindedness with which he went about freeing the sculpted gure from the con nements of regionalism and its unavoidable modesties. Further, without events in postwar Europe as a background, his work probably would not have taken shape in quite the same way. Remove that context and Neri might appear idiosyncratic to us now. As we consider his rst gures from our vantage in the present, their awkward, rather graceless appearance may be seen as a sugges tive metaphor of the awkwardness, uncertainty, and self-consciousness of the sculpted gure itself at that moment in the United States, as it strove to nd a direction during a cultural period almost wholly overwhelmed by the nonobjective canvas.

To speak broadly, our informing narrative is the successful passage of natu ralistic gural sculpture across the hazardous terrain of visual modernism as it played out during the postwar period here and in Europe. Because Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini are so familiar to us today, we can easily forget that their work met with tremendous resistance in its own time — that its passage was hazardous precisely because the artistic climate at the time,

20 dominated by abstraction and its advocates, would remain inhospitable to g uration of any kind until the early 1960s. But it was an adventurous passage nonetheless, one in which the very durability of the gural motif — its tenacity as a valid, ef cacious artistic choice — will nally ease formal divisions between these artists. Taken together, their work establishes the basic terms for the survival of the naturalistic gure in contemporary culture, or more exactly, how in each instance the individual treatment of the motif advances that survival, enabling the gure to retain a place within modernity’s contentious discourse.

Historically, the emergence of an expressionist gurative sculpture did not dominate European art after the war, but neither should it be taken as a minor or merely transitory outburst — nor was it unknown in the United States. In September 1959, the Museum of Modern Art mounted New Images of Man, an exhibition assembled by curator Peter Selz. New Images of Man brought together more than a hundred works by twenty-three contemporary artists engaged with gurative content, painters as well as sculptors. Nearly half were European: Giacometti, Richier, Paolozzi, and Armitage among them. The selec tion was provocative by design, a deliberate intervention that proposed itself as an alternative to the hegemony of painterly abstraction, or an antidote. In an

It is a journey in which Neri participates, and one in which he must be included.Inessence, Giacometti and Marini each developed a formal language that would be compatible with the temper of progressive art after World War II. As a matter of strategy, neither artist attempted to refute abstraction or its rationales, or to undermine its real advances. Nor did they ignore the cultural atmosphere in which abstraction was emerging. Their work never shows any particular desire to evade its historical moment. In their hands, the gural motif demonstrates its ability to address some of the most problematic conditions of the modern present, and in doing so, it argued for the gure as a relevant contemporary form. Although Neri represents the subsequent generation in art — the next step in the trajectory of the sculptural gure — he negotiates the similarly dif cult landscape of late modernism and its eventual shift toward postmodernity. We are speaking, once again, of the continuity of the gure as a viable contemporary sculptural form.

21 effort to validate this work on historical grounds, Selz emphasized its humanist content, interpreting its appearance as a romantic resurgence, perhaps even a retention of nineteenth-century visual poetics that addressed, in a modern artistic vocabulary, the extreme duress that now seemed to characterize the human plight in the nuclear age. OPPOSITE 32. Carla VI , 1958–60 Private Collection 33–35. Exhibition catalogue, New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959

36–37.

At that moment, the postwar ascendance of abstract expressionist painting in America seemed all but unchallengeable. Its dominion extended across museums, galleries, and the academy alike, and although this was soon to change, for the time being, at least, the critical complacency that followed in the wake of triumph cast a shadow over responses to the exhibition. Diarchy, a squat, board-like gure by the English sculptor Kenneth Armitage, stood like an otherworldly sentinel at the entrance to the galleries, but it would be powerless against the condescension of the New York press. One critic described New Images of Man as a display of brutes, monsters, and hollow men, and in the New Yorker, Robert Coates dismissed its premise out of hand: the exhibition, he wrote, is “so capricious and so far from representing any broad, true impression of the atmosphere of today that it is hardly worth while giving into any critical appraisal of it.” Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 1959

30–November 29,

For the organizers, a great deal was at stake, enough that Selz had been able to recruit Paul Tillich to contribute a preface to the exhibition catalog. Tillich was then the preeminent theologian in America, and already had written at length on the possible paths of reconciliation between Christian revelation and European existentialism. Tillich believed that Christianity could still answer the most dif cult questions raised by modern philosophy — even postwar theories of radical doubt and despair — and so the thrust of his thought was aligned with Selz’s ambitions for New Images of Man . Indeed, his essay has the tone of a manifesto. In Tillich’s view, the disappearance of the gure from art offered yet another example of the suppression, alienation, and dehumanization that were being instituted throughout the life of culture by the vast, largely anonymous forces of self-interested power at play in the postwar world.

38. Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of Alberto Giacometti sculptures in the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959

As a consequence of those conditions, he wrote, “the image of man became transformed, distorted, disrupted and it nally disappeared in recent art. But as in the reality of our lives, so in its mirror of the visual arts, the human protest arose against the fate to become a thing. The artists, who are shown in this exhibition, are representatives of such a protest.” Selz took up his own motives in an essay saturated with the existentialist discourse of the prior decade, and one senses that for these authors, both of whom emigrated from Germany during the mid-1930s to escape harassment by the Nazis, the prideful autocracy of abstract expressionist doctrine was more than a philosophical or art-critical problem alone. For us today, the tempest surrounding the appearance of New Images of Man is a vivid reminder of the barrier that separated abstract and gurative art and their respective functions at that time. As we know now, a fairly wide variety of work was moving forward beneath the visible skin of the New York art world during those years, and inevitably it began to assert itself on the critical marketplace. Although one can make too much of the signi cance of the exhibition, it has meaning here because it epitomizes, too, the erce critical partisanship that Manuel Neri faced in the late 1950s as he formulated his direction as an artist. At that point, the gure, as a subject for contemporary art, was laden with risk even in the Bay Area. In the years immediately after the war, San Francisco had experienced its own comprehensive abstract expressionist phase, a moment when regional conversion to the nonobjective canvas was so complete that the emergence of gural painting in the early 1950s — beginning with David Park — would be received by other artists in the region as regres sive, willfully contrarian, reactionary. Yet the gural canvas held rm there, as a kind of local insurgency that eventually settled into uneasy coexistence with the abstractionist mainstream, and without it, Neri might well have found himself on much stonier ground. If an attraction to the full-sized sculptural gure seemed eccentric in an artist then in his mid-twenties, to his good fortune, the Bay Area let him go his way.

At the time of New Images of Man, Giacometti and Marini were well established in European cultural circles. Although viewers and institutions in the OPPOSITE 39–40. Figure with Arms Raised , 1968 Private Collection 41. David Park (1911–1960) The Model, 1959 Yale University Art Gallery

43. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Composition avec trois gures et une tête (la place) [ Three Figures and a Head ( The Small Square)], 1950; Cast Fondation2007 Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche I [ Walking Man I ], 1960 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

26 United States still turned a cool eye in their direction, change was in the air here, too. In another six or seven years, Giacometti’s attenuated gures would be a common sight in American art museums, an instantly recognizable sculp tural population whose appeal has never diminished. And within the context of the humanist sculptural revival in Europe after the war, only Giacometti and Marini have a critical relationship with Neri through their conceptions of, or for, the human form. Both were born in 1901, and so represent the preceding generation in art. They are his most proximate lineage and Neri, to speak broadly, relates to them as such. But let us go another step. Giacometti and Marini represent the two primary paths for an explicit sculptural guration in the mid-twentieth century. For 42. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona [Reclining Pomona], 1935 Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT

44.

27 Giacometti, the gural identity is chie y perceptual, the site of a tense, dramatic encounter between the artist’s eye and the spatial world, mediated through his hand and his materials. Although he refers to sculptural history, the modes of archaic religious statuary in particular, Giacometti was resolutely engaged with the present and its concerns: his tactics would be scale, material attenuation, stylized form and idiomatic surface, and repetition. Marini’s gure is poetic. Its awareness of its own cultural past — Marini’s cultural inheritance as an Italian and as a Tuscan — can hardly be overstated as a resource in his expansion of content and mean ing, as if the artist means to insist that the past cannot simply be argued away, jettisoned, or abandoned, nor can the gure, as a representative of all that is human, be severed from its deepest roots and traditions and endure.

These currents converge in Neri. He values the centrality of the gure in the history of art, its textures and immense eloquence as a form, but at the same time, he is always aware that in the atmosphere of the late twentieth century he will be required to establish himself as the authority in his work, the source of both its authenticity and its communicability, that he cannot claim the cultural commonalities that once informed sculptural building except as personal refer ence. His gure, we might say, is autobiographical. It speaks for him in, or as, his language, and he is driven to make that language accessible in sculptural terms, literally from work to work. At the same time, the trans-historical nature of his imagination has allowed him to proceed with the assurance that more generally expansive and encompassing gural traditions stand in support behind his im mediate predecessors, too, and behind him. It is relationships with the past that have enabled Neri to look at and use almost any prior use of the gural form as though it is itself of the present.

OPPOSITE 45–46. Armless Figure in Silver II , 1960 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis 47–48. La Palestra No. 6 , 1988

In the summer of 1961, Neri traveled in Europe for the rst time, and there he saw works by Giacometti, Marini, and other postwar gurative sculptors that were previously available to him only in reproduction. Firsthand experience was revelatory. The gures opened themselves in all their formal and thematic complexity, and Neri returned to the United States invigorated, with a fresh understanding of himself, and of his work, within the context of a much larger sculptural emergence. As a sculptor, he was no longer alone.

49–50. Male Figure I, 1958

During the course of that trip, Neri also encountered — crucially — the sculpture of antiquity, the stone fragments he saw in Florence, Rome, and Paris — gural remnants that had endured centuries of tribulation and wear, the very sculpture studied by Michelangelo, Rodin, and many others. He was fascinated by the sculptural lessons imparted by accidents of breakage and erosion, time’s serendipitous alterations to these ancient forms. However truncated, still they displayed a complete, unequivocally human, often complex expressive capacity. Their effect can hardly be underestimated. No other American sculptor of the postwar era has worked as extensively or as fruitfully with the partial gure. 51–52. Female Figure I , 1958

53.32Kneeling Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Private 54–56.OPPOSITECollection Shrouded Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Yale University Art Gallery

Still, the 1960s would be for Neri an investigatory period of exemplary thoroughness and rigor, as he went about placing a sturdy foundation for the great spread of work that was to come. He produced heads and partial gures of notable force — Kneeling Figure (1960; re-worked 1964), and the enigmatic plaster, Shrouded Figure (1964) are examples — as well as ostensibly “abstract” forms such as the light-weight, wall-mounted, sculpture, Window Series Sculpture I (1968), made out of a plaster-like material called “magnesite”. This wall sculpture is related to a series of paintings and drawings Neri created in the late 1950s titled “Window Series” while he was a student at California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Two other sculptures, the aluminum-faced Geometric Sculptures (1966) are characterized by their unmistakable formal echoes of the human torso. Neri’s sketchbooks are full of colored versions of these joined and twisting “blocks,” and we feel instinctively that for all their formal objecti cation, they are based on a model, or on memories of gures that Neri had been observing in his daily life.

57.ABOVE,34LEFT/RIGHT Pastel Study for Window Series No. 11, 1959 Private Collection 58. Pastel Study for Window Series No. 7, 1959 Private Collection 59. Pastel Study for Window Series No. 14, 1959 60.BELOWWindow Series Sculpture I , 1968 61.ABOVE,OPPOSITELEFT/RIGHT No Hands Neri Sketchbook, Page 75 verso, 1966 62. No Hands Neri Sketchbook, Page 83 verso, 1966 BELOW, LEFT/RIGHT 63. Geometric Sculpture I , 1966 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis 64. Geometric Sculpture II , 1966 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

By the end of the decade, Neri was also building the Architectural Forms (1969), which re ect his travels through Mesoamerica in the late 1960s and his studies of ancient sites in Mexico and Peru. The Architectural Forms reach in a number of directions: toward the ancient past, certainly, and the utter submission to time that marks its sculptural survival, and toward events in contemporary art, including earthworks, conceptual art, the material and formal reductions of minimalism, and so on. But they also resemble pedestals. Was Neri already thinking about the gures that he might one day place on them? Perhaps. In any case, he was circling patiently in the direction of the full gure of his mature career, and as we shall see, this kind of discipline and attention would yield many rewards.

65. Architectural Forms–Tula Series V [ Untitled Rectangles, 1969–71], 1969 Yale University Art Gallery 66–67.OPPOSITEStanding Armless Figure, 1974

68.38Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993

70. Mary Julia Klimenko, Photographer View of Carrara Studio,BELOW1983

During the late 1970s, Neri spent several summers in Carrara. In 1981, he acquired a studio there and began returning annually to Italy to work in marble. This provided him with a base from which he was able to travel easily to Florence and Rome, to the Etruscan archeological sites throughout the region, and to the Tuscan museums where he could contemplate the recovered sculp ture and artifacts at his leisure. He was now in regular, direct contact with some of the most durable gurative traditions in Western sculpture, immersing himself in a landscape inseparable from the history of the sculptural gure in Western art as he studied the gures of the Etruscans and of classical antiquity alongside work of European modernism. It would become a regular practice, one that also re ects Neri’s desire, or need, apparently innate, to extend his grasp of the history of his form, which in turn has enabled him — as we shall see at greater length — to absorb and utilize this history in incontestably modern terms, drawing on various traditions without repeating or quoting them verbatim. It is a resilient form he seeks, an authentically modern gure with the ability to communicate a felt humanness under the most contemporary of circumstances.

71. Darren Cox, Photographer Etruscan Temple Ruins at the Fiesole Archaeological Area outside Florence, Italy, 2007

LEFT/RIGHT

69. Babette Eddleston,CarraraPhotographerStudio,1977

72–75.40Carla V, 1964 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Because we are considering him, in part, against the setting of the postwar gure in Europe, let us remember that Neri’s place is the United States of the Vietnam years, Watergate, Reaganomics, the culture wars, ecological catastrophe, an in ltration and corruption of public discourse by the self-serving lexicons of politics, the media, advertising, and technology, and on and on. Much of his career unfolded during a dif cult historical period, in a nation rife with social and political anxieties and, at the same time, dulled and distracted by a bur geoning, increasingly in uential mass culture. In the midst of this strange, often frightening environment, Neri discovered possibilities in the naturalistic gure as a pathway through some of the thorniest problems of human communication and expressivity. Not that his work can or even should be seen as artistically “expressive.” Absolutely not. It is a dedicated study of communicative expression itself.

SECONDparts. SELVES2

76. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Manuel Neri working with Mary Julia Klimenko, Benicia Studio, 1985

NERI MET MARY JULIA KLIMENKO IN 1972 , and she would be his primary model for decades to come. Klimenko was ideally suited to Neri’s working methods. She had an unusually vivid awareness of her body as a com municative vehicle, and at the same time showed little physical self-consciousness in the studio. No pose or gestural nuance went untested, and their work together yielded the expansive production of the gural form that has become a hallmark of Neri’s output, the lithe, delicate-looking females, androgynous, wai ike, feet planted resolutely on their plywood bases.

These gures refer explicitly to the physical traits and gestures of the model, and they reveal the tremendous care with which Neri attended to replicating her narrow, delicate shoulders and the curve of her abdomen, the owing movement of back and buttocks, the serpentine spine, the neck and ponytail, the athletic thighs and calves, her innate poise: such fastidiousness led to a particular kind of verity, one that allowed the sculptor to develop a lucid, compelling depictive reality apart from the deterministic appearances of conventional realism. What Neri does accept from sculptural tradition is the submission of the entire gure to formal integration, the insistence that each part be congruous with and contributive to the uni ed whole of the gural body — a harmony of gesture that prohibits the visual dispersal of the form into its constituent

This devotion to the structural unity of the gure has the effect of linking Neri to the sculpture of antiquity, the Renaissance, and, if surreptitiously, to Rodin and Bourdelle, a sense of the body as a proportionate, interconnected system of levers and fulcrums in which even the slightest shift or alteration produces unavoidable formal consequences throughout its entirety. While the historical connections may only be inferred, Neri appreciates their presence and the particular kind of support that comes from them: a nonspeci c histor ical context that places no pressure of its own upon his constructive process.

Still, because Neri’s gures tend to hide the kind of psychological information that normally invests the form with literary narrative — facial expression, or specialized physical gestures — his sculptures withdraw from the thematic

77.LEFT/RIGHTSteveMoore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1979 78. Seated Female Figure I , 1979 Private Collection

45 intentionality of those predecessors, which in the past has variously appeared as idealization, commemoration, the orid tonality of Rodin and the symbolists, and so on. If Neri returns periodically to formal ideas drawn from the sculpture of antiquity, it is because those gures embody a paradox that he admires: though they may be quite anonymous as depictions, an expressive capacity endures, undiminished after millennia. How, he wants to know, does the gure express itself as a body rather than as a personality? Or: how is character embodied physically? Thus Neri’s study of the gure has been experiential and empirical, not traditionally anatomical, and he has often worked with the model and sculpture in immediate proximity, thereby insuring the precise accuracy of the gural form as he builds. 79–80. Seated Female Figure I , 1979 Private Collection

81–83.46Standing Figure No. 1, 1976; Re-worked 1979 Private Collection

This kind of building is not simply technique, for the purpose of recreating the form of the model. It re ects, rather, the artist’s un inching skepticism re garding a priori knowledge of how gures reveal themselves, his conviction that sculpture contrived solely from a memory or an idea might be little more than the presentation of a predetermined concept, and therefore corrupted as a form. It further con rms Neri’s reliance on touch, as well, his fear that the eye alone might force his gures back into acculturated hierarchies of formal or narrative signi cance. To get a little closer to the nature of this quality in the artist, let us say that Neri sees with his hands. Or that what he knows with his hands is more trustworthy to him than what he only sees, and so provides him with a more dependable testimony regarding the truth of the subject. Does this suggest a phenomenological motive for Neri’s gures? One thinks of an observation by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind.” Here, Merleau-Ponty refers to Cézanne, though the passage is toned by the author’s abiding interest in the Giacomettian gure, which, he believed, was closer in spirit to phenomenology than to existentialism or to the existentialists’ claims for it. But we cannot read these words without thinking about Neri: “The painter ‘takes his body with him,’ says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by leading his body into the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body — not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.”Merleau-Ponty’s subject is the eye, and how a distinctly modern problema tizing of visual perception affected the tasks of painting, typi ed by Cézanne’s realization, as art, that visibility is as much an extension of the body/self as it is a quality in things, that art and the world do not in fact meet within the eld of representation. Just as the point holds as an approach to Giacometti’s work, it can also be applied to Neri, whose work continually reveals his conviction that the whole body participates in our encounters with the physical world — in, that is, the endless and abundant accumulation of sensory information — and that an awareness of the operations of the active, sensate body will always be necessary to our understanding of reality.

84–85. Posturing Series No. 2, 1978 Private 86–87.OPPOSITECollection Julia, 1976; Re-worked 2010 Yale University Art Gallery

The overall integrity of Neri’s form suggests, therefore, that a comprehensive integration of our physicality — body and mind — is not simply our best means for knowing our surroundings. It is also the means by which we arrive at knowl edge of others like ourselves. What exists solely in the realm of sight exists “outside” the body, in space, and thus “apart” from the body, forever marked by an absolute separateness, as the eye forages the visual eld before it, looking without physical contact across a spatial divide it can never hope to master. The eye may lead the body, but that is all. Because the sculpted gure must express itself in a (visual) eld comprised of other objects, a eld in which it takes part, as do we, its viewers, the work always risks a return to the realm of sight alone — a situation that Neri strives to circumvent with his dynamic surfaces and the addition of color. Or: a vivid, dimensional instatement of the gure into the physical world, as the demon stration of its desire to be seen as something more than an “object,” is among the duties that texture and color are called upon to perform on behalf of the work.

50 In L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti (1958), Jean Genet wrote of visiting Giacometti’s studio and there conversing with the standing gures by running his hands over their pitted surfaces, and we want to do the same with Neri’s sculpture, too, not as voyeurs, but as fellow travelers who yearn for the kind of experience that only the body can provide. The gural surfaces, scored and abraded, marked everywhere by the hand of the artist, sometimes urgently, sometimes gently, sometimes ruminatively, seize the haptic eye and, further, seek the actual hand of the viewer — as though Neri reaches for our hands with his own, through the gure, or with the gure as intermediary — that our hands might also see as he sees, that we might travel his path to knowledge of the form. In just this way, the gures argue for Neri’s belief that authentic contact is possible, and here he plunges decisively into a territory of his own, for he is now 88.LEFT/RIGHTM.Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1992 89. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1980

Still, Giacometti’s experience provides a useful background to Neri’s under taking. For Giacometti, the sensation of acute visual de-familiarization, which occurred during the seemingly prosaic act of looking, provoked an anxiety that became another aspect of a phenomenon that he wanted to embed in his sculpture — the demonstrable instability of sight and the frightening jolt of physical separation it produced in him. To go another step, if the labor of the eye is unstable, then knowledge — even consciousness itself — must be peril ous as well. 90. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1995

51 far from the Giacometti who described the unsettling nale of a studio session by saying that after many hours of close observation his model had become a stranger to him — even when the model was his wife — and that he no longer recognized her as someone he knew, loved, observed daily.

91–94.52Mary and Julia, 1979 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Neri is sensitive to these concerns as aspects of sculptural presence and the questions it can raise for us. He feels a related, perhaps quite similar anxiety in the face of language and its ambition to contain — to represent — de nitive modes of knowledge. When rationalism calls upon language, words are suscep tible to rationalism’s (self-) deceptions, its inevitable human shortcomings, limitations, and misunderstandings, and in this sense, the vagaries of language resemble, or are analogous to, the deceptions of the eye, similarly conditioned by familiarity and habit to see what it wants, or expects, to see. Neri, however, has no interest in posting further lessons on the subject of visual instability. The physically expressible is his concern — what is expressed by the gure, whether human or sculptural, authentically, beyond the reach of language — and so he commits himself — the point can hardly be made often enough — to an indi visibility of perception as the most reliable basis of experience and therefore of understanding. Here, indivisibility describes the fullest kind of physical encounter, one that engages the whole physical body in its contact with the world, repre sented in Neri’s work by our moment-to-moment apprehension of other human beings, endlessly variable, endlessly communicative, complex, and utterly likeForourselves.Neri,all

the pictorial conventions related to the biases of sight — perspective, scale, the illusionism of modeling, descriptive color — are inven tions that have originated in art, that is, in the human mind and its desire to manage experience. As such, they are techniques, submitted to the organiza tion of things seen, true to the human imagination and its irresistible ordering impulse, but unfaithful to the actuality of the world. Thus art may become yet another rationalizing system, like language itself, and we will nd ourselves on treacherous ground if we accept without question the explanations and claims to truth of either. We tell ourselves that language and visual art are simply revealing an order that already exists in and around us, but how can we be so sure? Neri asserts his questions through sculptural gestures that derive from his own body and are subsequently rediscovered in the body of the model. It was a stroke of fortune that he found a model through whom he could perform these constructive processes so consistently as a mirror of the (his) self.

PLASTER / A FUNCTIONAL METAPHOR

95. Steve Moore,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1980

THROUGHOUT THE 1970S AND EARLY 1980S , plaster would be Neri’s chief sculptural medium, and although he has worked at length with marble and painted bronze since the mid-seventies, plaster is the material with which he is most often associated. It is so crucial to all that he has done with the gure — conceptually and formally — that the terms of his engagement with it bear inspection. First and foremost, the malleability of plaster, which permits an end less variety of additive and reductive techniques, is exceptionally well suited to the concentration and speed with which he typically builds. He can model, carve, or cast it, and its surface, marked by every gesture, each glancing touch of hand or tool, is an unerringly precise palimpsest of the making process. Whatever history may reside in the pose or gestures of the form, the surface belongs entirely to the artist. In this respect, Neri has bene ted from Giacometti’s handling of surface as a viable, personal site of engagement with, and on, a motif that comes sweeping out of the past and into the (his) present moment with its history in tow. Given its swiftness of application, plaster may be the sculptural medium closest in spirit to painting or drawing, and indeed plaster invites the use of paint. Although Neri has used color on bronze and stone with striking originality of effect, the luminous brilliance of freshly dried plaster can hardly avoid com parison to a waiting canvas, and the possibilities for metaphor quickly multiply when the traditional ground of painting assumes human form.

Not only does plaster offer the potential for substantial revision — Neri has gone back to individual pieces after years, or decades, to rework ideas — it can discolor or crack over time. Certain textures begin to crumble, as if shedding dead epidural tissue. Thus time enters the work — enters it literally, a material resource just outside the artist’s control — as the sculpture struggles to return to its constitutive state, with often unanticipated visual effects. These kinds of unpredictable occurrences are transformed in turn into a functional metaphor of the patient agency of time — of history — connecting the work both materially and conceptually to the scarred fragments of antique sculpture that Neri rst encountered in Italy in 1961, objects whose surfaces, inscribed by existence itself, gave seductive evidence of historical passage, as a kind of serendipitous artistic presence that very gradually went about altering the work by the means of happenstance and accident.

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 96. Standing Figure, 1972 Private Collection 97. Photographer Unknown Neri with sculptures in process, San Jose State University Art Gallery, 1974 98. Photographer Unknown Sculptures in process, San Jose State University Art Gallery, 1974

But this is poetic reading of time and its functional relationship to the work of art. Once Neri recognized the material effects of time as another element active in his work, he forced the point conceptually by taking some of time’s duties upon himself in a series of exhibitions conducted during the early- and mid-1970s, in which he altered and reworked gures on site throughout the period of installation. The rst of these took place in 1972, at the Davis Art Center in Northern California. In this instance, Neri went back to the gallery to work on the sculptures every third night. Two years later, at the San Jose State University Art Gallery, he built a series of gures during the course of the exhibition itself, a performative presentation, and riskier for the artist.

99–103. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976

These adventures reached a culmination in May 1976, with The Remaking of Mary Julia at 80 Langton Street, an alternative space in San Francisco. Neri was now acting as time’s proxy, its stand-in, even as the project tacitly acknowledged that he himself, and indeed all of the circumstances of setting, are subject to its contingencies in the end. In The Remaking of Mary Julia, Neri and Klimenko returned nightly to the gallery, to the population of gures awaiting them there in various states of completion. Viewers could, if they wished, come each day and follow the changes. Poses were established in part by the sculptures’ steel armatures, so alterations were evident chie y in the realms of mass and surface markings. Yet this in itself was a revelation of Neri’s process, of his innate sense of how the sculptural gure is brought to full formation, day by day. 80 Langton provided a large, unobstructed area in which to build, and daytime visitors also encountered the remnant splatters, pebbles, and dust of the plaster lying around the gures, which stood on the drop cloths that covered the oors. In essence, the gallery offered a window onto the life of the working studio.

104–105. Re-making

The nocturnal encounters — an ongoing discourse, really, between artist, model, and sculpture, intimate, discursive, unpredictable — openly acknowl edged the mutuality of exchange through which the work comes into being and the participation of time in that process. Neri’s willingness to expose himself in this way can probably be traced to his early involvement with the Beats, who were generally unconcerned with re nement, nish, or studio mystique — with idea, rather — and who admired the intervention of chance in any artwork. The Remaking of Mary Julia had merged one of the great archetypal forms of Western art with the jazzy modality of the Beats, and its success reveals Neri’s level of formal and material uency at that moment, his knowledge of gural traditions past and present. Mary Julia No. University Art

6 , 1976 Yale

Gallery

106–107. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976

But plaster had another virtue for Neri: the speed with which it submits itself to his use has fostered productivity, the outpouring of gures from his studio and the gradual spread of those gures into a kind of population. Plaster pre sented no material obstacles to a strategy of serial building, which allowed Neri to reconsider and then revise one of Giacometti’s most familiar tactics, the incessant cycles of construction, destruction, and reconstruction that were also enabled by the use of plaster. On this point, we can say of both artists that while the sculptural body may ultimately be another object among the world’s innu merable objects, and not inherently conceptual, philosophical, or spiritual, it may accept meaning from any of these areas at any moment, as a gure whose physical characteristics, inscribed and left intact by the sculptor, will inevitably engage its speci c situation or conditions of its setting. The gures are never inactive, never quite lifeless.

Sometimes We Forget [Mrs. C. I.], 1976

Such processes are themselves aware of time, while the frangible material nature of plaster insists, once again, that Neri’s gures will at some point begin to show the effects of time and its vicissitudes, physically as well as metaphori cally. It ages, becomes brittle, cracks, or changes color, but now, as we accept such changes as intrinsic to the life of the work, we can see the gure striving to evoke the human capacity for endurance, survival, continuity — how our humanity endures after once-sustaining cultural ideals and iconographies have been discarded, and how we go about seeking replacements for them — with the vertical gure “standing” to present a possible alternative or direction, encouragement, support. The very choice of form declares an underlying optimism. If, at some moment in the future, the sculptural gure no longer has relevance for artists, it will mean that society has undergone a transformation of consciousness, that our understanding of the human, and perhaps of con sciousness itself, has changed in ways that cannot be satis ed by the motif. We Forget [Mrs. C. I.] (Detail), 1976

108–110. Sometimes

Private Collection

Private 111–113.OPPOSITECollection

NERI’S SENSE OF THE NATURALISTIC FIGURE has required — along with his devotion to the speci c physical traits of his model — that he recreate her form at the scale of life, a trait that characterizes virtually all of his output. Here, too, he deviates from both Giacometti and Marini, and some comparisons may be helpful. For Giacometti, scale would be a decisive strategy. He shifted the scale rather than the pose of his standing gures from one sculpture to the next, in part to locate them within an identi able eld of transaction between the sculptural form and his own distance from the model at the time of its construction, as a document of his visual perception within that space: the scale is so exacting that we can often recreate the precise distance between artist and model by simply shifting our position relative to the gure, which appears like the xed point on a graph, with ourselves as the variables. In a critical sense, this tactic had additional consequences. Scale was no longer a reliable determinant of utility — that is, whether the work was destined for a tabletop, niche, or civic square — nor was scale a criterion of the inherent “signi cance” of the work.

UNEQUIVOCALLY MODERN

114. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976

Collectively, then, Giacometti’s gures build towards a particular sculptural situation — one that the sculptor demonstrates in microcosm in his City Square pieces — a situation whose operational clarity refers to our encounters and perceptions of the world as we move through its innumerable spaces in real time. Neri is less programmatic. As his gures entered the spatial realm of objects and human beings, he found that the naturalistic form at correspondent human scale had little dif culty eluding forthright allegations of a deliberate or exclusively phenomenological function. Or: the gesticulating gure, however anonymous as a depiction, could prompt a startling — and startlingly human — intimacy in the viewer that Giacometti’s standing forms do not. As a result, Neri’s gures arouse a curiosity that goes beyond interest in either their critical or their perceptual intentions as sculpted objects, and should we suddenly come upon one of them in a gallery, surrounded by other works of art, its call is so uncannily human that we can hardly turn from it.

116. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Piazza, 1947–48; Cast 1948–49 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 117–118.OPPOSITEMary Julia [Standing Figure V ], 1976 Private Collection

115.LEFT/RIGHTAlberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche [ Walking Man], 1947 Kunsthaus Zürich

On this point, Neri leaves behind an art of ideas, which, strictly speaking, is the territory of rationalism. He longs to transcend the tics of ideation and interpretation, to test instead the accuracy with which his gure projects a recognizable communicability in a felt, self-evidently human way. It may go without saying that an experiential familiarity with the human form — his and ours — is a perennial condition, and a serious one. We meet ourselves in others all the time, and to echo the surrealist poet André Breton, we are likely to insist that everyone knows what a human being looks like. It is among the most intractable challenges faced by the contemporary gurative sculptor. How will the work perform the necessary initial task of penetrating the perceptual habits that enclose our usual encounters with the sculptural gure, all the well-conditioned re exes of “reading”?

69 OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 119. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1948–50 Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris 120–121. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1956; Cast 1981 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 122–123. Mary Julia Seated [Seated Female Figure No. 1], 1976 Cincinnati Art Museum

124. Alberto Giacometti sculptures on exhibit at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark

70 In Giacometti’s work, the forms are clearly gurative, and yet, just as clearly, they do not reproduce or duplicate us. They are not “naturalistic” in quite the same way as are Neri’s. Surface brings them to an enlivened state that piques our interest almost in spite of the effect of separateness created by their extreme formal stylization. Put another way, the intricacy of the artist’s handwork over the entirety of the gure, in conjunction with the removal of mass, emphasizes the form as a referential “body,” however ethereal, and, at the same time, the liveliness of its surface. Because we feel these two aspects as a charged relationship between the artwork and its setting, the gure is a natural metaphor for the tension of the living, conscious body for which the very conditions of existence require that it conduct its own wary passage through an intricate, potentially dangerous world of other bodies, objects, and events separate from itself.

71 125–126. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme qui chavire [ The Man Who Capsizes] [Falling Man], 1950 Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence

In his drive for visual effect, Giacometti’s handling of gure and surface, or perhaps more accurately, his handling of gure as surface, represents a produc tion of formal rather than depictive detail, or in place of depictive detail. Consequently, surface distortion is nally inseparable from formal distortion in Giacometti’s gures: and yet the discontinuous surface also gives the gure its delicate shiver of animation, a visual effect emanating from its literal response to the speci c conditions of space and light around it — the gural “skin” as a network of facets and textures whose interaction with its setting recreates the sculpture as a device for transforming its environment from a seemingly passive, circumstantial setting into an active reality inextricable from our perceptual experience of the work. Although Neri, too, uses the surface to bring a felt sentience to the mass of inert sculptural material, his conception of the building process — his search for the gestures with which to speak through the gure — is far more variable than Giacometti’s, and certainly less committed to the requirements of styliza tion. As naturalistic forms of our own scale, Neri’s gures are spatial beings, resolutely so, as they must be, and we, the viewers, meet them in space, where they stand. Or: they do not tell us about space, as Giacometti’s gures tend to do, they tell us about our space. Thus Neri employs scale and surface to invoke the familiarity of experience that characterizes our encounters with other human beings, but the liveliness of his sculptural surface — the textures and colors that mobilize the eye — is not dedicated to drawing attention to expe riences of uncertainty speci cally spatial in nature. We absorb the gural pres ence in a bodily way, true, yet Neri’s gures never insist that our encounters with them ought to proceed from their real settings, or from the ways in which the contingencies of distance can and often do in ect our reading of the gure before us. Neri, we might say, accepts the presence of space and gure alike as readily apprehensible, and so he problematizes the communicative resources of the gure as a representative of human expression rather than the physical, sense-based experience of distance and form.

Whatever Neri’s treatment of surface may derive from the Giacomettian gure, the comparison refuses to continue into the realm of thematic function. The uni ed drama of formal organization and surface invention is instead a

OPPOSITE73127. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Grande femme [ Tall Woman], 1958 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 128–129. La Niña de la Piedra, 1978 Private Collection

75 means by which Neri claims authentic engagement with his form: the form is him, or speaks for him, in an idiom of his own devising. The orchestration of the sculptural surface, the ow of detail that constitutes the gural “skin,” is another active mode of speech. While the surfaces may strike us as pictorial in the same sense that a nonobjective canvas is pictorial, and descriptive in the sense that the artist makes self-descriptive gestures on them, for Neri their pictorial, descriptive activities are integrated with his goal that the gures be recognizably “naturalistic” as gures, more “like” us than not.

OPPOSITE 130–131. Standing Male Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Private Collection 132. Acha de Noche II , 1975

As another comparison, let us turn to Marini’s Pomona gures, the standing or seated females constructed of plaster or stone, their scored surfaces rubbed with soft-hued pigments. Here, similar means lean toward more decidedly narrative, thematic effects. The Pomonas emerge from the Tuscan landscape where the artist spent most of his life: history lies everywhere around them, remnant, fragmented, obscured but never quite eradicated, like a fragrance that has settled on the present — and the gures, conscious of this past, evoke the timeworn, yet incompletely effaced ideals that long ago gave such vitality to Western sculpture. In this sense, their surfaces can also be described as autobiographical, at least to the extent that they manifest in sculptural form a tension, lodged within the artist himself, between his love of the old parlance of guration, on the one hand, and on the other, the modern loss of faith in art’s ef cacy.

134. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

135. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], 1932–34 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

Marini’s surfaces rarely bear the unmistakable signature of the sculptor’s hand. He is creating marks, but they are not the marks of a “writing” hand, as are Neri’s. Put another way, Marini’s material facility is committed to a thematic necessity, and he does not need to claim the surface with the same declarative energy. Still, if Neri is a more individualistic mark-maker, he and Marini do share a feeling for the sculptural surface as a referent of time, not time as a concept but as a substance, carrying with it all of life as it goes by. It is among Marini’s intentions for his archaized gures that they demonstrate the loss of a support ive, uninterrupted cultural tradition.

The modern condition, Marini infers, becomes quite clear when we contem plate it visually, through the social and cultural values that once found unitary form as art, the values we have freely chosen to abandon in our pursuit of self-congratulatory fantasies of progress. No nostalgia is intended. In encounter with the artwork, the viewer’s intuitive recognition of loss — a palpable loss, beyond recovery — might lead further still, toward deeper insight into the circumstances and implications of a culturally diminished present. Neri’s surfaces are never as explicit. For him, surface is another vehicle of ambiguity, one that succeeds by balancing gural scale and exacting formal accuracy with visual textures that refuse the old sculptural illusion of skin, thus redirecting our approach to the form as a whole.

133. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 Uf zi, Florence

77 OPPOSITE LEFT/RIGHT

136–137.LEFT/RIGHT78Rosa Negra No. 1 (Cast AP), 1982; Cast 1998 Private 138.OPPOSITECollectionMarinoMarini (1901–1980) Torso di donna [Female Torso], 1929 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

139. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1979

THE SCULPTURAL FIGURES OF THE PAST are cloaked in a distinctly human reality, the mark of their human origins. Neri studies them with care, whatever their epoch, and he has turned to them on occasion, taking up forms and poses that feel present to him, vivid, pertinent, useful.The untitled, headless/ armless gures of 1974 look at history in one way, as Neri examines with increasing discernment the phenomenon by which complete formal communi cability resides in broken, incomplete forms: Neri uses only what is necessary, nothing more, and indeed, a full body might articulate itself with less concision. Their brokenness may for him suggest the spiritual terrain of modernity, its losses and absences, which he wants to express and overcome. Other gures investigate the functionality of prior forms.These would include three sculptures done in the 1980s titled, Bull Jumper I, II, and III, that were based on a small, Minoan ivory gure with moveable head, arms, and legs, The Bull-leaper, c.1600 B.C.; the Sancas partial gures of the early 1990s, and many of the serene, nely harmonized standing gures in marble from the same period and later, many heads and partial gures, often derived from sources in Classical antiquity. SPIRITUAL TERRAIN OF MODERNITY

THE

140–141.82 Colonata No. 1, 1982 Private Collection

142. Pisano Marble Torso, 1985 Private Collection

In each of these series, the sources remain relatively undisguised, and Neri seems to look not only at the sculptural form, but at his own relationship to the past, what it is, its features and contours, what it means for him. He has an enthusiasm for the gure, of course: it continually arouses his curiosity. Sometimes he wants to study a pose through the form itself, at human scale, with his own model and his own constructive gestures: he is a gurative sculptor contemplating his tradition with his own hands. Elsewhere, he considers what he has gained from this past, literally so, what he can use, what must be discarded, what any historical form says about its own time and about the circumstances of the present in which he now puts it to use. And always there is the artist’s love of the motif as a personal, intrinsic form.

143–144.ABOVE,84BELOW Bull Jumper III , 1987 Yale University Art Gallery 145. Bull Jumper II , 1987 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa OPPOSITE, LEFT 146. Sancas I , 1991 OPPOSITE, RIGHT 147–148. Sancas Plaster Maquette, 1983 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

Certainly Neri was aware of how Marini had made use of historical sculp tural idioms at a time when much contemporary art wished only to leave history behind. Although Marini was acutely conscious of the sculptural past, that past was his own, and speci cally Tuscan. His native landscape had been inhabited more than two millennia earlier by the Etruscan civilization, and he grew up there at a time when comprehensive excavations of some of the great cities of Etruria were newly underway. Marini came to feel an unusually intimate bond to his own place and its remarkable history, a sense of ineffable connection at once genetic, cultural, and imaginative: he possessed that past, and was, in turn, possessed by it — its glorious, ruined artifacts, the old walls and ironwork and votive niches in the old hill towns, the houses and piazzas piled one against the other along winding laneways, the enduring stone and tile buildings, many of them still in use, almost monuments themselves, their surfaces like geological textures, richly detailed — a tangible environment in which past and present seemed to merge. For the artist, it was an experience of site and situation inseparable from consciousness itself, and yet, as a modern, Marini knew that he had been cast adrift from the kinds of cultural certainties that once shaped and nourished the old sculptural forms. Still he loved them, with a depth of feeling undisguised in his work — loved them as one who knows them thoroughly, has always known them, cannot forget them and does not want to do so. Thus he engages the shadow life of a history that has left its lovely bones upon the land. In this respect, Marini is more of a modern than a modernist. He feels no need to submit his work to any strictly programmatic format, and as he takes up the modes of the past, those gural motifs that once eased the passage of societal values and ideals from one generation to the next, his visual language remains personal, self-possessed, and modern because he is himself modern, an artist of his own time. If the Pomonas evoke something of the idealism and integrity that Marini has recognized in archaic sculpture, at the same time the gures are, in a modern context, determinedly anti-idealist in form as well as theme. And yet it is not quite enough to say simply that they constitute the artist’s critique of a corrupted present: for him, those forms are not exhausted.

149–150. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Popolo (La couple)[People (Couple)], 1929 Museo del Novecento, Collection Marino Marini, Milan

153. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [ Young Girl ], 1938 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

Marini would achieve a unity of the aesthetic and the ethical as he contem plated the cultural loss of con dence in the forms of art — the nature of that loss as well as its consequences — the ethical as inextricable from his motif and imparted aesthetically to the viewer. To accomplish this, he con ned himself to a narrow range of serial forms, forms attuned to a cultural history of immea surably greater length and breadth than Marini’s own moment, a sense of scope that allowed him to absorb and utilize the archaic forms in a thorough, authentic way. Elements of critique will be inevitable in such work, and they can hardly help becoming thematic for us. Marini, however, had found a way to fuse a visual present and a visual past in the gure itself, not just as idea but as a perceivable sculptural form, and for Neri, that was an invaluable precedent.

LEFT/RIGHT

152. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], 1932 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

151. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [ Young Girl ], 1938 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

154.LEFT/RIGHT88Figurine of a Concubine, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIIth Dynasty (1991–1786 BCE ) Musée du Louvre, Paris 155. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme au chariot [ Woman with Chariot], Fondation1943–45 Alberto et Annette Giacometti, 156.BELOWParisFertility Figure, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIth–XIIth Dynasty Aegyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Giacometti knew the gural past as well, and while his formal debts to Egyptian, Cycladic, and Romanesque sculpture are by now well documented, the studio research to which he submitted these antecedents would be perceptual rather than historical. How is the gure, ancient or modern, seen by the viewing eye? How do the senses gather information from the physical world, that endlessly contingent experience of the relationships between space, distance, and scale, and then resolve our encounters with it? Is the eye a reliable source? Giacometti represents this, our situation in the world, as sculpture, building gures that ask us to set aside acculturated assumptions about the procedures of sight and how we know and understand the appearance of objects in space. Giacometti longs to return viewers to the marvelous strange ness of bodily experience as he knows it for himself, the truly remarkable experience of inhabiting a human body in the realm of objects. Giacometti had ruminated at length about the ancients. What did those vanished civilizations seek in the rigorous stylization of their sculpture? What were the intimate, interior connections of such forms to the peoples who created them, their functions, their meanings? This became the process by which Giacometti discovered how modern perception might be instructed by similar kinds of forms, human, yes, but unmistakably sculptural, and capable of speaking to the moment by moment conditions of existence in a real world of spaces and objects.

To maintain the comparison with Marini’s work just a little further, Marini was not concerned with the cognitive hazards entailed in occupying a eshly body. He believed that the Etruscans and Archaic Greeks had been striving for an embodied, ideated form that would invoke a higher mode of realism — a realism of aspirations, desires, dreams — and so he looked upon their forms as inventions that in turn gave him permission to invent in his own way. Unlike Giacometti, or Neri, for that matter, Marini did not typically work from the model. He composed differently. His gures, whether the Pomonas or the Dancers, are unabashedly thematic, addressing us in a manner that can be as literary as it is visual. Neither Marini nor Giacometti expects us to confuse their gures with “real” beings, of course, nor should we see them as surrogates of the human. Both artists want their work to act upon us as art, setting us on our own paths of inquiry, whatever they may be.

157. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio

Neri has expended little effort on the problem of “how” we see. He proceeds from the belief that visual encounter is neither elusive nor illusion ary in essence, nor inherently deceptive. Put another way, Neri does not question physical reality as such, its existence or its appearance, and so — crucially — he reverses Giacometti’s question. Rather than interrogate how we see, Neri strives to understand how a gure expresses itself across, or within, a site composed of continuously variable spaces, distances, scales, and perspectives.Or:Giacometti involved himself in the physical processes of cognition — and hence, how we arrive at knowledge through the senses, that is, the extent

158–159. M.J. Series V, 1989 Private Collection

160. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) La forêt [ The Forest], 1950 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

91 to which the sculptor’s formal “expression” can be said to reside in us, as the agents of perception — while Neri investigates the ways in which form makes itself known to other (human) objects in the spatial eld around it, how it communicates information and/or knowledge about itself. Thus Giacometti embraces as inherently problematic the precariousness and variability of the senses lodged in esh as they pass through their surroundings — not just the optical, but our entire experience of ourselves, our sense organs, and our scale, as the inhabitants of bodies in space moving in relation to other bodies. Neri, on the other hand, tests the projection of visual data rather than its reception, how a gure makes itself apprehensible in a spatial world.

163. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 2003 164. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2004

162. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW

92 Giacometti’s constructive process was of great value to Neri, while Marini offered the example of an unusually cordial relationship with the past. The utilization of historical forms, Marini suggested — their assimilation and inter nalization by the contemporary artist — should never be con ned by the artist’s own, perhaps rather specialized interests, and he himself demonstrated some of the bene ts entailed in opening the present to a dynamic, imaginative conversation with the past. Neri seems to share something, too, of Marini’s tender regard for the old traditions now closed off to him by the passage of time — he is cut off, in other words, from the kinds of widely accepted values and meanings that once enabled the forms of sculpture to converse with viewers in a eld of mutual understanding — but Neri realizes, too, that he can do nothing to reverse the terms of historical change in the wildly fragmented, media-saturated culture of late twentieth-century America, a condition he considers indirectly, or metaphorically, through the material fragility of plaster. Change will come.

161.LEFT/RIGHTErnstScheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti working with plaster, c. 1960

In a sculptural sense, the female nude has provided Neri with a versatile basis for his organizing instincts. At the same time, to return to an earlier point, it is the point of departure in a drive to circumvent his abiding mistrust of (verbal) language, giving him both a form and a constructive means with which to establish his own alternative to the vagaries of the linguistic. It is language, after all, whose own repetitions are put to the task of con rming and condi tioning our sense of experience as stable, containable, safe, accessible to the tools of cognition. Neri wants desperately to avoid the impositions of language and its dubious claims to mastery of experience, and he strives to elude its urge to organize and tame the unruliness and joy and pain of existence. If Neri cannot quite trust the word, he does trust the act, and here the past is import ant as a source of continuity in an inherent communicability of form: statements made through the gure a millennium, even millennia, ago, are perfectly comprehensible to the present viewer, a phenomenon that guides Neri’s study of the past. Is the human past really this close, as near to our own experience as the sculpted form before us? While Neri is uninterested in simply imitating or replicating the formal means of the past, he knows that he ignores them at some peril. They are too rich. In a straightforward way, the gure offers him the security of its gestures, the body that cannot hide its intentions, which is the source of his faith in the processes of sculptural building as a route of escape from the confusions insti gated by language and by the potential for misinterpretation that lurks within the enclosures of verbal exchange. He wants his form to speak clearly, directly, apart from language and its proclamations of authority, and to be understood in just this way. His encounters with the gural past assure him that such “speak ing” is potential in the present, that the development of an authentic gural language remains available to him.

165. Makiko Nakamura,CarraraPhotographerStudio,1983

95 AS NERI WAS BEGINNING HIS CAREER in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he could hardly have ignored the elements of uncertainty and paradox simmering around him. There was a widespread feeling during those years that secure social structures, combined with technological progress and material comfort, would bring us happiness at last — a loosely assembled, eminently saleable social theory that plenitude is the rst step on the road to content ment. But was it really true? Anyone who cared to look closely could see that it was not, that burgeoning American af uence was a solution stitched with dissatisfaction. Such was the substance of the Beat/hipster critique, as well, though it would be articulated more as attitude and lifestyle than as a manifest ideology. Further, there was the lingering legacy of war, still active in global events: ongoing revelations of the Nazi genocide; a continuation of nuclear testing by the American government; the triumph of the Western technocracy and the accelerated industrialization of capitalist society; Soviet totalitarianism; and the re-entrenchment of a self-absorbed, materialistic middle class, and with it, the aggressive spread of secular mass culture, technology’s most devout acolyte. Could the sculpted gure truly engage this world, this setting, these issues, and the anxieties that followed from them?STRANGENESS THAT COEXISTS WITH THE FAMILIAR6

167. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Detail in Alberto Giacometti’s studio: sideboard with sculptures, c. 1954

96 In Europe twenty years earlier, Giacometti was witness to an unstable economy, widespread political unrest, the rise of fascism, and all the cultural tensions of modernity, and in the midst of it, he struggled to reintroduce a naturalistic gure, as art, based on his conviction that it could be appropriate in, and in response to, this setting. Surrealism had been the ground of his rst major sculptural campaign, but by 1935 he was heading towards an irreconcil able con ict with progressive artists and critics disdainful of overt naturalistic content. Yet he remained resolute, and before the end of the decade, Giacometti’s decision to build from the model would prompt the public ire of André Breton and the surrealist inner circle in Paris — it was of this work that Breton famously pronounced that everyone knows what a head looks like, as if to say that Giacometti had not only betrayed the surrealist revolution, he

166.LEFT/RIGHTErnstScheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Detail in Alberto Giacometti’s studio: wall with sculptures, c. 1954

97 had betrayed himself as an artist, that his return to the gure was an act of cowardice.Atthatpoint, however, Giacometti grasped something that Breton perhaps did not, that visuality in a world of intricate spaces and objects is itself miracu lous and enigmatic, and the artist who attends to it with persistence need not forage through the surrealist unconscious for imagery. As continuous motif, the human gure could draw attention to the strangeness that coexists with the familiar, a subject that might keep a sculptor busy more or less inde nitely. The surrealist work of art may be a terrible and wonderful thing, but it is the gure that brings the artist deep into the most fundamental conditions of existence. Such was the basis of his sculptural response to the world as he found it at mid-century.

168. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti modelling, c. 1965

98 Neri never underwent an ordeal comparable to Giacometti’s disaf liation from the Surrealist program. In a way, the shape of his career is closer to that of Marini, a gurative artist from the start, who, after spending the war years in Switzerland, would resituate himself on his home ground as a matter of choice and temperament. Neri, too, remained where he was, in the Bay Area, working amid cultural conditions that bore little resemblance to those of postwar Italy or France. Although he saw no reason to abide the more sinister preoccupa tions of a social system so keen to promote its gospel of material satisfaction and complacency, his decision to pursue a path of sculptural naturalism almost guaranteed that he would have to go forward without critical or commercial support, an outsider forced to struggle against the central currents of the art world. Artists like Giacometti and Marini were now models of courage and persistence.Thesituation posed an obvious but necessary question. In the self-conscious, self-certain artistic environment of the period, did the gure, with its intricate connections to the long trudge ofWestern history, have more to contribute to the inner life of contemporary culture? Neri shared with his predecessors an unswerving commitment to the sculpted gure, and in the end, he felt himself at liberty to go his own way, making a virtue of his detachment from the pressures that shadowed the New York scene. Still, if he wished to pursue the gure as his sculptural form in a serious way, Neri saw that he would need to demonstrate, through the work itself, that the business of being human was no simple, ordinary matter. As he began his career in the mid-1950s, the heavily worked plaster gures were his initial means of negotiating this eld, de ant, rebellious gures that asserted themselves on a cultural landscape where, strictly speaking, no one knew quite what to make of them and where they were not entirely welcomed as a result. Coarse in form and posture, almost crude, made of mostly scav enged materials, they were anything but precious or artful, traits that did indeed accord with the Beat aesthetic: Beat art-making, like art brut in Paris, was carrying on a romance with low materials, the discarded and abandoned, often materials without prior art associations, but for Beat artists, these were vehicles of cultural critique, while practitioners of art brut tended to view such materials as resistant

If, for Neri, the idiomatic surface is inseparable from his constructive process es, those processes never quite enclose the gure thematically. While his uni cation of form and surface seems to want to attract meanings of its own, meaning will fail to nd a sure footing there. As a result, the proliferation of readings, stimulated by different aspects of the total sculptural form, keep the work from sitting for long in one interpretive environment or another, as Neri intends. Thus, too, the myriad elements of touch, including color, would become as crucial as the gure itself to the development of Neri’s sculptural vocabulary, and from the vantage of the present, we can see the care with which he avoided submitting his form to (localized) thematic statement.

Neri’s combination of naturalistic form and non-naturalistic surface — the surfaces whose own “naturalism,” if naturalism it is, derives from their documen tary revelation of the artist’s very human hand — arouses our curiosity, and because the gures share our scale as well as our form, they seem to beckon from somewhere within their stillness and silence. Like Giacometti’s gures, they invite commentary almost as a mode of communion, and they are similarly OPPOSITE 169. Chula [Carla I ], 1958–60 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 170. M. Lee Fatherree,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1988

99 to artistic will, which invested them with a rather more philosophical ambiance, at once uniting the artist with, and differentiating him from, the world of objects.Although plaster had accommodated Giacometti’s constructive strategies, as a sculptor steeped in European traditions of presentation, he expected to recreate the gures in bronze editions. Plaster was Neri’s chosen medium, and in this sense, his plaster gures are nished works. Plaster had an extensive, honorable history in art, of course, but for Neri at that time, its accessibility and low cost were also great bene ts. It was another modest material, available at any hardware store for next to nothing. At that point, his material options were dictated by economic necessity, but the choice proved fortuitous. As we have seen already, plaster had assets beyond price alone, and the vivid physicality of Neri’s building processes eventually earned him a reputation — echoing the discourse around painting in New York — as an “action” sculptor. When he added color to the distressed and textured surfaces, the gures took on an aura of improvisation that seemed to infer a kinship with the programmatic demands of both abstract expressionist painting and Beat assemblage.

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OPPOSITE 171–172. Standing Female Figure No. 4, 1978 Private Collection 173–175. Posturing Series No. 5, 1978 Private Collection

101 distinctive for the ease with which they offer themselves to viewers — the ease with which they accept interpretation from any number of interests, personal concerns, and agendas, without endorsing any of them as nal or de nitive. Such is their ambiguity, their mystery and allure. Indeed, these various readings, taken together, comprise another history of sorts, one that veri es the unusual openness of Neri’s formal language.

But of course meaning is itself highly voluble, and when Neri took up the gure as his motif — a form that could not reasonably expect to escape its vast array of historical and cultural referents — he had to accept that all such meanings, whether intended or not, would be impressed upon his work from the outside. As he was pleased to discover, however, their accumulation only added to the density of the work, often in interesting, unpredictable ways.

But if Genet stops short of the obvious conclusion to this view of the work, we, certainly, are free to consider it: in an earlier time, Giacometti might have been a religious artist, an insight that may be taken as an early, prophetic recognition of the skill with which Giacometti recreated in modern sculptural terms the enigmatic appeal of formal idealization that we often nd in religious statuary.

176. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1982

AUTHENTICITY EXPERIENCE

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IN L’ATELIER D’ALBERTO GIACOMETTI , Genet recalls an experience of gazing at the sculpture that seemed to be everywhere around his friend’s studio: “I know only the statues of women for which Annette has posed, and the busts of Diego — and each a goddess and this god — here I hesitate: if, in the presence of these women, I feel I am in the presence of goddesses — of goddesses and not statues of a goddess — the bust of Diego never attains this height.… Instead it might be the bust of a priest belonging to a very high rank in the church. Not a god. But each very different statue still belongs to the same proud rank and somber family. Familiar and very close. Inaccessible.” Genet cannot quite resist the impulse to place a sacred overlay on these gures, and maybe it was inevitable, given his rather ripe, rakish romanticism.

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As still another way of thinking about the humanist impulse in gurative sculpture after the War, the point holds, and Neri, too, has permitted the entry of a loosely religious ambiance into his work, a latent Catholicism that lies in the background of his characteristic form: the real delicacy of standing gures that can evoke the innumerable statues of Mary in Catholic churches the world over, reminding the faithful of the spiritually obedient young woman on whom has fallen the humbling, mysterious destiny of divine purpose. Here we return, as well, to the desire of Giacometti’s gures, and Neri’s, to demonstrate the persistence of a numinous presence in modern art, in the gure. In Neri’s case, it is an additional element that distinguishes his handling of the motif from that of the Bay Area gurative painters, whose use of the form is utterly secular and oriented toward a sense of the necessities of painting at that moment.

178.OPPOSITEAlberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme debout (Poseur II ) [Standing Woman], c. 1954 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

177. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s studio with un nished sculptures, c. 1962

Of course Genet may simply have been stating the obvious, acknowledging that a frontal approach to the standing gure is in fact no more than a well-conditioned cultural re ex whose deepest origins do indeed lie in religious practice and spiritual need: when the form is gurative and female, frontality can transform the (secular) space of modern sculpture into a site of (religious/ spiritual) encounter. Neri is sensitive to this response, and utilizes it with gures of animate poise that stand as if awaiting the arrival of some precipitous event or visitation. Frontality is effective because it does so readily invoke the isolate, hieratic status of ancient religious and commemorative statuary, not as a manifest religiosity, but with a suggestiveness, an ambiguity, that enables the artist to address a human need that secular culture alone cannot quite satisfy.

The form of Giacometti’s standing women derives, as we know, from the vertical liform gures of ancient Egypt, Osiris in particular, though the artist’s strategy crucially did not go as far as his source in the quest for formal puri cation. His slender gures not only possess the general physical attributes of the model, they are nudes. Giacometti never desexualizes the form, but attenuation and terseness of pose relieve it of the delimiting obligations of sculptural eroticism. The gures are released, in other words, from the traditional demand that the sculpted female nude be displayed frankly before the (male) viewer,

Both Giacometti and Neri are now familiar enough that we accept without question Genet’s invocation of the religious af liations that adhere to their work with such ease, associations that depend on the ef cacy of cultural memory. It is for this reason, surely, that when they are installed in museums, the standing women — Neri’s as well as Giacometti’s — are almost always placed with their backs to the gallery walls — whether by curatorial intuition, habit, or conscious determination — thereby requiring that we enter their eld frontally. Giacometti might not have approved. Better that the viewer be allowed to navigate around them, that our perspectives remain continuous and variable from all sides, thus offering a more open-ended perceptual experience. On the other hand, if this mode of display is routine enough that we no longer think much about it, our very response may be a measure of Giacometti’s success at reestablishing the gure as a modern sacral form, and Neri’s success at sustain ing this element in his own work.

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106 and, at the same time, they are freed from related narrative exposition that would bind the gure to any particular sculptural past. The work thus achieves an undeniable formal objectivity, or objectness, and as scale shifts from among gures almost always smaller than life, they are utterly concretized, above all creatures of (our) perception. Giacometti then forced the point with some of his most distinctive sculptural tactics, not least of which was the rejection of contrapposto, one of the most venerable techniques ofWestern sculptural realism, as a means of formal enlivenment. Although this does not of itself generate an inherently “religious” presence in the nished work, in practice it tends to act in that way upon us.

179. Malcolm Park, Photographer Alberto Giacometti sculptures in retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, May 8, 2017

180.OPPOSITEMarino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1945 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

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“Pomona” is the goddess of gardens and cultivation, a deity indigenous to Roman mythology, and in her traditional iconography, she often carries an apple in her hand. But Marini’s invocation of the classical/mythic/cultural past — like that of the Giacomettian gure, though here enclosed in local reference — is also a way of mitigating against the intrusion of personal taste regarding female appearance. This in turn releases the gures from the eye of (male) desire, understood by the artist as a malign signi er of the implication of Eros in every form of the (male) will to power. Marini typically presents her in a posture of domesticity — humble, bene cent, self-possessed — a formal character that further declines the voyeurism rampant in sculpture of the preceding century, asking us to contemplate instead her identity both as a gure and as sculpture. For all their human referents, these gures act in ways that never really require the topical or historical as sources of meaning. Yet their appeal to ancient traditions is surely empathetic with the spirit of humanism reemerging during the postwar era.

But this response may also signify our own desire, correspondent with that of the artist, to grant a spiritual intention to contemporary gural sculpture. The gures appear to have emerged from his hand in answer to an extra-artistic necessity, seeking an existence independent of the secure means of traditional sculptural depiction. Only a short leap brings us to Marini’s standing gures, above all the Pomonas, which are similarly creatures of both history and modernity.Sheathed in anonymity, and with the bodily composure we often nd in antique gures, the Pomonas also withdrew themselves from the tempests of debate that commanded the attention of the postwar intellectual world: because they have a character whose effect as sculpture is “archaic” in its essence, they seem to us unbound by the tragedies of the twentieth century, and perhaps by any topicality. Their otherworldliness belongs to the realm of myth, free from the bondage of time and the inevitable limitations that de ne a human (rather than a godly) existence. If the Pomonas are indeed goddesses, their pearlike bodies and roughened surfaces gently tug them back in the direc tion of the human realm, enabling us to accept them into our space, not as one of us, perhaps, but as (sculptural) beings sympathetic to our circumstances.

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Although the Christian tradition was hardly dead, it had been jettisoned from the main currents of European cultural life and practice. We are speaking of formal modalities, in any case, and as Giacometti and Marini sought a sacral ambiance for their work, the pre-Christian gure offered an escape from unavoidable associations with the magni cent mausoleum of the Christian sculptural tradition, an iconography and a history implanted in Western cultural memory. But Giacometti and Marini were born at the very beginning of the twentieth century, at a moment when Monet, Degas, and Cézanne were still alive and working, when Rodin reigned over French sculpture, when Picasso was just beginning his career. Their sense of the social possibilities of art, sculptural or otherwise, differed from those of Neri, who, as a postwar American, exercises an even less stable partnership with the past, art-historical or

Would Giacometti, Marini, and Neri have been religious sculptors in an earlier time? It is an intriguing question, but any answer only points in the general direction of ambitions that re ect a much broader background to their work — their response to a problem that has haunted gurative sculpture in the post-Enlightenment West, what could be described in simple terms as a deterioration of the integration of religion and society that has occurred since the eighteenth century, and some of its consequences for the life of culture.

The Enlightenment brought an end to sculpture’s long partnership with reli gious representation, the great common ground enjoyed by religious belief, society, and art. This shift would eventually require that sculptors seek their own pathways through the thickets of modern insecurity and doubt, a chal lenge heightened in the postwar environment by the questions impressed by wartime events on philosophy, theology, and art. Artists could no longer assume the absolute truth of anything, and in the twentieth century, art almost necessarily takes up this quest for authenticity of experience and insight in secular terms.

Still, even before World War II, that task had also presented gurative sculp tors with a truly open eld. What form(s) would this “new” gure take? How can personal truth be communicated sculpturally, with an ef cacy and depth that will justify its appeal to the viewer’s attention? What is the appropriate setting for the “new” gure? And the status of the gure in that setting?

109 otherwise. His work, once again, coexists with them in a situation of continuity, not of direct discipleship or imitation.

Neri has no qualms, therefore, about allowing his gures to behave in ways that Giacometti’s and Marini’s simply do not. They share our scale, and like us, they may bend, kneel, twist, look aside, shrug, or gesture boldly.They belong with us, among us, on the same ground, and as a result, they tend to operate most effectively when they are installed in fairly open spaces, without the explicit demarcations that insist on their separateness as “art.”

181–183. La Palestra No. 5, 1988 Private Collection

At the same time, and this is true of all of the sculptors under discussion here, the evocative nature of touch, as a material transcription of making itself, suggests the creation of forms “in touch” with the fragility of the human spirit as it confronts the situations of modern life. Touch becomes a token of individ ual commitment placed on the surface of the gure for all to see, the assertion of an essential human identity in objects that, as a result, tend to become talismanic as well as sculptural. Neri could not have expected to repeat the tactics of his predecessors, nor did he want to, especially as his work matured during the 1970s and 1980s in the long series of standing gures and gural reliefs. The individual utterance demonstrates its own necessity, and thus he was able to incorporate surface as a constructive element, available to his use, one that, in combination with the motif, answered his need to speak truthfully on his own behalf, through the hand.

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It is on these grounds that Neri declares himself the nal source of authority in the work and so makes his own assertions regarding the place of the contemporary sculptural gure. If his ties to postwar European guration remain important to his development and indeed to his position in the trajectory of the naturalist gure during the latter twentieth century, Neri’s sources are many, and can come from almost anywhere, not just the art museum. In his engagement with the formal vocabulary of the sculptural past, he has also discovered that distance in time from an earlier sculptural form does not exclude or deny his sense of its relevance. Quite the opposite. Temporal

Although Neri also minimizes explicit facial features and expressions, the details of identity and psychology, he departs from his predecessors by encoding explicitly expressive information into the gestures of the sculptural gure in its totality. Thus the model maintains her anonymity as an individual, while the gestural body is highly communicative, assisted in its expressive capacities by the artist’s own tracings and inscriptions across the entirety of the surface. Because Neri’s constructive naturalism is so physically precise, he can abandon the determinations of psychological and/or narrative content conveyed by facial depiction without compromising the entirety of the form. Such gures provoke a startling degree of empathy, a level of physical identi cation that enables the work to grip us in the experience of immediate, bodily encounter.

111OPPOSITE184–185. Kneeling Figure, 1991 Denver Art Museum 186–187. Annunciation No. 1, 1982 Yale University Art Gallery

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OPPOSITE 188–189. Armless Figure III , 1970 Private Collection 190–191. La Palestra No. 6 (Cast AP), 1988; Cast 2007; Patina 2016 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

113 distances often unloosen a form from its original application or setting, giving it a freedom and objectivity of its own, which in turn may amplify Neri’s af nity for it. If he can draw such information into the present, he knows that he has uncovered a crucial vein of continuity, a durable human theme, still viable as a sculptural resource. Even as this becomes a substance inextricable from all the other formal transactions occurring in his work, its unaffected absorption assures us that certain human traits, expressed by the physical body, are indeed fundamental and always have been.

Whatever Neri can use is useful, a drive that shows itself as early as Beach Figure (1958), which interrogates the walking man of Rodin. In those years, Neri would have known the pose only from books, yet he made it his own by altering gender, adding an atmospheric setting, and applying paint. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Bull Jumper and La Palestra series tested ideas drawn from Cretan and Mycenaean sculpture, and during the same period, Neri also worked with poses that had originated in pop culture and advertising, poses with which he evoked the presence of (absent) props. By the mid-1980s, when Neri began

192–194. Prietas Series II (Cast 1/4), 1993; Painted 1994 Private Collection

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the large Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada relief panels, series embedded with references, his formal colloquy with the past had achieved remarkable density, as if he wished to take up the whole history of the form in a single sweeping embrace. When these kinds of visual echoes occur in the individual gures, they are normally uent, unforced, inexplicit, sensed rather than seen in the course of our encounters with them. It is an intimate relationship with the form, based on the artist’s faith in the kinds of human concerns that reappear in art, sustained through time, or by time. But continuity with the sculptural past, as Neri knows, cannot be sustained by the manipulation of form alone, whether as reference or quotation. It must be integrated into the modalities of artistic consciousness.Muchofthe mid-twentieth-century gurative sculpture of humanist orien tation is similarly synthetic, typi ed to one degree or another by a receptive attitude towards the canons of the form. Aspects of the past are reoriented through the means of the individual artist, and thus borne into the present. This seems almost de nitional, insofar as this group of sculptors has striven to reinstate a recognizably human creative spirit in their work as an expression of af rmation and renewal during the postwar era. Yet the presence of the distant past suggests that these sculptors also yearn to somehow situate their work outside the accelerating tattoo of action and reaction in modern art. This need governs the very choice of the human form in a postwar setting not entirely hospitable to it, just as it governs their handling of the form. A relationship with sculptural pre-modernity allows each artist in turn to invoke the originative energies of the gure, that in doing so the gural body may reveal a reality more enduring than the cycles of call and response that have become so familiar, all the spinning cogs of novelty, ideology, visual pleasure, plurality, fragmentation.

But the humanist sculptors in postwar Europe — and Neri, too — were working, once again, in an ostensibly post-Christian world where the spiritual resources of the past — the commonly understood images of Presence, the visual vocabulary of divine revelation, the iconography of spiritual order — were no longer suitable to their enterprise. Sculptors of humanist orientation were almost necessarily required, therefore, to reinvigorate the connection

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They would ask of the gure that it serve as a carrier of some of the oldest, least acculturated mysteries of human existence — mysteries older than memory — and so offer itself as an alternative to the platitudes of the age. To accomplish this task, Marini turned to the recuperative serenity, or sanity, of the Pomonas. Giacometti’s gures, too, might be tattered goddesses, icons of adaptability, their very survival a cause for encouragement, however guarded. Such gures can easily become metaphorical objects, not “likenesses” as such, and indeed they now seem less concerned with disturbing the familiarity of the motif than with de-familiarizing the stance of the form within the eld of sculpture itself — with, that is, loosening re exive views of the gure as knowable or secure, bolstered by cultural assumptions about representation that willingly accommodate the viewer’s delectation. As Neri continued to develop and expand the means of gesture — the gure’s and his own — his sculptural gure became the material projection of his “speaking” voice. His subject, we might say, is not really the gure as such. The gure is simply the form that provides him with a just, reliable vehicle for exploring and communicating subject, and his treatment of the form draws him, paradoxically, into a history that, as it turns out, is not actually past and never entirely lost.

Almost twenty years later, he returned to the idea in another interview: “The rst sculptors made use of the gure for a reason, which is because it has so much power.” 195–197. On the Up No. 1, 1992 Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

117 between art and hope, or something like it. To do so, they had to address themselves to the same feeling of spiritual absence at the heart of the society, with all the attendant, insatiable anxieties, that the merchandisers of capitalism and technology were learning to exploit so ef ciently.

In an interview with curator Jan Butter eld in 1981, Neri observed: “I’ve always been intrigued with the spirit that the gure conveys. Not necessarily in Christian terms, but in relation, for example, to the Greek heroes with their dirty feet and curious morals — they were heroes just the same. It is this God-spirit that I think is the real God for us. It is this thing inside of us that I want to talk about in the gure. I can deal with it only through the work.”

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IDIOMATIC COLOR / A REQUIREMENT OF THE ARTIST RATHER THAN FIGURAL REALISM

NERI’S ACTIVITIES AS A PAINTER before the sculpted form and his idiomatic colorism are both distinctive traits, and we can now see him as a builder who paints and a painter who builds. Although he does not paint every gure, he has been putting color on his sculpture, on plaster, bronze, and marble, throughout his career. The practice would achieve something like culmination in the Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada relief series that began in the mid-1980s. In these works, life-sized standing or kneeling gures are incorporated into large plaster walls whose surfaces are themselves inscribed and painted. They are relief sculptures, to be sure, but descriptive terms such as “painted sculpture” or “sculptural painting” are inadequate. In their wake, as if the demands of the project had conferred upon him an absolute freedom, his subsequent use of paint would attain a visual poetry of often exquisite beauty. Indeed, nothing resembling the spread of Neri’s painted gures can be found in the work of his immediate predecessors, and nowhere else in contemporary American art. Thus Neri found a means with which to surmount habituated ways of seeing the differences between these mediums, differences that still shadowed the art world during his early career, an obstacle he found needlessly divisive and nally pointless.

198. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1997

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Painted sculpture was nothing new in modern art, of course, and would be common by the 1960s, in nonobjective sculpture especially, but those sculptors shied away from obvious associations with the depictive loyalties of realism. Giacometti added paint to some of his plaster gures near the end of his life, but his interest in sculptural color seems to have been just getting underway, and the application of black lines and forthright primary hues does not feel fully realized sculpturally. Here, then, Neri makes his advance, successfully extending the communicability of the standing female gure without relying on descriptive color and its narrative obligations. Or: Neri’s color refers to the requirements of the artist rather than the requirements of gural realism, and his achievement emerges from the skill and originality with which he integrates his gural naturalism with a highly evolved color sense and a level of painterly gesture that show a comprehensive understanding of the most advanced art of the period of his emergence. Thus he uni es two ostensibly disparate media with a visual logic that never slips into material or conceptual discord. The tone of the work is, indeed, speci c to him.

OPPOSITE,121LEFT/RIGHT199. Caryatid I (Cast 1/4), 2008 Private Collection 200–201. Seated Figure Maquette, 2007 Private Collection 202–203. Torso (Cast AP), 1978 Private Collection

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Some interpreters have seen Neri as an abstract expressionist sculptor for whom paint simply extended his way of working with the plaster surface, but this is too mechanistic a reading. From the start, he embraced paint as another component of his visual vocabulary, as important to him as any of his other visual means, and over time he has used color to enhance the latent ambiguities and nuanced speaking capacity of the reiterative, serial form. In practice, the visual effects of color on the gures are themselves enigmatic, compelling, evocative, but dif cult to articulate or explain easily: although paint can instigate and/or call attention to the fundamental visual operations that occur on a volumetric form, including its surface textures and the interaction of its constituent elements, Neri never treated color in a strictly functional way. It is functional, and then it does something else.

Some hues undoubtedly have associations in the artist’s memory — the bright reds, yellows, and blacks, for instance, could derive from the lavish hues of vernacular art or processional statuary — while the bold reds may refer in a general way to blood, the force of life, the sangre brava of music and dance. Or not. One is as likely as another. In the studio, Neri saw no inherent divisions between genres, or even between colors. Such distinctions are imposed from without by criticism, theory, and precedent. Art does not need them. So Neri invents. Because his color always exists outside the realm of familiar modes of representation the gure does not resemble anything we might otherwise see or imagine as a “real” being in the world. Neri’s combinative re exes direct us past the physical and sculptural alone, back in the direction of the psyche of the maker, and as a colorist, he has learned to produce effects at once personal and poetic, often through the use of unusual or unexpected mixtures and

204. Seated Girl II (Bather), 1963 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

To the extent that color can be approached as a source of narrative, the narrative, once again, is interior to the artist, and therefore resistant to external reference or summary interpretation. The ef ciency with which Neri’s color refutes cognitive reading as a reliable or self-contained approach to his gures can also be taken, perhaps, as an admission of the limits of the eye as a source of information about the world and its meanings, or at the very least, it admits that the eye is not the nal arbiter of the real. Better that we dream as we stand before the work. Neri’s color requests that we do so.

205. Female Torso III [ Untitled Torso III ], 1960 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

123 combinations, giving the painted gures — the bronze editions especially — a kind of unaffected grandeur. Such work asks that we rely on our imaginative resources — also poetic in essence — which will carry us into a substantially widened eld of response. With the rst full-sized gures of 1957 and 1958, Neri handled paint in a loose, energetic, but organizational way, placing it as if on a canvas for the purpose of moving the eye around the work, or to focus attention on particular areas of the form. Clearly, however, he recognized the greater possibilities for

LEFT/RIGHT

206. Female Torso II [ Untitled Torso II ], 1960 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

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125 sculptural color almost immediately, and so he did not tarry for long in this rather schematic mode of application. He wanted to press his colors harder still, and after the early 1970s, paint exists more completely in terms of its visual properties — the complex color relationships, intricate layering and glazing effects, and the shifting qualities of illumination. It is lyric color, and as the years passed, Neri learned to use this aspect of his vocabulary with increasing skill. During the late 1970s — as an example of the thoroughness with which he conducts his research — Neri began mixing dry pigment into his wet plaster as he built, producing works that recall Marini’s use of surface tints as an evo cation of the abraded surfaces of old polychrome gures. Here, colors are added like tinctures into the plaster itself, and they tend to be quite soft, Indian reds, serene yellows, and dovelike grays that create an even body tone. These hues enabled Neri to study the ways in which opaque, all-over color is seen in OPPOSITE 207. Two Figures (Bather Series), 1964 Private LEFT/RIGHTCollection 208. Seated Female Figure III , 1979 Private Collection 209. Seated Female Figure IV, 1979 The Oakland Museum of California

210.126 Blue Blond , 1979 Private Collection

127 a variety of spatial settings and conditions, and how it interacts with light. Again, he is interested chie y in clarifying by every possible means the articulation of the gure, its ability to express, and how its expression is affected by the subtly altered appearance of the plaster as a eld/surface. As a comparison, the surfaces of Marini's Pomonas also tend to be quite calm, and their mild color, as soft as a whisper, enhances their atmospheric silence and formal balance; but they have a thematic component, as well, as the artist contemplates the fragility of any artistic reconciliation in a historical period typi ed by imbalance, dysfunction, and violence of every sort. For Neri, then, color — regardless of its particular mode of application — is another legible gesture upon the form, orchestrated in conjunction with his surface markings. Just as he has taken up many kinds of mark-making tools for the purpose of varying appearance and defeating surface re nement, his use of color generates tension with the form on which it appears. The colors can be unusual, striking, at times declarative, at times beautiful, at times unsettling or garish, disruptive, with the intention of upsetting assumptions regarding what the gure ought to be, or how it should look, without upsetting the form of the gure itself. They may attain a feeling of harmony, or not. They may soothe, or not. They may delight the eye, or not. They may arouse, or not. But the colors are never static.

213. Seated Figure Study No. 30, 1981 Bound in the artists’ book Tristezas/Songs of Sadness ; Yale University Art Gallery

211. Seated Figure Study No. 28 , 1981

212. Seated Figure Study No. 31, 1981

LEFT/RIGHT

214–215.128Standing Figure No. 3 (Cast AP-II), 1980; Painted 1992 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 216–217. Isla Negra Series I (Cast AP), 1989; Cast 1993; Patina 2016 218. Catun No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1986; Cast 2003; Patina 2016

129

During the 1980s, Neri also began painting the bronze editions of his gures, which required that he switch from oil or water-based media to enamels — a medium he had used years earlier on some of his rst plaster gures. He ap proached metal much as he had approached plaster, treating it as a surface — not, that is, as a “precious” art material — but here the surface is impermeable, re ective, the opposite of plaster, which remains an aqueous medium at heart. As always, Neri wants to test materials, in order to discover how he can use them to extend his expressive means. A patina may be applied to the bronze before he paints, giving it a surface tone, and the enamel then lies “on” the surface like a lm or a skin, an effect that Neri may modulate by applying some of his paint with tools such as whisk brooms or bundled twigs, or by layering many thin glazes (as with the surface treatment he calls Alborada, layers of white paint and yellow glaze, which emphasizes surface textures and gesture and enhances the natural glow of the bronze). Such color can have an effect of modesty, like a veil draped over the gural “body,” and although the paint does not produce a “skin color” or “ esh tone,” nor does it disguise the material personality of metal, it will alter our perception of the gure as a form in space.

130 For Neri, paint has its own beauty, and he loves its sensuousness, its uidity, every aspect of the application process, all the endless prospects entailed in mixing, combining, and collocating hues. But it is not an end in itself, nor is Neri using it to simply counteract common modes of conveying content through the motif. Color is always asked to press the communicability of the gure in some way. If his seemingly arbitrary, non-descriptive, or intensely poetic color deper sonalizes the model as the psychological basis of the gure, it utterly personal izes Neri’s investiture in the form. If he wishes to convey a narrative — and surely he does — the narrative is his own, with the gure as a document of his engagement with the model and pose.

219.LEFT/RIGHT Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 1/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection 220. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 4/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection

221. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 2/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection

222. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 3/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Yale University Art Gallery

LEFT/RIGHT

131

Although color is not only a visual experience in Neri’s work — reception tends to be more fully physical — our visual re exes will soon be set in motion by the vacillation between sculptural and painterly seeing. Needless to say, Neri’s color assures that we never mistake his gures for real human beings, and yet, because their formal basis is naturalistic, a decidedly human reality comes forth from them. Or: paint is among the means with which Neri asserts its sculptural identity as an (art) object whose origins lie in the humanity of both artist and model and can never be entirely separated from them. All such effects also tend to destabilize the potential for summary interpretations of gural meaning. The painted gure enters the world of objects, seeking a place among

132

223–225. Annunciation No. 1 (Cast 3/4), 1982; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

133 us, in our space, where we nd that its operations are vividly distinguished from those of the two-dimensional gure, whose home is on the canvas, in a “space” fashioned by the painter for its habitation. Neri’s color is never set to the task of bringing the sculpted gure closer to the circumstances of the narrative canvas.Onthe other hand, paint has enabled Neri to challenge the compliance with which we tend to accept the material differences between genres as irrecon cilable. In its ability to overcome the compartmentalizing of genres, his painted gure, at its most effective, frees itself from its speci c past as a medium/genre/ motif and, indeed, its past as an art-historical tradition. Yet the motif belongs to history, is inextricable from it, and so the painted gure discovers fresh ways of participating in a free discourse with that past and that tradition, and with the present.

226. M. Lee Fatherree,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1985

THE FIGURE IN RELIEF

DURING THE MID-1980S , Neri began building large-scale sculptures based on the integration of his plaster gures with a materially substantial vertical ground, a format that evoked the relief carvings and architectural friezes of antiquity. Although he had done something remarkable, his accomplishment was not immediately apparent. At that moment, he had been building from the gure for more than twenty years and was identi ed with the freestanding female form. Although the single gures had indeed provided an exemplary document with which to record Neri’s struggle for self-description and self-authentication, less obvious at the time was the amount of art-historical knowledge that owed into their construction, and the degree to which such utterly modern forms opened themselves to a nuanced play of these kinds of associations.The life-sized relief works represented a major advance in both the application and expansion of these aspects of Neri’s practice, but given the ef cacy of his single standing gures, their clarity, their reliability, and the ease with which they accommodated his invention, the appearance of large relief works in plaster seemed sudden, unexpected, digressive, a kind of aside.

135

Some of the reliefs were exhibited in the late 1980s. As reviews at the time indicate, they were generally taken at face value, as though Neri had done little more than place his gure against, and partly absorbed into, fractured, irregularly

227.LEFT/RIGHT136 Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XI , 1984 228. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/ Escalieta Study No. 10], 1987 Private Collection

137 shaped walls: sculpture of imposing presence, yes, but a variation on an other wise familiar form. Because Neri made no effort to interpret this work publically, the relief format gave the impression of being a material rather than thematic extension of his gural imagination. Its lively, sophisticated play of referential and inferential indices, so evident to us now, generated little critical excitement, and because the series were never shown in their entirety at the time they were made, the ingenuity and sheer breadth of their thematic conjugations remained hidden. The decade drifted to a close, and the reliefs would not be shown again for many years. Our interest now lies precisely with the elements then unapparent: (1) the intricate, fully realized relationships among the reliefs themselves, carefully developed within webs of formal and poetic information that drew them from their isolation as individual entities and onto a ground of familial intimacy; (2) the uent conjunction of inter-textual episodes that mark them as a purposeful, fully uni ed body of work; (3) the various ways in which the reliefs advanced and solidi ed ideas that had been emerging in Neri’s drawings and paintings during the prior decade; and (4) the underlying relationship between the reliefs and Neri’s single gures, precisely the eld in which we uncover his profound understanding of the history and the traditions of the sculpted gure, and their formal absorption into an unequivocally contemporary sculptural language. We can nally acknowledge the true value of these series to the artist. Not only do they represent a pinnacle in his career, they are a pinnacle in postwar American gurative sculpture, and in postwar sculpture generally.

229. Arcos de Geso [Carrara IV], 1984 Private Collection

As an architectural format linked by its gural components to Neri’s previous work and, at the same time, in ected by its various historical af liations, the reliefs provided the sculptor with a durable foundation for the release of immense amounts of personal information into his constructive process. This in turn would enable him to instate a complete, remarkably rich emotional environment as the comprehensive effect of the work itself, one that draws on a past synthesized into, and through, the artist’s own hands, as personalized narrative material readily available to his use in the present. As the relief series continued to develop, Neri would begin applying atmospheric color with a level of re nement well beyond that of his previous work, which led him to an

230.LEFT/RIGHT138 Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IV, 1984 Yale University Art Gallery 231. Arcos de Geso Study No. 4 (Diptych), 1984 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 232.BELOWArcos de Geso Study [Amal No. 4] (Diptych), 1984 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

139LEFT/RIGHT233. Arcos de Geso II , 1985–89 Private Collection 234. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette V, 1984

While the Mujer Pegada bronzes and the Arcos de Geso plasters can be regarded as both individually identical forms and parallel series, Neri comes to each material as a paint ground, and with this in mind, they generate very different effects. Bronze has an adamant surface, and paint tends to adhere to it like a skin. Yet the surfaces permit an inventive application of color: patches, broken layers, paint wiped away to leave networks of color in the surface abrasions, and glazes. The material nature of metal — its impenetrability and dull, re ective gleam — can transform the artist’s color handling into a drama enacted in patterns of texture and shadow, soft-glowing highlights, and solid

237. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Patina 2016

The origins of meaning and sculptural presence in Neri’s work have always been located in the making process, and in this context, too — the context of the studio — the relief format was a huge advance. As a physically expansive structure, its capacity to absorb a tremendous amount of sculptural information would offer him tremendous potential for formal variability and complexity. Put simply, the relief enlarged his eld — the surfaces available to the mobile, building hand — by enabling him to weave laments of personal, cultural, and historical detail as they passed back and forth over both the sculpted body and the wall of the relief itself. Neri had done something similar with the single standing forms, but as full-sized, naturalistic gures that occupy our space, with us, and “like” us in appearance, they inevitably remind us of ourselves, as the artist intends. The relief changed all that. It was a different kind of object, and its habitation of space required more of the viewer, too. Let us pause to de ne the scope of the relief project. By the end of the 1980s, the format had coalesced into four series: the bronze Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada, titles that, in these series, refer to casts of the Arcos de Geso plasters; and the Maha series. Although the expense of production meant that the bronze editions often required periods of several years or more to com plete, nine of the full-scale plaster reliefs were eventually cast, and these were either painted by the artist or given a patina at the foundry, recreating them as unique works. Maquettes accompanying each of the series were also cast and subject to additional nishes.

238.BELOWMujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast AP), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

140 unusually poetic mode of gural building, not entirely new to his work, certainly, yet rarely stated as openly, or with such con dence and depth.

Arcos de Geso V, 1985 Yale University Art Gallery

Private 236.OPPOSITE,CollectionLEFT/RIGHT

235. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast 1986

141

239.LEFT/RIGHT142 Omaha No. 5, 1986 Private Collection 240. Omaha No. 4, 1986 Private Collection

143 shapes. A silver-nitrate patina, a muted, ghostly chalk-white, or the Alborada patina of white with a yellow glaze, can create an intense, dreamlike silence around the work, especially in low light. Here the gures might be fugitives from theTakensubconscious.together, the relief series yielded an immense outpouring of work. Each series was preceded and often accompanied by a substantial number of drawings, many of which refer to speci c sculptures. The Arcos de Geso series proved especially fertile in this respect; in the drawings, Neri considers gural positioning, posture, and gesture, sometimes from a lateral perspective, or he studies color possibilities in sculpture already underway. Other drawings — Omaha No. 4; preparatory studies, Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 11] and Pisano No. 48 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs); as well as a large number of untitled sheets — investigate the gure in a position against, close to, or partly subsumed in the relief plane, typically utilizing a language of evocative color.

LEFT/RIGHT 241. Omaha No. 1, 1986 Private Collection 242. Omaha No. 8 , 1986 Private Collection 243. Omaha No. 3 , 1986 Private Collection

244.LEFT/RIGHT Pisano No. 48 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Private Collection 245. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 11], 1987 Private 246.OPPOSITE,CollectionLEFT/RIGHT Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XII , 1984 Private Collection 247. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette X , 1984 Private Collection 248.BELOWArcos de Geso Plaster Maquette VII , 1984

144

The relief series included a number of maquettes, including three sets of Maha maquettes. One group, done in 1986 and comprised of ten plasters roughly twenty inches in height, is typi ed by a rectangular relief shape and it extends the format of the earlier Mujer Pegada maquettes. The second, eleven stoneware pieces of similar size, was done the same year, during Neri’s residency at the Bemis Project in Omaha; these tend to be irregularly shaped, like broken walls, while the gures, almost notational, molded in urries of thumbprints and indentations, lie outside literal resemblance. They share a kind of ritual urgency with some of their predecessors among the Mujer Pegada maquettes, evoking an archaism emphasized by their earthen surfaces and subdued glazes.The third includes the bronze Maha maquettes, cast from the ceramic and stoneware series.

145

249.ABOVE,146LEFT/RIGHTReeSchonlau, Photographer Bemis Project, Omaha, Nebraska, 1986 250. Maha – Ceramic Relief I , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum 251. Maha – Ceramic Relief II , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum BELOW, LEFT/RIGHT 252. Maha – Ceramic Relief III , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum 253. Maha – Ceramic Relief IV, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum

147

254. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 1 (Cast 2/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

255. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum

256. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 6 (Cast 2/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

LEFT/RIGHT

While he was at Bemis Project, Neri also built six larger Maha stoneware sculptures, each approximately forty-eight inches in height. Although they resemble the life-sized works, at three-quarter scale their articulation of the relationship between parts has particular clarity.Three are still intact.These have been cast, and uniquely painted by the artist. Indeed, many exceptional exam ples of Neri’s use of bronze as a paint ground are to be found among works of this period: a further selection would include Mujer Pegada Series No. 3 (Cast 2/4), Mujer Pegada Series No. 4 (Cast 3/4), or Arcos de Geso (Cast 4/4). In many of them, Neri applied color in processes of addition and removal, often expos ing areas of metal below and creating intricate surface textures. A coloristic atmosphere of age and use emanates from the lacework of incisions, the carved lines and irregular surfaces, marked by broken, fragmented, overlapping, and non-local hues that survive in unexpected pockets, patterns, and combinations — such surfaces have the appearance of old walls, the beauty of seemingly random episodes of color and texture, a cooperative handiwork of time and weather and human encounter.

148

OPPOSITE,149LEFT/RIGHT257. Relief Study No. 15, 1983 Private Collection 258. Mujer Pegada Study [Gustavo No. 11], BELOW1985 259. Maha Study – Carrara I , 1984 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis 260–261. Mujer Pegada Series No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast 2005

262.LEFT/RIGHT150 Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XIII , Nasher1984–85Sculpture Center, Dallas 263. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/ Isla Negra Study No. 9], 1987 Private 264.OPPOSITECollection Arcos de Geso (Diptych) (Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006

151

152

Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude ; Private Collection

Neri knows, of course, that the cultural memory of the viewer may intercept an embedded historicized form — that referents will be felt bodily, however altered or personalized by the artist — but he has made a virtue of this situa tion by refusing to treat it as a problem. The history of the gure is such that a comprehensive “originality” might not even be possible. For Neri, “originality” tends to reach in the direction of “origins,” not toward novelty as such. Or we might say that when he took up the gure, Neri did not go in search of the past, OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT

The plasters were painted, too, though not in the same way. The Arcos de Geso series is, for example, an early instance of Neri’s use of dried pigments mixed into the wet material during construction, a technique that permits the ephemeral volumes of Arcos de Geso VI and Arcos de Geso X

267. Relief Study No. 1, 1983

265. Relief Study No. 3 , 1983

Although a general history of the sculpted gure had always been crucial to Neri’s sense of the form and its operations — the ubiquity of the upright pose means that his standing gures will naturally seek some level of contact with this past — his interest in art-historical form normally arises from a direct response to individual moments or instances in which he has discovered an af nity, a speci c facet or detail to which he nds himself responsive. They are not arbitrary. Neri’s interest, always, is located in those sculptural moments that continue to communicate humanness, a connectivity with the contemporary present, those properties of gesture and form in which we continue to recognize ourselves, a sculpturally embodied humanity that reaches across and collapses time.Once Neri has assimilated a form — absorbing it into his hands, initially through his drawing practice — it will eventually nd its way into his building process, though its appearance is idiomatic and not always immediately apparent. It has the ow of speech. But Neri never incorporates historical information as a way of supporting some conceptualization of the gure, or as quotation: as, that is, an associative form af xed to the work for the purpose of bulking out its thematic substances. Neri may not care particularly if its appearance can be identi ed by the viewer. It is information now, distilled into his own idiomatic naturalism as a way of looking at, thinking about, or expressing human gesture that, apart from its other sculptural functions, bears the energy of its human address in, or into, the present.

Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude ; Private Collection

153

266. Arcos de Geso X , 1985 Yale University Art GalleryBELOW

268. Buddha No. 8 , 1984 Private Collection

Although we can distinguish conceptually between the implied spaces created by open, spacious surfaces (those of the world) and surfaces whose Mary Julia, 1973 Yale University Art Gallery

269.

154 but neither, as it turned out, could he entirely elude it. The form inhabits tradi tion, and is inhabited by it. This is a fact for him. Through his own repetition of address, tradition takes a place among his visual resources, which allows him to turn his imagination in any direction he chooses, toward historical motifs as near to him in time as Degas, Matisse, Giacometti, Marini, Manzù, or Aristide Maillol, and as distant as the Etruscans and the Egyptian dynasties — as well as from his own past, the early plasters in which he tested the use of props, multiple gures, and environmental con gurations, works such as Seated Girl II (Bather) (1963). As Neri knows, there are gural continuities that have never ceased to attract the interest of sculptors; and once again, internalization of form allows him to examine experientially the ways in which a gural past can cooperate with the contemporary form and at the same time, it is a way of insuring that references enter his building process without overwhelming or interrupting the sculptural entity as a ( gurative) whole. Invested meaning ultimately comes from the present, and speaks of present needs and desires. Intimations of the relief form would appear in Neri’s work at least as early as 1976, in the Emborados series, eighteen drawings absorbed in pictorial issues to which he would give more exhaustive attention in the sculptural walls. The Emborados drawings take up, in a direct way, the peculiar kinds of ambiguities that arise from collisions between spatial representation and its depictive evo cations. At rst glance, they might be eld-based abstractions, compositions based on combinations of blocky forms rendered in delicate, transparent watercolor and areas of textured color in pastel, raw pigment, and charcoal. In fact, they emerge from Neri’s long interest in the ancient architectural sites of Mexico and other parts of South America, and their imagery is based on old walls in the towns and villages there. In actuality, then, the Emborados series approaches literal depiction. As a representation of intricate, visually intriguing surfaces, Neri’s broken, irregular, overlapping forms, as well as his patterns, textures, and colors, transform their visual source into sign. It now seems but a short step from the Emborados series to the relief walls, and another to the addition of gures.

270. Emborados Series XV (Diptych), 1976 Private Collection

spatial tropes are intentional and controlled (those of art), in practice, both can be and often are read in much the same way by the perceptual imagination.

155

With the Emborados series, Neri attempts to undo such familiar spatial distinc tions by failing to disclose the basis of the imagery: if they are seen solely as artworks, the drawings point toward a well-trodden path of interpretation that, in actuality, bears no connection to their actual genesis. It is an ambiguity that wants to counteract critical assumptions regarding the nature of the image as readily apprehensible.

271.LEFT/RIGHT156 Mary Julia – Side I , 2001 272. Arcos de Geso VII , 1985

157 Neri does something similar in the relief sculptures. These sculptural “walls” never insist on an explicit meaning or af liation, or on any reliable cluster of references. Nor do the titles provide descriptive information that might locate their origins as spaces or sites, or even the artist’s intended effect. At full scale, their material nature is speci c and concrete, and as ostensible “backgrounds” to the gures, their very materiality asserts the ambiguity of their relationship to the gure, spatial or otherwise. Many of the walls from the Arcos de Geso series are marked by an elegant embroidery of linear incisions, as well as intri cate patterns of inscriptions, ssures, indentations, breaks, splatters, buttons, depressions, hairline cracks, and the “ghosts” of gures: thus Neri activates and LEFT/RIGHT 273. Relief Study No. 11, 1983 274. Relief Study No. 12, 1983

275–276.158Mujer Pegada Series No. 3 (Cast 2/4), 1985; Cast 2006 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

159 enlivens the sculptural surfaces in ways that recall his drawings, and yet, as solid surfaces from which the gures advance physically into our space, their function is not so obvious. With the addition of non-descriptive, often lyrical color — color that speaks on behalf of the artist, autobiographically, and, at the same time, stimulates the viewer’s imagination — the relief here seizes a broad terrain of emotional and/or psychological expressivity.

The Arcos de Geso sculptures are distinguished thematically by the presence of the gure, which occupies (our) space at life size and in three dimensions, a gure whose unmistakable human appeal is excited rather than inhibited by the addition of poetic color. Still, the Emborados series drawings do not simply recede from view at this point. When the gure enters drawings of the same period and family, Neri tends to treat drawn space very much as he treated the spatial wall in the Emborados series — as, that is, readily available to color, but nonspeci c and free of narrative detail. Almost any pictorial setting, however “nonrepresentational,” launches a response that differs from our sense of the solitary gure as a formal vehicle whose gestures bear particular kinds of narrative content. What is this “place” in which the gure nds itself? Why is the gure there? From this perspective, the relief form entails much risk for a contemporary artist, for it necessarily bears traditions of use, meaning, and association, ancient as well as modern, civic as well as religious. Because the imagery of the Emborados drawings is not perceived in terms of mass, it performs spatially as a matter of course, but, once again, the slippage that occurs around its representational “identity” does not transfer to the relief. Here, mass tends to be perceived as literal, and cannot guarantee a similar kind of reading, even when Neri uses paint to subdue some of its strongest material effects. The relief is a (literal) wall of signs, but rather than denoting spatiality, it displaces (real) space physically and encloses the gure within its assertion of mass. The wall will continue to exert at least some domination over the gure, and because its materiality resists the spatial readings that come so readily to drawing, we cannot quickly grasp the nature of the exchange between the physical and spatial identities of the wall, or between the wall and the gure contained by it. Figure and relief can never be completely separated, must forever coexist, wedded in a kind of eternal unity. 277. Mary Julia, 1999

160

Neri was aware, of course, that the relief walls would ultimately resist spatial readings, even when a relationship with drawing was implied by the proportions of the “ at” surface around the gure. We might say that the relief wall no longer signi es the spatial as such, but instead implements the withdrawal of the dedicated notational spaces of drawing and painting: it forces the work to rst perform sculpturally. Its relationship with the gure is unitary, and if the wall confers meanings on the gure, so, too, does the gure confer meanings on it. Yet the relief, as a ground for the gure, tends to problematize this exchange by materially absorbing potential meanings related to the presence of the gure as a gure, and as it does so, it begins to expand the gure’s physical and conceptual elds. Such issues do not arise among the single standing gures, which necessarily enter our own space as gures, and when they do, they behave in ways readily comprehensible to us. As a gural environment, the relief mass imparts the impermeability of surface, opacity, and obstructive scale, and even atness cannot simply be accepted as a trait somehow required by the gure as a source or explanation of meaning. It is for this reason that Neri refrains from further literalizing the already literal wall. He does not build the “wall” from brick, which would overly determine interpretation, nor does he add other architectural features.

To the extent that the wall can be perceived as a “background” to the gures, it may of course imply certain common forms of presentation, but even though it provides a perfectly viable structural solution to the real dif culties posed by the combination of material and scale, it is not truly architectural. Its proportions bring to mind a stage, as well, which gives the relief form a certain theatricality that the gures, in spite of their apparent indifference to the performative nature of the tableau, never quite contradict, but this is probably built into the history of the relief. When we encounter a single gure, we are free to circle it, to interrogate its human af liations from our own sense of self; the relief, on the other hand, insists that we position ourselves before it, that we study it from a perspective established by the artist, and because we must account somehow for the wall, our response to the gure as a gure is bound to proceed along different lines.

278. Arcos de Geso [Pisano No. 53], 1982; Re-worked 1984

161LEFT/RIGHT279. Arcos de Geso III (Detail), 1985 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 280. Recuerdo Benicia No. 8 , 1993 Private Collection

Nasher

Still, the wall does carry out a number of duties. It is: (1) a material analog to the drawing sheet; (2) a contained, internally integrated structural eld that simultaneously contains and isolates the gures, cloaking them in a mysterious atmosphere of hiddenness or interiority; (3) an enclosure that shelters the gures from the surrounding world; (4) a barrier that prohibits us from seeing “beyond” the gure, whether literally or as interpretation; and (5) a framing device that reorients the gure as a presentational form. Similarly, associations de Geso I (Diptych), 1985 Sculpture Center, Dallas , de Geso Study [Rock No. 48] Arcos de Geso Study [Rock No. 47 ]

OPPOSITE

162

, 1984 283.

, 1984

281. Arcos

ABOVE/BELOW 282. Arcos

163 generated by the relief as a historical genre establish af liations with (human) time, including its numerous connections to art history and the uses to which the sculptural gure has been submitted in many different periods, cultures, and locations. We soon discover, too, that these networks of association and con nection are cooperative. None struggles for dominion, and as they seek each other, we have dif culty extricating them, one from another, as discrete features.Thus Neri uses the relief to shift the gure from the communicative (freestanding and humanized in open, variable settings) to the dramatic (the historicized genre that situates the form in a controlled setting). Although the dramatic can easily resolve in the direction of arti ce, Neri resists this movement, which further explains why he never added details or props to the wall as a way of setting a stage. By treating the wall as a sculptural entity integrated with the gure and susceptible to his gestures as a builder, Neri’s strict management of visual features yields a closed frame of the privately signi cant and personally symbolic. As effect, this heightens the atmosphere of (personal) ritual as an aspect of the (his) sculpted gure: the relief is a vehicle with which the artist ritualizes, dramatizes, and symbolizes his autobiographical, self-descriptive drives in a manner that is more distinctly presentational than the single gure. Neri’s decision to work with the relief may also be connected to stone sculptures that he began in 1983, full-sized gures partially submerged in, or appearing to emerge and assume form from the material itself. These had in fact started earlier that year as a sequence of nine maquettes that Neri called the Mujer Pegada series, each a small plaster gure set against a plywood wall. These were shipped to the artist’s studio in Carrara and provided the formal basis for his subsequent Mujer Pegada marbles, which cannot really be called wall or relief works in the fullest sense, not as Neri would develop the format in the large plaster Arcos de Geso reliefs of 1985 and after. The remnant material that constitutes the gural “walls” does not have nearly the same sculptural prominence, and in any case it points toward different inquiries around form and material. Nonetheless, the Mujer Pegada marbles are suf ciently companionable with the relief to suggest a signi cant role in Neri’s subsequent expansion of the wall form in plaster.

284–286.164M.Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1988

165

166

290.

OPPOSITE,167LEFT/RIGHT

287.

292.

288.

293.

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VIII , 1983

Yale University Art Gallery Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IX , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

291.

294.

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VII , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery BELOW, LEFT/RIGHT

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief I , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief II , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief III , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery ABOVE, LEFT/RIGHT Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief V, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VI , 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

289.

295.LEFT/RIGHT168 Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IV, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 296. Mujer Pegada No. 4, 1985 San Francisco International Airport 297.OPPOSITEMujer Pegada No. 8 , 1985; Re-worked 2012 Private Collection

Neri’s work in marble, in which ground was inseparable from the gural body as a loosely columnar, af liate shape, would agitate against old sculptural certainties as partial gure and rough stone vied for the viewer’s interest, with the result that the surrounding space could no longer be regarded as ambient or neutral, as if simply awaiting the arrival of the sculpture into its precincts.

169

Neri’s devotion to the single gure tells us that his understanding of ground was de ned largely by his own experience as a body moving through the spaces of the physical world, and as a body engaged in the interconnected procedures entailed in perceiving, looking, touching, learning, thinking, and making.

Among the Mujer Pegada marbles, there are instances in which Neri abbre viates the gure to the point that it truly blends into the stone. He then takes another step, chiseling sheets of texture that erode lingering demarcations between material and form to the point that a conventional gure/ground relationship ceases to exist. The gure is now inextricable from its formal integration with the slab — it is a presence — and our perception shifts from the familiar, generally secure procedures of looking to a reliance on a more intuitive kind of perception. This gure passes into the relief sculptures, where

At that point in the 1980s, he was giving a great deal of thought to the nature of stone — its unique properties, as well as the ease with which material and form combined to evoke prior modes of gural sculpture as a valuable site, securely lodged in cultural memory. In essence, the stone carvings blur the gure/ground relationship, and in this sense, are crucial to Neri’s transition from the single gure to the relief. Modernism had challenged the idea that gure and ground are intrinsic to the production of art; this was an especially import ant issue for painting, as gure and ground became a site of struggle against perspective, the pseudo-science of representation that had satis ed the rationalist instincts ofWestern culture in art since the Renaissance. Though sculpture would not be exempt from these same questions, they were never entirely settled for the gurative sculptor, nor could they be, for the presence of a ground of some kind — even real space — is inevitable.

The gure/ground relationship had never been unduly troublesome among the standing gures, insofar as it was conceived in terms of sensible, empirically veri able distinctions as clear as up and down, here and there, this and that.

170 it will become most apparent among the double gures and silhouettes. It is the form that appears alongside the sculpted gure on Arcos de Geso II and Arcos de Geso VI. It also inhabits some of the Maha – Bronze Relief maquettes, where the “second” gure is either a silhouette — a rough sort of bas-relief related to the contour in Neri’s drawings, raised slightly from the relief surface but essen tially at — or a fragmented form that scatters and dissolves as it descends along the relief surface from head to ledge.

When the reliefs are inscribed in ways that evoke the artist’s drawings, they maintain a body of recognizable signage that we can link to the drawings, as Neri’s visual grammar slides back and forth between mediums. A fundamental identity will hold, and in this sense, Neri’s handling of the relief as a surface is a

Even when the gures seem to come forward from the relief wall to enter our space, and our world, the relief in its entirety continues to ful ll its formal identity as a gure or gures on at surfaces proportionately consistent with those of Neri’s common modes of drawing, and indeed, such explicit sculptural references to the gural occupation of the drawing sheet would seem to con rm that he is assembling a legible relationship between otherwise dissimilar mediums. Although the gure and wall are collaborative, and advance the inherently sculptural issues of visibility, accessibility, and display, their material unity proposes ambiguities, as well. Neri does not simply “place” the gure, or join it “to” the wall, and while the volumetric extension of gure from surface is spatial, the gure belongs to the wall as completely as it belongs to real space.The contour line, where the “edge” of the gure meets the wall, rarely articulates the gure/ground relationship with the clarity of the artist’s drawings.

The line of contact can be more like a smear of material uncertainty. Because Neri never quite de nes its exact nature as a boundary or even as a transitional zone, the line refuses to provide an outright explanation of its duties, or to actualize an explicit role of its own with either the gure or the relief surface; gure and wall are neither exactly one object, nor explicitly two. While the basis of formal connectivity is, once again, material and literal, its literality is simulta neously disallowed as the interpretive basis for a formal relationship. Just the opposite — everything is implication and suggestion.

171 point of junction with the larger body of his work, af rming the relief as an extension of (rather than a digression from) his need for self-telling, the ambition to depict autobiographical content that is by nature incorporative, self-descriptive, and non-narrative, an outpouring of personal detail. In sculpture and drawing alike, the gure remains the constant. At a scale close to one of Neri’s common drawing formats, the sculptural maquettes seem especially keen to dwell on the exchange between mediums. Their rough, handmade quality, whether in ceramic, stoneware, or cast in bronze, and apparent in Maha – Ceramic Maquette I, seeks the speed and direct contact we associate with drawing, and as a result, the smaller gures have a beguiling individuality, a quality of personality that emerges in contrast with the rhythmic textures of the relief surfaces. Although the maquettes lack the bodily presence of the full-size sculptures, they do display Neri’s translational activities at the level of process, as he explores the intimate permeability of texture and form (in a way that the larger sculptures do not) as a readily apprehensible uni cation of gure and ground. The low-keyed glazes and earthen character of the stoneware maquettes clearly support this effort, as do the plaster surfaces left bare to enforce an association with paper. Additive color can be a factor in the relief sculpture at this scale, but it is a limited one. Neri focuses instead on discovering more about the operation of the gure in this format. In Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IX, for example, he positions two kinds of gures — a frontal and a lateral — into a simultaneously formal and inferential relationship, a con guration he never duplicated at full size. The smaller works answered his inquiries satisfactorily. In some instances, differentiations are created by formal and textural dissim ilarities between the gure and the relief structure. Although the depth of the relief may shift from bottom to top behind the gure, the most common distinctions between gure and ground are textural. When the textures differ in perceptible ways, the gure seems to advance from the wall in a vivid spatial effect. Color or the reduction of gural volume introduces other effects, some times blending gure and wall by lessening sensations of gural dimensionality.

298. Mujer Pegada No. 7, 1996 Private Collection

299. Maha – Ceramic Maquette I , 1986 Private Collection

OPPOSITE

When Neri uses similar or related textures on both, tightening the proximity of gure and ground, the maquette clearly recalls his drawn gure.

300.LEFT/RIGHT172 Relief Study No. 9, 1983 301. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IX , 1984 OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW 302. Carrara No. 5, 1984 303. Carrara No. 6 , 1984 Private Collection

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All such techniques can be transferred to the format at life size, but the maquette scale is more sensitive to nuances of material handling. In both stone ware and bronze, the smaller size soon exposes the way in which an alteration to any single aspect of form affects all others, a tendency that reinforces the logic behind Neri’s limited palette: earth-based pigments give a uniformity to the surface textures, which, in conjunction with scale, means that the entire work can be perceived quickly, an effect that tightens its various internal rela tionships, while the surfaces, which retain the sandy texture of the clay, tend to unify our perception of light and shadow, weight and density, and by extension, our sense of formal organization. Needless to say, the stoneware maquettes also give high value to their elemental material personality and its association with archaic sculpture. Among the freestanding gures, gesture is typically ordered around a length of rebar that replicates the human spine as its central structural component, and as an aspect of the form crucial to expressivity of gesture. This is a standard solution to the material necessities of construction in plaster, but at the same time, it connects Neri’s single gures to the history of naturalistic sculpture, all those gures for which the spine is the organizing principle in the handling of communicative form. Once the architectonic function of the spine has been transferred to the relief wall, gural gesture begins to seek other modes of projection. Although the gure never surrenders its naturalism, neither can it ignore the encroachment of the wall as a form. That Neri immediately grasped the sculptural implications of this shift is evidenced by the degree of gural mobilization among the maquettes. Wherever he places the gures, their upright posture accepts and accommodates the actual presence of the wall, and a unique perspective is brought into being by the gure-as-axis, characterized in part by the ability of the wall to defeat the kinds of spatial depths that settle so easily around the single standing gure, or around the drawn gure. Still, the dimensions of the relief surface cannot quite release their associa tion with the artist’s drawings, and so the comparison needs further adjustment. Because Neri’s drawing elds tend to be nonspeci c, we naturally see them as spatial, while the relief surfaces, objects of physical mass, will not permit an identical response. Depth fails to conform to the familiar logic of pictorial

Lastly, even when the proportions of many of the Mujer Pegada, Maha and Arcos de Geso reliefs echo those of the drawings, the full-sized sculptural reliefs disable direct correspondence. The reliefs are sculpture, unequivocally. Neri inscribes their surfaces with marks that may recollect those of his drawing elds, thus suggesting the potential for a spatial dimension, and for a translation across mediums, yet the marks do not overcome the materiality of the relief itself.

The inscriptive nature of the surface, as Neri uses it, also argues that the relief be regarded as a linguistic format whose decoding must be undertaken through our participation in the artist’s formal language. When two gures appear con junctively, either in the maquettes or the full-sized reliefs, the absence of explicit narrative between them can be disconcerting. If the material eld unites them metaphorically, they are nonetheless depicted as separate, isolated, self-enclosed.

304. Pisano No. 17 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Private Collection

174 perspective, and should be recognized as something other than “space,” and other than, or more than, a visual geometry based on width, breadth, and depth.

Neri’s deployment of sculptural marks can certainly animate the surface, but the material alters the nature of the mark, as it must, transforming to one degree or another its role as a signi er. At full size, the reliefs are monumental enough to maintain the idea that they also be seen as enclosures, contained environments that preserve the gure within.

Each may wish simply to be regarded in terms of a speci c kind of occupation of sculptural space, or as a kind of submerged narrative that wishes to return us to a realm of dream in which many stories now become possible.

This situation recalls an earlier question: can the sculptural object ever reenact the mark-based evocation of an internal spatiality that comes so effortlessly in drawing? Perhaps Neri believed initially that it could, and if this belief informed his drive to test the sculptural relief as an environment for the gure, one that might also have the effect of separating it from an uncontrollable world beyond its borders — only to discover the dif culty, if not the impossibility, of achieving this type of space in plaster or bronze.

Consequently, while the relief form provides the gure with a domain of sorts, a habitat related to and yet separate from its structural function as a ground, it lacks roominess, the felt sensation of a depth that envelops the gure in a eld we perceive as spatially related to and coextensive with our own.

175 Here, then, the sculptural surfaces at last surrender the lingering tokens of depictive space. Flatness, as well as mass, opacity, imperviousness, and weight, are now submitted to the organization of the relief as a form metaphorically descriptive of a condition that concerns the gure. Neri has indisputably created a unique kind of environment for it, and in doing so, a unique kind of gure belonging to that site. We nd ourselves asking once again: should the wall be properly regarded as a ground, or as a background, or as an environment, or as form only, privately inscribed and referential? Or is it all of these things, and more? The gure, caught between the freedom of emergence from the wall and submersion into the material that continues to hold it in place, gives a powerful impression of striving to articulate layers of meaning unavailable to the freestanding form alone.

305. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006

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The standing gures of the 1970s openly admit Neri’s obsessions with the act and processes of building, with (re)making the body at his own scale. He was invested in the physical demands entailed in making a certain kind of nat uralistic gure in plaster, and among the single gures, physical empathy between the viewer and the sculpted human form provided an imaginative eld in which to consider questions related to the gestures of the gure and the artist alike.

OPPOSITE 306–307. Standing Figure I , 1982 308–309. Standing Figure No. 6 , 1978 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

310–311.LEFT/RIGHT178Arcos de Geso XI , 1985 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

312. Mary Julia Standing VII , 2009

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The relief format stood differently, in a different relationship with the viewer, while the wall enabled Neri to integrate a rich vocabulary of mark and allusion into the work. For that very reason, the relief continues to raise a question of crucial signi cance to the artist: at a time when the nature of the human, as it has been understood at least since the Renaissance, is under duress, can gurative sculpture sustain a meaningful interrogation of selfhood, human purpose and ful llment, individuality of spirit? Will inscriptions from the past assist him in his undertaking, or do they rebut the demands of modernity? Even before the Renaissance, those were among the questions that contributed to the development of a sculpted gure still familiar to us historically. Such ques tions still cling to the naturalistic gure, and remain all but unavoidable here. Once Neri began loosening received de nitions related to sculptural formats and genres — de nitions contained and stabilized by the procedures of art history — he scrambled some of the very signi ers that might have guided us through his intention for these works, a strategy that tells us once again how explicitly his thematic concerns remain bound to the currency of the contem porary art world. The gure, again, is the constant, and as it continues to confront the communicable possibilities of the modern form, his visual ideas cross one another like laments within the material body of the reliefs, the tracings of intrinsically synthetic imagination. When these ideas draw upon the art-historical, they assume features so deeply settled in a form that we nd ourselves ranging over references without alighting for long on any single one. We may be barely aware of them, or they may startle us like a suddenly remembered scrap of a dream. To some extent, Neri’s recovery of visual forms — his own as well as those of art-historical origin — represents an act of remembrance, of rescue, resurrection, renewal, preservation — even of liber ation, as they burst upon the present — not as reminders of what was but as embodied elements whose vitality refers to that which is most durable in the nature and construction of our humanness.

DURING THE LATE 1950S , Manuel Neri began making life-sized plaster heads. His preoccupation with the sculpted gure was comprehensive and, we might say, devotional. For him — as for Marini and Giacometti — the head represented an important precedent form, and as such, it asked for his consid eration. He knew the work of his predecessors, and wanted to learn for himself, in the studio, with his own hands, what they had gleaned from this ancient motif.

The production of heads paused in the early 1970s, when Neri turned his full attention to the standing gure after he began working with the same model on a regular basis; although he did at least a few heads based on her features, clearly they are digressions from their other work together. But Neri is restless, compulsively so, and he returned to the head in the early 1980s, undertaking a sequence of portraits in plaster, bronze and marble based on a Japanese artist he had met in Carrara. Those thirty-two heads, a uni ed group known as Makiko, occupied Neri off and on for the next fteen years. For us, their often luminous surfaces and barely audible features — at times, the hint of features — may be more likely to call to mind the Sleeping Muse (1909–10) of Brancusi than Marini’s gruff, heavily-worked heads, but neither comparison is adequate to Neri’s achieve ment. The Makiko heads advance an array of the artist’s ongoing interests,

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313. Joanne Leonard,BeniciaPhotographerstudio,1972

HEADS: MOTIFS FROM THE GREAT FIGURATIVE TRADITION

182 including the evocative nature of his materials and how they can be in ected by handling, particularly when his constructive techniques move against art-his torical convention — in this case the application of non-descriptive color on materials as characterful as stone and metal. And Neri is concerned, as always, with the communicative capacity of the partial form, advanced through the felt effects of scale, proportion, and nuanced formal distortion.

Marini’s portraits — unlike those of Giacometti — are unequivocal sculp tural and/or gural masses, and he can embed his own humanity in the heads because he maintains a steadfast belief in art’s principles and their foundation in human experience. He nds no salvation in an outright rejection of tradition. Innovation and novelty do not necessarily coincide. Mastery is important.

The sculptural head was not excluded from the early campaigns of visual modernism. By Giacometti’s time, some entirely new questions were gathering around the head. As a motif, the portrait head was so referential, so evidently

The Makiko heads are portraiture, though resemblance, to speak in a general way, is really Neri’s starting point. When he resumed his use of the head in the 1980s, he faced the challenge of investing his mature sculptural concerns in a motif whose formal self-containment would continue, once again, to resist his experience and technical facility — as much a virtue for Neri as it was for Giacometti before him. Amid the wildly divergent forms of sculptural rede nition in the postwar era, the portrait head — like the sculpted female nude — never quite surrendered its old historical and cultural associations. Because such forms will always maintain their identities as forms, they offer stability to the artist sympathetic to them, a condition that in ects the work of both Marini and Neri. In the atmosphere of anxiety, crisis, and enforced change that typi es modern art, their indifference to self-conscious reinvention or transformation of this basic sculptural format seems almost radical. At the same time, the head makes few concessions to art’s familiar advocacy and marketplace systems, and so the common modes of modern critique fail to provide satisfactory explanations for its contemporary use — another situation that has affected both Marini and Neri. Past and present converge in the portrait head, often in unpredictable ways, and it is on this ground that we come to their work.

In the late 1950s, the sculptural head was, for Neri, a natural aspect of his work with the gure. The head had no presence in progressive American art during those years, and its very irrelevance was among its appeals. He could do with it as he wished, and as a form, it suited his needs — it was small, self-contained, required only a simple armature, and was accessible to building with plaster. A head could be produced quickly, as well, revealing the success or failure of the ideas brought to it without the preparation and labor entailed in a full gure, and it accepted paint, as an element of sculptural making that had emerged in congruence with Neri’s other gural practices.

Portrait Series I (1959) is a larger than life-size male head that depicts one of the denizens of the North Beach bars and coffee houses in those days. It is vividly painted, and as a personality, it is characterized by its sleepy eyes and bulbous red drinker’s nose, and by its enameled black hair, glistening as though with fresh brilliantine. The surface marks call to mind the wide, wiry, textured brushstrokes of Bay Area gurative painting, but Neri also removed patches of color, exposing the white plaster beneath and highlighting particular areas of the form — in effect, pushing the nose forward, toward even further protuber ance — an integration of color and sculptural material advanced in combination with the freedom of his additive and reductive methods, submitted to a quest for full expressivity of form.

183 itself, and so stable that it could easily become as much an illustration of the formal advances of modernity as it was a revelation of them. Its very stability seemed to assist in codifying the uses to which it was put: when it was applied to the head, style had a way of appearing deliberate or self-conscious. Did this mean that the portrait head should simply be jettisoned from the repertoire of available forms, as a mode that refused to comply with the goals of modernity? Had it passed into obsolescence in this respect? Or could it still be transformed, in ways that had not yet been achieved by any modern sculptor?

The portrait head entered Neri’s repertoire around 1958, and he built many of them over the next twelve or fourteen years. How many is unclear. They were dispersed almost as quickly as they were made. Nonetheless, the docu mented heads of this period show that Neri was alert to many of the formal and communicative issues he would continue to explore for the rest of his career.

OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW 314. Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957 ) Muse endormie I [Sleeping Muse I ], 1909–10 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution 315. Makiko IV, 1980 316. Portrait Series I , 1959 Private Collection

317–318184. Mi China, 1969; Re-worked 1974 Private Collection

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The bulging, pinkish nose returns in Mi China (1969; re-worked 1974), but nothing else suggests that this head was made from the same subject: although spots of color and tone occur elsewhere on the head, the features are indistinct or eliminated altogether. In Neri’s hands, it is a true partial, a gural fragment that wants to discover the point at which minimal means and maximal expres sive effect coincide, another question that has haunted much of his subsequent work.But let us return for a moment to Portrait Series I, and some of the other heads of the same period — Dr. Zonk (1958) and the Head of Joan Brown (1959), in which the use of dark pencil lines on white plaster evokes a kind of three-dimensional drawing. Their hewn features bring to mind the imagery of 319–321. Dr. Zonk , 1958 Private Collection

322–323.186Head of Joan Brown, 1959 Private 324.OPPOSITE,CollectionLEFT/RIGHTDavidPark(1911–1960) Couple, 1959 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 325. Plaster Mask I , 1960 Private Collection 326.BELOWPlaster Mask III , 1960 Private Collection

Once Neri shifted his attention to the standing gure in the early 1970s, he began to eliminate facial expression altogether. The faces of those works really are closed off and largely without features, demanding that Neri locate his communicative information in the uni ed gestures of the gural form in its entirety. For Neri himself, the gestures of the body are more authentic than the expressions of the face, which can be manipulated easily by subject and artist alike.

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the Bay Area gurative painters, David Park especially, and indeed the early heads rise out of the milieu in which Neri worked at this time. Neri assimilates the at, masklike appearance of the painted faces, as he assimilates visual ideas from many sources, in order to see how they perform in space.

327.LEFT/RIGHTAlberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Head of Father (Mask ), c. 1927–29 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

With that said, Neri’s early work with the head readily conveys his pleasure in the processes of making as well as his delight at discovering his ability to construct persuasive forms with motifs from the great gurative tradition. And the tradition is on his mind as he begins moving decisively away from local ideas in, say, Untitled Male Head (1958), whose mild color elds and incised features recall Giacometti’s techniques in several of the portraits of his father, or Male Head No. 4 (1969; re-worked 1974), another instance in which direct, minimal means, scraped, hewn surfaces, and color tints bring forth a mood that feels complete in itself.

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328. Untitled Male Head , 1958 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

189 329–330. Male Head No. 4, 1969; Re-worked 1974 Private Collection

331–332.190Markos , 1958; Re-worked 1963 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The most striking portraiture of this period, however, is a series of heads of the sculptor Mark di Suvero. He and Neri shared a studio under the Caffè Trieste in North Beach and occasionally worked together on sculptural projects, but familiarity may have less of a factor in the choice of subject than di Suvero’s appearance — the tall, narrow head, the strong, straight nose, forceful chin, long facial planes, and attop haircut — a head that seemed to be all structure, tai lored to Neri’s constructive interests at the time. Markos (1958; re-worked 1963) is almost a bust, but the upper body fragment, which supports and gives a slight tilt to the head, yields no additional information about the subject. Its innate materiality may be its most obvious quality. Although parts of the head — sections of the cheeks, forehead, and cranium — are smooth and skin-like, the hacking and sawing of Neri’s further surface work produces severe distur bances. The ears are gone, and the beard and parts of the hair are painted silvery grey, a color like raw aluminum.

Neri continued working from his colleague, re ning the head, though hardly along a conventional path, and his further disruptions chart a radical testing of the head as a communicative human motif. Head of Mark di Suvero (1958; re-worked 1963) is unambiguously a head, but other than the strong nose and the suggestion of a beard, this reduced form lacks the identifying details of the prior portrait. With Head of Markos (1963), Neri af rms his early preoccupa tion with the additive and reductive possibilities of plaster. The head appears to have been completed and painted, but then Neri returned to it with his tools, gouging, scraping, and chipping. Amid these embattled surfaces, we see patches of disconnected, seemingly arbitrary colors that can only infer what might have existed at some previous point in time. With its tattered neck, the head looks as though it was torn from its body, giving the form a mood of savagery or primal rite: this is enforced by the hollowness of the head, the dark eye holes, the masklike ferocity. At rst glance, we might think of these heads as anonymous, but in fact Neri has not forgotten the fundamental task of portraiture. Sculpture is the most primitive of mediums, and he seems to want to reinstate something of this elemental energy in his own work. Here is a subject whose features are capable of enduring his concentrated attack on the portrait form, his erce physical 333. Head of Markos , 1963 Yale University Art Gallery

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We, on the other hand, conditioned by the tropes of artistic modernity, might be inclined to regard Neri’s treatment of the head as a contemporary mode of “expressionistic” representation. The artist “expresses,” that is, gives personal form or style to an underlying instinct for pictorial accuracy, creating the idiomatic textures and formal distortions that become points of meaning for him, and potentially for us. Such work can be approached, perhaps, as a mode of controlled interpretive representation, with the serial form itself — whether gure or head — as the “control” element, the form on which the artist relies as a kind of “standard.”

For Neri, then, portraiture is not synonymous with exacting physical replica tion of the subject: as if to force the point, when Head of Markos was cast in bronze in 1980, his application of paint and patina would push it even further from obvious resemblance.

192 struggle to maintain a tightrope balance between resemblance and personally communicative form.

This occurs both in connection with and apart from its basis in human content. Although Neri had been working with a model from the start, he was discovering that sculptural mimesis asks for further relationships between the work and the subject that go well beyond the conventional requirement of looking more or less alike. The work should also be “about” the motif — not just the subject, but the motif itself, as an art form. Thus the sculptural object becomes a thing in itself, not a replication of vision or of the observed subject. As Neri’s full-sized gures continued to unfold in collaboration with a single model over a lengthy period, they, too, were unquestionably “portraits” — portraits of the model, and of the artist — though these gures also tell us that regardless of his interests in the appearance of the human subject in a spatial world, Neri also is at some pains to show himself as conscious of that world, or of being in that world, bearing the forms and activities of (his) consciousness into the work, as the material is brought to “life.”

335. Mary Julia’s Head II – Cast Paper (Black ) and Mary Julia’s Head I – Cast Paper ( White), BELOW1975

336. Mary Julia Head I , 1974 Private Collection 337–338. Untitled Head IV, 1976 Yale University Art Gallery

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OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT

334. Mary Julia Head (Cast 2/4), 1980; Re-worked 1994 Private Collection

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Neri’s return to the portrait head might not have occurred without the intervention of another model. He had been making regular working trips to Carrara since 1976, in order to facilitate his increasing commitment to building with stone. That summer, he met a Japanese artist named Makiko Nakamura,

339.LEFT/RIGHTMakiko I , 1980 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 340. Makiko Drawing I , 1980 Private 341–342.OPPOSITECollection Makiko I , 1980 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum

With these series of portrait heads, Neri treats the model as a depictive gure nally unknown and unknowable as a personality: the head, that is, as a visual referent of an actual and speci c subject whose personality remains a cipher nonetheless. He advances in a direction opposite that of Marini, who adhered to resemblance as the basis through which he strove to capture and communicate a discernible “essence” of the sitter. Neri withdraws those kinds of details, and in doing so, he creates an identi able “portraiture” while at the same time erasing the physical markings of wear and tear, age, time, experience — the details that, for Marini, contributed to the visible formation of the “self” of the subject.

195 who also had a studio in the town, and she agreed to model for him: it was a relatively brief collaboration that produced four plaster heads in 1980, each developed from a distinctive coiffure. Two casts of each head were made at a foundry in Carrara. Between 1994 and 1997, he also produced three oversized heads in marble, based on the plasters rather than the presence of the model herself, as well as a sequence of eleven life-sized marble heads. Almost ten years later in 2007, Neri brought the plaster heads to his studio in Benicia that were subsequently re-worked. Molds were taken in 2008 and they were cast in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington. To distinguish between the original plaster heads and bronze casts, Neri used variations, diminutives of “Makiko”. The three large marble heads were titled Makida and the smaller marble heads were titled Maki. All of the large Makida marble heads were painted, as well as several of the life-size marble heads. If the plaster heads of the 1950s and 1960s are cloaked in an aura of exhil aration and discovery, the development of the Makiko heads is consistent with the methodology of Neri’s late career. They evolved systematically, in series, an approach that enables the artist to work out a variety of color-based ideas on a xed form. As he applies color, Neri un xes the form through the act of returning to it and altering it with paint — therefore denying its identity as an unchanging object of metal or stone, establishing it instead as variable, and open to an unexpectedly wide range of moods and effects. In the editions especially, Neri draws heavily on the color lessons he had been acquiring in his large relief series of the 1980s.

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197

Compared to Marini, Neri is exceedingly ambitious in his use of the portrait head as a vehicle for complex, non-localized, non-descriptive color: color as a crucial element in the overall production of the work as portraiture and, at the same time, apart from it, as a trait belonging wholly to the artist and only inferentially to the model. If the heads evoke the forms of antiquity, particularly in marble, this is an additional effect, not unimportant, but not primary. Makiko assisted in this project, if tacitly, with the placidity of her pose and by altering her hair from work to work. She never enforces an active or assertive character of her own, instead encoding a Japanese identity in her hair, which she treats as a form in itself. Each coiffure “means” something, a signal from the wearer to observers privy to its cultural signi cance, a signi er of some quasi-public communication. Neri never learned what those “meanings” were, and probably he did not care, preferring instead to let this level of absence enter the textures of his process. If he does not know, he can treat the model chie y as a form.

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 343. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Marina, 1940 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia 344. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Marina, 1940 Museo Marino Marini, BELOWPistoia 345. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Ritratto di America Vitale [Portrait of America Vitale], 1938 Museo Marino Marini,LEFT/RIGHTPistoia 346–347. Makiko II , 1980 Private Collection 348. Makiko III , 1980

349.LEFT/RIGHTMakiko No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Private Collection

By 1983, when he began painting the rst bronze Makiko editions, the quietude of the model assists in amplifying the effects of the color by shifting our attention from her features — our tendency, that is, to read the work as psychological narrative — to the paint itself. Neri might use color to formally separate face and hair, or he might not. As we continue to study the bronze heads, we will become more inclined to attend to the artistic choices entailed in the colors than to the subject on which they have been placed.

350. Makiko No. 2 (Cast 2/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 di Rosa Collection, Napa, California

198

Neri does not come to Makiko with the idea of reinvigorating the portrait head, nor does he nd a sculptural charge in the exoticism beloved by early visual modernism. Instead, this “foreign” head provides him with an opportunity to circumvent the (his) habitual re exes of familiarity — the model he has come to know extremely well, what we might call his “native” subject — and he can now concentrate on form.

351–352. Makiko No. 3 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Private Collection Makiko No. 4 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Private Collection

353–354.

ABOVE/BELOW199

200

201

These concerns become all the more apparent in the three heads of the Makida series. They are larger than life, cut from veined white marble, and mounted on black marble bases. The scale of these heads, in combination with the East Asian features derived from the model, evoke the feeling or mood of temple statuary. For Neri, none of this has anything to do with cultural stereo type. As a comparison, we might think again of Marini’s postwar portrait sculpture. It is a commonplace in the writing about Marini that his work was irrevocably altered by the war, that it became more somber, and took on a depth and breadth of feeling that is not evident in his prewar work. We can begin, therefore, to view this portraiture as an expression of his wartime experiences, and the shadow cast by the war over his generation: the troubled upward gaze of his subjects, the scarred surfaces, the dark patinas, the kinds of marks left by the hand — taken together they formulate a story of the spiritual struggles of the European twentieth century.

355–357. Makida III , 1997 Anderson Collection at Stanford University

This is not Neri’s world, and yet, as an artist of postwar America, he could look back across the history of the sculpted gure in the West and feel the disruptions that had occurred in the twentieth century, the breakage, and the lost cultural securities. He did not expect to recapture them in his work, no more than did Marini. These marble heads might be Neri’s dream in, and for, the present, embodied in the formal order of a head that, as portraiture, also appears to dream, so enclosed and withdrawn does the model seem to us, so disinterested in the world outside herself.

358–359. Makida II , 1994; Re-worked 1997 Private 360–362.OPPOSITECollection Makida I , 1994; Re-worked 1997 Private Collection

Neri seeks and for the most part achieves a quality that glances toward Western classicism and its sculptural imperatives — the head as both organic and abstract, dynamic and stable, present and eternal, a formal embodiment of the harmony of the inner and outer selves of its (human) subject — not a quest for order so much as a quest to place the (his) form of order within the world’s unruly spaces.

202

203

363.204 Makiko I (Cast 2/4), 1980; Cast 2008 Private Collection

With that said, Neri is not illustrating ideas. He works as an artist rst and foremost, and knows that he must ful ll the conditions of art if these other voices in the sculpture are to be heard. Thus we arrive at the Makiko heads as they were cast and painted in 2008, when Neri himself was approaching the age of eighty and looking at them with the experience and authority of a long career. Neri had made some breakthroughs in his ability to integrate paint with metal, and it no longer sits “on” the surface like a skin, but now gives the impression of having been sunk into the material. Here, he leaves intact the cuts and textures of the original plaster heads, but the features feel even more withdrawn than before, less engaged with the world, less concerned with the presentation of an individual personality. In some of the heads, slight disruptive textures around the mouth give the face a bit of a frown, as if to counter the 364–365. Makiko IV (Cast 4/4), 1980; Cast 2012; Patina 2016

205

206 eyes that feel eroded, hardly more than indentations. The coiffures are accen tuated by this mood of withdrawal, and accentuate it. One, seen frontally, creates a kind of semicircle broken by cuts in the area of the temples. Another leads to a strong, solid, sloping shape projected along the top and back of the head. At this point, the model has become at once subject and form, and for us, there is a powerful ambiguity in the blending of functions.

The colors are generally soft — a mild, owerlike yellow, or powdery blues and whites — and amid this palette, the vermilion hair on one of the heads is dazzling and strange, unnatural as realistic portraiture, yet controlled by the composed countenance of the model. On occasion, the metallic surface is also apparent, a contrast to the whisper of the paint, and yet the overall atmosphere is one of placidity and caress, a gentleness. Makiko II (Cast AP-I), 1980; Cast Patina

366–367.

2014;

2016

207 368–369. Makiko I (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 2008 Private Collection

208

After looking at the work of these three sculptors, we can better understand the interest in the portrait head during modernism’s rst decades. The artists of that period felt the proximity of the Western visual tradition, right at their backs, closer than we may be able to fully appreciate now, and there was a need, even an obligation, to demonstrate the value of the new ideas by applying them to the various gural forms, as the motifs at the center of the tradition. If the head was not quite a dominant form historically, it had the security of its prestige within that history, while its insistent referentiality challenged the ideas that were being brought to it. For artists committed to introducing these fresh

370.LEFT/RIGHTMaryJulia Klimenko, Photographer Benicia studio, 1995 371. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio 372.OPPOSITEPhotographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993

209 developments into a visual narrative they knew well, the portrait head was, if nothing else, a symbolic contest, a rite of passage at the gates of art history. If they met its demands successfully, their ideas were sound. As we turn back to Giacometti, Marini, and Neri, their attendance on the portrait head can seem idiosyncratic, at the very least a mark of their determi nation to maintain an independence from the dominant movements of their time. They are outliers. Progressive visual ideas are not unimportant, of course, but the humanist impulse, the very thing that drew them to the gure in the rst place, is always paramount. The gure would be their test, regardless of the particular form it took in their sculpture. Neither Giacometti, Marini nor Neri can presume the traditional artist’s role as a spokesperson for the culture, the one who gives visual expression to its foundational values. They share instead the modern artist’s disjunctive relationship with society: they do not speak for the culture, but to it, voices of inquiry and conscience, and to accom plish this as art, they must establish for themselves the authority that approbates theirDuringspeech.the postwar years, Giacometti’s busts pull away from portraiture as such to a more declarative view of the human as a being under pressure — an atmospheric pressure of space and distance — and he was able to recreate the stresses entailed in this condition, in his work, as a metaphor of the situation of modern social alienation. The portrait heads, on the other hand, demonstrate the limits of (his) facility as the basis for modern sculptural building. Marini and Neri tread a different ground. For them, the studio process became a lifelong methodology based on the expansion of the range of the information that can be applied to their basic motifs — including the head — a trajectory advanced by faith in those forms, what they represent, and what they might tell us about ourselves.

AND

373. M. Lee Fatherree,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1983

11 A

BECAUSE THE SCULPTURAL FIGURE occupies our space even as it stands apart from us, bidding us to approach, to step forward and meet it face to face, our encounters with it are ultimately confrontational, regardless of its scale. Extreme formal stylization would be Giacometti’s means of amplifying the effects of this situation for the viewer: however benign its intentions, confron tation is active and experiential as a matter of course, and Giacometti clearly hoped that it would prompt an active response from the viewer. Such opera tions are not mechanical nor, strictly speaking, within the artist’s control. The standing gures can seem quite animate, alert to our presence, as if they really do wish to extend the possibility of incipient exchange. But what are they really asking of us? What will happen if we accept their invitation? Here, once again, we can see the success with which Giacometti reinstated the frontal format in all its affective power and with a seductive presence that endures even in a contemporary museum environment — a stylized, hieratic gure, quasi-religious in its command of site. Neri began exploring stylization at length in the 1970s, when access to the same model in the studio allowed him to begin treating his motif as a repeatable form: whatever its gestures, the gural “body” was now consistent from work to work. Neri continued his practice of barricading the face behind a mask of TALISMAN OF CONFRONTATION EXCHANGE

211

374–376.212Prietas Series VI , 1993 Private Collection

Neri, again, has no interest in the effects of attenuation, or in a surface characterized by mostly similar types of marks. What seems to worry him is the modern cultural habit of interpreting surface disruptions as little more than constitutive features of an “artwork,” the distinguishing autograph of the builder, inscribed for all to see. Simply put, this view would be too limited, or it would

213 plaster, more determined than ever to eliminate the calculated indicators of personality, psychology, and narrative that are normally encoded into facial expression. By blocking off this information on a reiterative form, he forces us to look more carefully at the gestures of the gure in its entirety as the basis of communication. With a radical shift in emphasis from eye to hand during the constructive process, Neri would thus declare his desire to convey what might be called the experience of experience. If he mistrusts language as an exact or truthful mode of communicability, neither does he have much con dence in any acculturated hierarchism of the senses that would privilege vision, especially as it plays out in art, and in his treatment of the formal gestures of the model, he reveals his will to communicate what he knows with his hands. He trusts what he can touch with his body, literally so. Like Giacometti, Neri treats the sculptural gure as a (his) talisman of confrontation and exchange, with a crucial difference: their gures often seem to “stand” in much the same way, forthrightly, but for Neri, touch additionally upholds the fullness of identi cation between gure and sculptor, as, we might say, mirrors of one another. Here, “identi cation” refers to Neri’s deepest feel ings for both model and sculptural gure as images of the (his) self. Those feelings imbue his transaction with the model, and he brings them into material formation in the studio as he labors with plaster and paint. Within this process, however, Neri is not inhibited by Giacometti’s reticence before the model.

The intimacy and sheer force of his identi cation with his subject generate a vivid atmosphere around the sculpture, one that can strike us as unabashedly sensuous and, at the same time, without contradiction, metaphysical. Because Giacometti takes the experiential procedures of sight as a basis of his construc tive activities, the expressive force of his identi cation with the human model breaks down when sight is rendered as distance, as he obviously intends. Hence the mood of spatial/spiritual isolation that seems to envelop his standing forms.

377–379. Kneeling

1/4), 1991 Private Collection

214 accept too limited an array of meanings. Yet Neri was never tempted to turn in the direction of a conspicuously narrative gure, either, not in the manner of a Rodin or Bourdelle, and certainly not in the manner of those gurative sculptors of his generation af liated with photorealism, pop, and their various derivatives, George Segal, say, Duane Hanson, or John De Andrea. Nothing could be further from Neri’s objectives. His gures possess reality rather than realism. He wants us to “feel” the gure in the fullness of its communicability, and so he does not want viewers to be distracted by illusionism’s glossy craft or its proximity to the intentions of an unambiguous realism.

This was hardly an arbitrary issue for modern sculpture: we might say instead that it has been crucial to the fate of gurative sculpture in the modern period. Industrialization in the West brought with it an increasingly humanized land scape. Cities expanded upwards and outwards, and in the modern cityscape, the mounting scale, density, and complexity of the visual eld inevitably began Figure, 1991 (Cast

380. George Segal (1924–2000) Walk, Don’t Walk , (1976) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

215 to overwhelm the sculptural object, which, even before the mid-twentieth century, faced the diminishment of its old cultural status, its prominence of display in open civic spaces, the gravity it once brought to the service of social and political stability. This situation was further abetted by a steady assault from advances in modern painting, widely regarded by the end of the nineteenth century as the medium central to the trajectories of progressive art. How, then, was sculpture to recover its place in such a uid, visually demand ing environment? And if it could not, might it then be utilized as a vehicle of discourse with those surroundings? To what purpose? The gures of Giacometti and Marini had to nd their home here, in this world. The situation was even more emphatic for Neri a half-century later, when public and corporate spaces were increasingly populated by large non-objective sculptures that negotiated their relationship to contemporary architecture with an ease the gure could not hope to equal.

LEFT/RIGHT

382. John DeAndrea ( b. 1941) Three Versions of Ariel [Ariel I, Ariel II, Ariel III ], 2011 Courtesy of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York

381. Duane Hanson (1925–1996) Rita the Waitress , 1975 Courtesy of Van de Weghe, New York

216

As Giacometti confronted these changing conditions, the representational legacies of likeness, mass, scale, measurement, and proportion that had de scended from antiquity and the Renaissance, all the signi cant traits of sculptural rationalism, would be of less importance than a totality of impression depen dent on space and distance — in the spatial environment that had come to characterize the modern city, all the spaces and distances and proportions that shifted continually, sometimes unexpectedly, as the sojourner passed among its buildings, streets, alleyways, and parks. Thus Giacometti turned from likeness as such to scale, or literal height, as a decisive factor in his rendering of form, and necessarily withdrew it from the traditional sites of display. His gures would thus advance the critical argument that scale was no longer a standard of sculptural signi cance, even among the smallest works, nor was location. His standing gure did not want to be a reproduction of visual reality.

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT

If we look back from Giacometti’s solution, we can see which issues were most problematic for him, and how they have in ected Neri’s work. The management of the eld in sculpture, as in painting, can easily become absorbed in the business of producing visual hierarchies, those valuations regarding which objects are signi cant (and why) and which are not, arranged through the means of scale, placement, and so on. Giacometti rejected the notion that such questions could be satisfactorily answered by the preoccupations of rationalism. Because he was so immersed in questions of how we acquire knowledge, particularly as it comes through the senses, and most especially through the eye, he could not accept comforting but thoroughly conventional assumptions about the stability of knowledge or even our capacity to know things in a de nitive Giacomettiway. had recognized that because the sculptural gure must operate in the disorganized precincts of real space — that is, without the aid of painting’s self-enclosed spaces — its submission to the ordering logic of perspective, scale, and so on can appear willful, arbitrary, arti cial. His sculpted gure needed to be completely itself in the midst of any and all visual conditions, xed in its setting but capable of registering ambient changes as they occur around it, which are then registered in turn by the mobile viewer, whose passage through time and place is variable as well. Needless to say, conventional guration would not serve this purpose.

Giacometti was hardly oblivious to the potential for commentary in his work. As a metaphor, severe material attenuation could, by the mid-twentieth century, suggest, for example, a whittling away of the sheer, exhausting weight of the Western sculptural tradition, an effort to release the gure, and its maker, from the obligations of a venerated but burdensome legacy. Would he forge a path to freedom at last? Certainly the sculpture can be understood as a revelation of the struggle itself: to demonstrate its dif culties materially was to express the situation of the modern sculptor who looked at a history that must have seemed unsurpassable on its own terms. But what are the new terms? Will the artist be liberated by submission to the making process, or subjugated to it? Such is the ambiguity of the Giacomettian gure, which feels almost weightless before the eye, and, at the same time, remains grounded by its

383. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

385. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), Photographer Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1945–46. Paris. The 14th arrondissement. Rue Hippolyte Maindron

384. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Walking Quickly Under the Rain, 1949 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

217

218 oversized feet, subject to forces of gravity that are at once visual, sculptural, and metaphorical: evidently the tradition cannot bear complete effacement, for the gures are connected to the Western sculptural past even as the artist differ entiates them from it. Or: they are descendants of that tradition, and stand apart from it, on their own ground, critiquing the encumbrances of the past from the vantage of an unsettled present.

Stylization enabled Giacometti to vary gural scale more or less at will, while severe material reduction gave the individual work a formal unity that can be perceived in a glance.The gures are never quite self-evident as formal signi ers of human consciousness and its operations. They are referentially human, yes, but if their overall structural integrity can be discerned quickly, their surfaces are too complicated to decipher easily. To go a further step, the standing women are neither inventions, nor are they not inventions, another ambiguity. Thus the stiff, compressed postures and kneaded surfaces convey the sculptor’s sense of the dif culties entailed in seeing the world and in representing that seeing, by showing what the processes of seeing are like, however imperfectly. The Giacomettian gure, we might say, exists to be looked at. Giacometti did not wish to eliminate altogether the feeling of empathy that typically occurs when we approach gural sculpture. His course of defamiliar ization required, once again, that the work be at once associative as a form and clearly separate as an object. His involvement with surrealism had demonstrated the shortcomings entailed in realizing (his) psychology in viable physical form, quite literally a translation problem, and while the gure could never quite elude its history as the most ubiquitous of cultural subjects, Giacometti’s close study of perception enabled him to develop, as content, the existential experi ence of inhabiting a physiology, a condition laced with uncertainty. This opened the gure to some of the artist’s most distinctive visual effects, which, as it happened, had the additional virtue of allowing him to address, if by inference, the matter of separateness as the spiritual situation of the modern century. These forays into sculptural meaning were motivated by an excruciat ing, intrinsically human sense of (his own) isolation and individuation. Giacometti’s primary means of articulating an otherness not only sculptural can be found, then, in the manner in which he recreated the traditional sculptural transaction

386. Inge Morath (1923–2002), Photographer Studio of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, 1958

387. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme au doigt [Man Pointing ], 1947 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

388. Gordon Parks (1912–2006), Photographer Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) surrounded by sculptures in his studio, 1952

219LEFT/RIGHT

389. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti painting in his Paris studio; in the foreground is La Grande Tête, c. 1960

220 between volume, surface, and ambient space, his insistence that we experience the gure as a multitude of irregular surfaces liberated from narrative duties of gural “skin,” mass, and gesture.

It may well be, as many commentators have suggested, that every mark of the hand was for Giacometti a metaphor of the glance, a way of documenting materially the processes of seeing and then transferring visual information onto the form as a rendition of perception — a sculptural equivalent of Cézanne’s taches , or color patches, the rhythmic, stitch-like brushstrokes that build towards pattern and image on the canvas — a material rendering of the combination of anxiety and excitement that arises from the sculptor’s commitment to living

391. Rene Burri (1933–2014), Photographer Rue Hippolyte Maindron. The studio of Alberto Giacometti, Swiss painter and sculptor

LEFT/RIGHT 390. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer Alberto Giacometti with two sculptures, 1954

221 with the strangeness of the world, among all its endless, endlessly shifting spaces and surfaces. As an enactment of the problems entailed in representing visual instability as sculpture, Giacometti’s surfaces necessarily want to avoid the sculptural production of the gure as a creation “like” us, formally and spatially, comprised of predictable characteristics that are replicated by the artist and observed by the viewer through a lens of conditioned perception — it is a gure that wants to avoid being “seen” in the mind rather than by the eye. Non-descriptive texture is a thickness we must traverse as viewers, another obstacle to the mechanisms of routine vision, as the moment-to-moment actuality of contact begins to unbind habituated cultural attitudes that want

222 to restrict the gure to a passive, routine, or secondary role in its spatial setting.Bythe late 1970s and early 1980s, when Neri began working in bronze and marble, taking advantage of the approximate, open-ended historical references offered by various combinations of materials and poses, he had given careful study to the handling of similar kinds of visual information among his predeces sors. With that said, Neri was nally less concerned with demonstrating what has been lost to the culture — thus separating himself from Marini’s project, as well — than what can be saved and, more importantly, what endures. He comes to the gure with a sense of what is at stake in a lifelong engagement that placed his sculptural form at the crux of an encounter between self and other — or self and culture — an encounter that might go on and on, without prospect of a de nitive end. Still, in a climate of modernist triumph, it is an aspect of his originality, and his courage, that Neri never makes an effort to refute or avoid positioning the naturalistic gure as a cultural object loaded with associations past and present. Whatever happens to adhere to it will adhere. Such is the artist’s choice — not a failure of nerve, certainly not a retrogression — and because his gures so willingly accept this fundamental identity, Neri has been able to embed the form with an unusual array of operations — sculptural, painterly, autobiographical, expressive, perceptual — that continue to draw upon its innumerable associa tions, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not. His gure is, in a sense, a “still” (or more properly a “stilled”) life, and we feel neither discord nor collision as its naturalistic and metaphorical components slide into one another.

Neri accepts that at least some degree of perceptual accuracy is available to him, and to us. It must be. Could we endure our lives otherwise or, for that matter, negotiate the world successfully? He begins from there. Our consider ation of his gures turns, then, on their ability to speak, or to speak for the artist. How do we receive their (his) speech? Is it self-evident or inferred? A species of poetic information? In Neri’s hands, the human form catalyzes an exchange between gural depiction and the artist’s own narrative, or something like narrative. This further explains the drive behind Neri’s surfaces, as well. They are his gestures, a mode of textural marking, inventive, essentially non-repetitive,

223OPPOSITE392. Julia (Cast 1/4), 1976; Cast 1998 Private Collection 393–394. Carrara Figure No. 1, 1979–80 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

224

OPPOSITE 395–396. Carriona Figure No. 1, 1981 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, promised gift of Thomas J. Davis and Shirley Ross Sullivan, L.37.1.2004 397–398. Etrusca, 1989 Private Collection

225 integrated with the gure’s gestures. To go another step, they connect natural istic gurative sculpture to developments that were taking place among Neri’s contemporaries, in abstract expressionist circles in particular, related to the language of the mark and its ability to visually objectify the structures and workings of consciousness. Not that Neri can or should be seen as an “abstract expressionist” sculptor — his work, again, does not trade in gesture as a kind of constitutive calligraphy — rather that he was attuned to issues in the art of his time. Even when the surfaces perform in a quasi-linguistic manner, their beauty, so irresistible to the haptic eye, is thoroughly personal.

The liveliness and variety of the artist’s touch are remarkable, and bring the surfaces to life by creating passages for the viewer’s eye to follow, like roadmaps across the form itself. At the same time, manipulation of surface insures that no sculpture duplicate itself. Every square inch will be topical and documentary, a material signi er of the artist’s activities before the work, always reminding us that process lies at the core of Neri’s undertaking. No gure is or can be de nitive. One leads to the next, and along the way, textural discontinuity resists

In his study of Giacometti, David Sylvester noted the sensitivity of the sculp tor’s attention to the spaces around the gures, although Sylvester, rightly, was less interested in the question of whether or not Giacometti had extended the vocabulary of sculpture than he was in the ways in which the gure expanded the effects of sculpture in its own space, that is, the paradox by which the gures simultaneously dominate their space and are absorbed into it. Neri, too, contin ues to grapple with this complex gural/sculptural presence, and like Giacometti and Marini, his gure must resolve the matter in the face of larger questions regarding the stability of the gure as an ef cacious contemporary form in contemporary settings. With this in mind, he embraces the textural mark as gural in essence — insofar as it originates in the active body of the artist, and is a token of that body — and as yet another layer of gural signi cation on the surface of the form, where it joins with the whole of his visual vocabulary.

Still, the extent to which any gure succeeds as a viable modern format is also the extent to which the sculptor can satisfactorily answer questions surrounding the cultural ef cacy of the motif with the work itself. Does the gure still matter to us? On this point, there is little left to say about Giacometti or Marini. They have done their work well. Neri, meanwhile, persevered in his efforts to “advance” the gure in every sense: he evolves its means, uses it as a form with which to meet viewers on their own ground, and presses its utility in a wary cultural environment. At the same time, the autobiographical nature of his gure can also suggest the kind of self-motivated, self-authenticating practice that pursues its ends outside the evolutionary trajectory of the modern visual mainstream. From this perspective, Neri’s surfaces are variations on a theme of self-projection, a mode of free speaking characterized by its dense linguistic texture.

226

227 399–401. Re-making Mary Julia No. 1 (Cast AP), 1976; Cast 2006; Painted 2008

228 our desire for a visual site of ease and rest. Even the smoothest areas want to lead the eye somewhere else, mitigating against the stillness, silence, and mate rial solidity of the gure as a sculpture, and giving the form a visual charge — an aura of animation — that supports its communicability as a dimensional entity.Neri avoids extreme distortion or disintegration for just this reason. Not only do such techniques disturb our sense of correspondence with the form, they can by now appear to the viewer as chie y formal strategies, intended to attract our curiosity or to implicitly connect the gure to practices going on elsewhere in contemporary art — and so the artist’s most urgent concerns might remain hidden. Giacometti may well have provided a cautionary lesson on this point. Whatever else it might achieve for the work as sculpture, the radical elimination of mass, the stripping away of the outermost body of the gure, poses the risk that aggressive disruption of form will become its most compelling aspect. It may go without saying that Giacometti never wanted to establish exact physical equivalence between work and viewer: his handling of scale tells us that. But once the artist’s mark begins to dominate the form, the gural basis of the work surrenders some signi cant element of its bond with us — with humanity — and for Neri, such an effect would be needlessly problematic and nally counterproductive. His form must, therefore, remain indisputably empa thetic. As he knows, the sheer disunity of modern culture agitates against the kinds of vivid, commonly held beliefs that once gave reliable thematic substance to the sculptural gure in Western art, and against the possibility of encoding cultural belief into a more or less universally apprehensible artistic form. Can he create a gure unencumbered by this baggage from the past, all the old associations that no longer apply? Can it speak from its essential humanity?

For Neri, art does not compete with the built world, but enters it, partici pates with it, negotiates its spaces, and lives in it, as do we ourselves. In that world, the most readily available site of cultural commonality is the body, as an actual, inescapable condition, or situation, of existence. Whatever else Neri might do with the gure, this one fact cannot be ignored. His delity to the expressible grows from it, as he offers himself to others through the

229 (correspondent) body, his own and that of the sculpted gure in which he has invested himself. And yet, even though its physical body is real, Neri’s reality, his sense of the body’s communicative identity — his/its sculptural recourse — develops dialogically. Formation occurs in contact with the other, represented by the model. The artist goes to her, and then returns to the sculpture with further de nitions or expressions of his own humanity. Each work is an image of self-creation. 402–403. Standing Figure No. 4 (Cast AP), 1980; Cast 1982 Private Collection

404. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1992

CONTEMPORARY SCULPTUREHAS GONE its own way and with its extravagant formal and critical inventions, its innumerable passages and trans formations, it can con dently claim parity with painting in the discourses of contemporary art. Figural naturalism has been among the bene ciaries of this development, but any account of the re-legitimization of the gure must also acknowledge Neri, and behind him, the surge of humanist gural sculpture in Europe after World War II. Neri’s career by now bears some resemblance to that of both Marini and Giacometti: his output has been so inimical that he has garnered no disciples, founded no group or school. By the same token, the evolutionary narrative of modernism, still favored by many art historians, does not provide a suitable perspective from which to view his work, or theirs. Even the af liations that have attached themselves to Neri most strenuously, whether the San Francisco art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, or postwar guration in Europe, may be little more than suggestive and contextual in the end. The very ambiguity of Neri’s relationship to other, now-institutionalized movements in contemporary sculpture requires that we come to his work more or less as it stands. HISTORY

12 THE NARRATIVEEVOLUTIONARYOFMODERNISM / AN ALTERNATE

231

By the 1980s, in the climate of postmodernism, critical emphasis began to turn from the “body” as “ gure” to the “body” as “system” or “organism,” a turn in the direction of those dilemmas originating in the systemic operations of the actual, individual body and the paradoxes that can arise in the corporeal being as a consciousness-bearing organism. This represented a shift in the cultural understanding of the gure in art and our expectations for it, one that returns us to an issue as relevant to Neri as it was to Giacometti or Marini as a way of thinking about their work in its speci c historical setting: modernity’s identi ca tion of gural sculpture with generally conservative, retrospective values — a narrative at least partly contrived, but one that affected cultural and critical views of the sculpted gure through much of the twentieth century.

If Neri appears to stand apart from other art movements that were pushing towards the threshold of artistic postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s, one reason may be his acute awareness of the breadth and vitality of the gure as an extraordinary network of histories stretching back through time. As a

Or perhaps we should approach Neri’s career as a contemporary instance of art’s alternate history, one that attends to the cyclical reoccurrence of particular forms in different places and over great spans of time. If his gures are responsive to the conversations around modernity and indeed modernism in art, they also declare, once again, the endurance of the human form as a sculptural subject. It is a form whose necessity in art has never disappeared.

232

From this perspective, Neri is a contemporary sculptor whose work af rms the power and durability of the gure after eons of visual making, not simply as a motif, but as (a) presence. Such a history would assist in accounting for Marini and Giacometti as well.

Postmodernism brought relief from this straitjacket of historical legacy, and the subsequent developments of the gure/body within the critical arena of postmodernism show Neri to be something of a transitional artist. Although he is tied to some of the key issues of late modernism, his period of emergence, at the same time he often looks in the direction of developments to come, having spent his career treating the gure as an expressible body that speaks for its altogether human maker — this tentative, uncertain, always limited crea ture of esh and blood.

233 405–407. Carriona Figure No. 2, 1981 Harold Washington Library, Chicago

408–410.234 M.J. Series II (Cast 2/4), 1989; Cast 1990; Patina 2016

Such ideas were part and parcel of the intellectual life of the Enlightenment epoch, and as they continued to develop, they elevated the viewer to the role of perceiving subject who would henceforth determine the meanings of the artwork, rather than being determined by them. The shift was congenial to an increasingly secularized, humanistic cultural environment and, needless to say, it had immeasurable consequences for art. In the viewer-centered relationship, a painting stimulated the imagination and was then “completed” by observers who kept their distance, an operation that attered the autonomous viewing

Figurative sculpture was caught in this tangle of received doctrine, as we have seen, a view that lingered into the postwar decade as an issue that still required de nitive address. Enlightenment theorists and their inheritors linked sculpture to touch, objective autonomy, and durability, and painting to sight, imagination, the effervescence of moment-to-moment experience. In effect, this narrative positioned sculpture and painting as antagonists in a seemingly irresoluble struggle between ancient and modern, between the public and private spaces and functions of art, and between the physicality of the three-dimensional gure and the poetic interiority of painting.

235 gurative artist, Neri knows that he cannot escape them entirely, but as a matter of far greater importance for him, he does not want to. History is not a resource for quotation, reference, or visual bibliography. History bears the heat of life. The makers of the past, his real and actual predecessors, were exactly like him, as he well knows, taking into their hands each day the same kinds of tools as they pursued their own interrogations of some of the most challenging problems of human existence.

Yet Neri must have had moments of doubt. During the mid-twentieth-century decades that are at once background and prelude to his work, the sculpted female nude survived only at the fringes of progressive art, having been excluded from its major cultural campaigns by the notion, a legacy of eighteenth-century critical theory, that painting is privileged by its emphases on visuality, color, and poetic or literary ideation — that painting offers a more appropriate visual forum in which to engage philosophical and social values separate from art as a production of images. Under those terms, sculpture would remain bound to its relationship with the physical body, to high craft, and to the antique.

236 consciousness. Painting, of course, was not only very good at accomplishing this, the canvas at any scale knew its place — the wall — where it did not compete with the space of the viewer, who could now take (imaginative) control of the image through the eyes. Sculpture’s solidity and its identity as an implacable spatial object, especially at human scale, presented a literal obstruction to the Enlightenment’s visual fetishes. The standing female nude, whether carved, modeled, or cast, bearing the implications of its allegiance to unrecoverable traditions, seemed escapist by comparison, a wistful distraction from the discomforting realities of the modern (urban, industrial) world. 411–412 . Cipolina No. 1, 1983 Private Collection

LEFT/RIGHT

413. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s working desk, detail, c. 1952

237 Sculptors working in Europe in the mid-twentieth century were fully aware of these historical circumstances as a signi cant and nally unavoidable back ground to their work. But by the time Giacometti committed himself to his postwar style, he also knew that neither cubism nor surrealism could provide him with the resources he needed to reinvigorate the gure. However expan sive or in uential the movements themselves, the sculptural formations that emerged from them had grown directly out of advances charted by painters, and such work tended to be unpersuasive as sculpture. The three-dimensional gure had to be reinvigorated from within, by means not yet established.

414. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), Photographer View of Alberto Giacometti’s studio withParis,sculptures,c.1955

415–416.238Carrara Figure No. 3 , 1979–80 Honolulu Museum of Art 417.OPPOSITECarriona Figure No. 3 , 1981 Private Collection

239

Thus Giacometti formulated an ef cacious sculptural claim to the (paint ing’s) modern realm of sight, one that sought no rivalry with painting, rst by remaking the gure in a form compatible with viewer-based physical correspondence, and then, with that gure, by transforming its traditional duties in the realm of cultural objects into a phenomenological situation. Marini, with his frank embrace of native forms, further proposed that the legacies of a historical and/or sculptural past could not be argued away or objecti ed, not, at least, by theory or critical exposition. Rather than battle critical restraints on their own ground, Marini and Giacometti went about altering guration in ways that answered the crisis of the present without denying or betraying the sculptural past. Neri, on the other hand, negotiates a modernism terrain that, by the late 1950s, was itself codi ed as doctrine. His solution — only loosely following his predecessors — would include a syncretizing (rather than an appropriation) of gural history. Although he looks at the carvings of the past for the ways in which they communicate complex information about the human form, they are not tokens of a lost world: the sculptural past, whether recent or ancient, provides him with real information, still vital and available to use. Thus he gazes across the entire eld of gural sculpture with the purpose of strengthening his own language. For him, the various gurative traditions, taken together, establish an atmosphere, a kind of habitation, one that has continued to nourish his faith in the human form as a speaking object. When Neri turned to non-naturalistic, ostensibly abstract sculptural construction during the late 1960s, even those twisting, torso-like blocks have an evident gural bias. He soon left them behind, in any case, and went about ridding himself of modernism’s formal distillations. He had studied early twentieth-century predecessors like Jacques Lipchitz and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and found that they offered little assistance. Their lessons had limited value for a sculptor uninterested in modes of building whose relation to the human form focuses on some purely artistic business or on a self-conscious deviance from “traditional” guration. When the sculpted gure re ected advances in painting, imposed on it as a formal ideology, it surrendered its vivid connections to lived experience.

240

Human beings are drawn to forms and objects that resemble themselves — that is axiomatic — and the immediacy of a felt, bodily empathy can be crucial to an encounter with the work of art. Attempts to reduce gural sculpture to networks of signs or art-historical codes must be secondary, partial, or contingent, insofar as they discount its most penetrating level of reception, that of physical af nity. For Neri, who begins from this assumption, the sculpted gure is not life, but certainly it is more than an image of life.

With this in mind, we can see that all of the artists under discussion here have asked similar kinds of questions of the motif, and about its relationship to the art-historical past. What are the deepest, most unequivocal sources of empa thy? What, exactly, is the nature of its power over the viewer? Where is this power actually located in the work of art? How does it reveal itself physically? What sustains it from past to present? What endures, and on what terms?

418–419. Aurelia No. 3 , 1995 Private Collection

241

420–421. Aurelia No. 2, 1992; Re-worked 1998 Private Collection

Neri never ritualized the procedures of building as an avenue for interrogating those kinds of concerns, not as Giacometti did, certainly. For Neri the building process can be more accurately characterized as a path of continuing re-evaluation of the formal and its communicable possibilities. If his form remains more or less consistent, based on the actual body of the model before him, the details of his making process remain non-repetitive from work to work, as his mode of discourse with the motif. The surface never undermines our sense of the gestural accuracy of the overall form. It records, rather, the sculptor’s passage across the gural body, a detailed, inquisitive conversation conducted throughout the course of its construction.

And how, nally, can such information be transmitted to the contemporary gure as the sculptor strives for the expression of human continuity that only the gure can provide?

422–423.242Re-making Mary Julia No. 8 , 1976 Private Collection

424. Annunciation No. 2 [Penance No 3], 1982; Re-worked 1984 Private Collection

True, Neri is interested in particular sculptural effects, effects that, he knows, would not be enhanced by formal ritualization. His gure stands with us, cloaked in the irrevocable humanness of our own size. For Neri, human scale, as an irrefutable assertion of the correspondent nature of the (his) gure, insists upon the (shared) condition of inhabiting a fragile, or mortal, body, the physical body that exists in a (spatial) world of things in which it, like us, must make its way. Thus the kneeling gures, the Penance and Annunciation works of 1982–83, for example, need no gallery riser to assert themselves. Every twist of muscu lature feels visceral, alive. On the oor, at our feet, the pose, at once submissive and resistant, achieves a condition of shocking vulnerability, an effect of emotional and spiritual tension that is especially pronounced in the bent arms and clenched hands of Annunciation No. 2.

243

At the same time, such gures also advance Neri’s interest in a phenomenon that echoes another idea articulated in modern terms by Merleau-Ponty, that perception begins as, or takes place as, the experience of a gure in a ground. Perception goes about organizing itself from that point, although the inherent subjectivity of any single view means that our experience of the form will be always variable, contingent, and above all individual. When the gure shares our scale and our gestures, the absence of a conventional base reduces our sense of its identity as an “artwork.” It seems to join our own spatial arena — our world — much like any other human presence. Any further interaction of Neri’s visual and referential elements only expands the liveliness of its presence.Greathistorical transitions always entail some loss or abandonment of prior cultural traditions, and in our own time, general awareness of such losses has been debilitated, or trivialized, by a postmodern sensibility in which historical motifs are more likely to survive in a realm of style, quotation, add-on, or pastiche — and so contemporary Western life drifts a little further from its sturdiest, most nourishing taproots. Such is the triumph of a consumerist culture indifferent to all but the most ephemeral of desires, values, and memories. We may know some of the older visual histories that guided sculp tors less than a century past, or know of them, and yet lack a clear sense of their relevance in their own time, or their potential relevance for us. Still, even

244 as contemporary life continues to erase our ability to grasp the poignancy with which twentieth-century sculptors yearned for the lost security of an authentic connection with the past and its availability to art, we can certainly recognize the lingering, underlying uneasiness in their work, the statement of an existential loss from which few escape. Neri does know the history of his form, and he is sympathetic to the issues that surround its loss without quite submitting his work to them. As a builder, he is also involved in the question of how things take form. That these “things” are sculptural and gural leads him back in the direction of how human expres sion comes into being, how communication formulates itself, con gured in or by the body, whether art-historically or in the present: this begins to explain why he has never made a project of working with strict canonical forms that may only “speak” from somewhere beyond the immediacy of the sculpted gure itself — indeed, Neri has used his surfaces to loosen the referential correspondences that might otherwise draw attention to themselves in a particular pose or gesture, thus reestablishing any such gure as the means by which he formulates and shares a (his) visual language. His gures evoke rather 425.LEFT/RIGHTEscalieta, 1989 Private Collection 426. Odalisque I , 1989 427.OPPOSITEEscalieta, 1989 Private Collection

Because Neri is involved in sculptural formation, in the emergence of the material gure before him in the studio, his sources, whatever they might be, must be in his hands, with real depth of re ex, or they will enter his work as interruption rather than presence. They are fully assimilated into the sculptor’s vocabulary by the time this seepage occurs, and can be spoken without self-consciousness. Thus Neri takes up the challenges entailed in guiding the naturalistic gure over an uncertain territory between the history of the form as an inescapable background to the work, on the one hand, a history whose meaning in the present is by now inexact, and on the other, the array of contemporary demands upon it, particularly that of abstraction, whose position in art culture rebuts the relevance of formally referential sculptural building. Neri’s borrowings, when they occur, have an effect on us whether we are able to locate them art-historically or not. He has made them anew.

245 than mimic humanness. In doing so, they also enact Neri’s own reconciliation of their dualistic nature as invention and representation, recreating them as a synthetic, continuously evolving embodiment of a struggle to communicate clearly and accurately. In this sense, his gure is a model of the expressible, of order created out of the material disorder of raw plaster.

As one example, Neri’s periodic references to the formations of Classicism imply a desire for a quasi-archetypal modality that will draw upon our deep cultural memories. As he has learned from his experience as a builder, however, the lingering dif culty of Classicism is embodiment, the (cultural) assumption that whatever constitutes our sense or understanding of the human, at any given moment in history, can in fact be expressed in sculptural form. Perhaps it cannot, or it no longer can, not as it once could. Neri never attempts to evade this problem. Giacometti, too, regarded sculptural embodiment with skepticism, and he turned to the forms of an even more remote past, forms that had become suf ciently generalized to provide ways of demonstrating the power of the gure without insisting that we know or acknowledge the speci c historical af liations of his formal references. Giacometti rejects correspondent scale on related grounds. Isolated, smaller than life, profoundly silent, his gures might be vibrations in space. The artist means for us to feel their human origins, but once again, the gures are not “like” us.

246

428.LEFT/RIGHTEscalieta No. 2, 1988 Private Collection 429. Odalisque IV, 1994 Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 430. Seated Marble Figure [Mujer Pegada No. 5], 1985 Private Collection 431. Escalieta No. 2, 1988 Private Collection

Here, with this issue in mind, Neri invests tremendous faith in activity, in the ongoing activity of building in the studio, in a struggle to clarify the gure as (his) voice. He makes no effort to invoke familiar, perhaps threadbare notions of (Classical) timelessness, which in any case might be misconstrued as an artistic conceit. Although his gures are inseparable from time — it is the air they breathe — they have a quality that might instead be called “timeness,” and their immersion in it is also their freedom.

Even when the forms and gestures of his gures recall a sculptural past, color and surface texture, once again, personalize those formal details and generate further personal ambiguities around their ancestries.Thus Neri separates them from easy interpretive af liations as well. For this reason, his addition of non-descriptive color is never an effort to make the sculpture act “like” painting, in imitation of painting, or even in competition with painting: rather, that

247 sculpture, as Neri understands it, lives in the same realm and enters the same elds of sight and visual imagination claimed by modern painting. Color, after all, does not “belong” to painting in some innate or inviolable way. Or: sculpture does not belong solely to the realm of touch any more than painting belongs to sight alone.

If the gures dwell in the eld of the expressible, what, then, do they express?

Neri’s many commentators have considered this question at length, and their answers mark him as an artist of the twentieth century: fragility, contingency, temporality, a capacity for endurance and survival, and the physical wear and tear that is the toll of survival in the contemporary world — traits that Neri’s gures do indeed seem to share with Giacometti’s standing women, standing as if squeezed nearly to the point of disappearance, their shoulders taut, arms close at their sides, legs rigid, eyes xed on vistas that only they can see.

432–433.248Bardilia No. 3 , 1983 Private 434.OPPOSITECollection Escalieta No. 4, 1987 Private Collection

WORKS CITED IN THE TEXT: Butter eld, Jan, “Ancient Auras — Expressionist Angst: Sculpture by Manuel Neri,” in Images & Issues 1:4 (Spring, 1981), 38–43. Genet, Jean, “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti,” in Edmund White (ed.), The Selected Writings of Jean Genet (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993.)

249

But Neri goes further still. He has devoted a lifetime to the innumerable dif culties of communication — the human need to be known to and to know another, and to discover how and even if a comprehensive exchange of experience and knowledge is nally achievable — and so the spread of work constitutes his response to the inquiries bequeathed to gural sculpture by the Enlightenment. Over and over again, he labors to build the forms that capture the simultaneously heroic and anti-heroic condition of the gure/artist striving to make itself/himself known in a world where space and time will always intervene to one extent or another in our reception of the sculptural object. Can we reveal ourselves through our traditions of expression? Can we? The gure merges with the artist’s gestures on it, urgently pressing towards revelation. Does he achieve it? Those are among the most urgent questions we can bring to the work, Neri’s, and that of his predecessors.

Sylvester, David. Looking at Giacometti (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996.)

Richard Howard, trans. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, “Eye and Mind,” in John O’Neill (ed.), Phenomenology, Language and Society: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.) Carleton Dallery, trans. Neri, Manuel, interview with the author, Benicia, CA, November 6, 2000. Raverty, Dennis, “Critical Perspectives on New Images of Man,” in Art Journal 53:4 (Winter, 1994), 62–64. Selz, Peter. New Images of Man. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959. Exhibition catalog.)

MANUEL NERI EXHIBITION CHECKLIST MANUEL ASSERTIONNERI:OF THE FIGURE SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 – FEBRUARY 12, 2018

NOTE:252Exhibition checklist is arranged alphabetically. Unless otherwise noted, drawings and sculptures are from the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Japanese Dancer Series No. 12 [Makiko], 1980 Charcoal, water-based pigments on paper 41¾ × 29¾ in. 106 × 75.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.08 Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 5, 1980 Ink on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 7, 1980 Ink on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 9, 1980 Ink on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Collage and Ink Figure Study No. 35 [Joan Brown], 1963 Ink, collage on paper 25½ × 22 in. 64.8 × 55.9 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.04 Female Figure I , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 38 × 11 × 6½ in. 96.5 × 27.9 × 16.5 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust Japanese Dancer Series No. 2 [Makiko], 1980 Charcoal, water-based pigments on paper 41¾ × 29¾ in. 106 × 75.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.07

253 Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 10, 1980 Ink, pastel on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 11, 1980 Ink, pastel on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Japanese Dancer Study (Makiko) No. 12, 1980 Ink, pastel on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust Joan Brown Seated , 1959; Unique Cast 1963; Patina 2016 Aluminum, oil-based pigments 30¼ × 12½ × 27 in. 76.8 × 31.8 × 68.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.01Trust, Joan Brown Seated in Studio 13, 1958 Ink, water-based pigments, graphite on paper 25½ × 24 in. 64.8 × 61.0 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.06Trust, Joan Brown with Neri Sculpture I , 1963 Water-based pigments, mixed media on paper 23 1∕8 × 17 7 8 in. 58.7 × 45.4 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.05Trust, K.C. No. 1, 1982 Water-based pigments on paper 41½ × 29½ in. 105.4 × 74.9 cm Courtesy of The Manuel Neri Trust K.C. No. 2, 1982 Water-based pigments on paper 41½ × 29¾ in. 105.4 × 75.6 cm Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, 1984.013

254 Makida III , 1997 Marble, oil-based pigments 24 × 16 × 22 in. 61.0 × 40.6 × 55.9 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.02 Male Figure I , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 37¼ × 10½ × 6¾ in. 94.6 × 26.7 × 17.2 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust Marble Relief Maquette No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 27½ × 9 × 3 3∕8 in. 69.9 × 22.9 × 8.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03a Marble Relief Maquette No. 2 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 21½ × 7 × 2½ in. 54.6 × 17.8 × 6.4 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03b Marble Relief Maquette No. 3 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 27½ × 9¾ × 4 in. 69.9 × 24.8 × 10.2 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03c Marble Relief Maquette No. 4 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 26 3∕8 × 9¾ × 3 3 8 in. 67.0 × 24.8 × 8.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03d Marble Relief Maquette No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 27½ × 9 7∕8 × 3¾ in. 69.9 × 25.1 × 9.5 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03e Marble Relief Maquette No. 6 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 27½ × 9 7∕8 × 3¾ in. 69.9 × 25.1 × 9.5 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.03f

255 Marble Relief Maquette No. 7 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 23¾ × 7 3∕8 × 3 in. 60.3 × 18.7 × 7.6 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.03gTrust, Marble Relief Maquette No. 8 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 23 × 9 × 3½ in. 58.4 × 22.9 × 15.2 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri 2017.2.03hTrust, Marble Relief Maquette No. 9 (Cast 1/4), 1983; Cast 2013; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 21 5∕8 × 7 × 2½ in. 54.9 × 17.8 × 6.4 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.03iTrust, Mujer Pegada Study [Gustavo No. 12], 1985 Oil-based pigments, charcoal, graphite on paper 13 5 8 × 10 5∕8 in. 34.6 × 27.0 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.10Trust, Mujer Pegada Study No. 2, 1984 Oil-based pigments, charcoal,ongraphitepaper 13 5 8 × 10 5∕8 in. 34.6 × 27.0 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.09Trust, Mujer Pegada Study No. 7, 1984 Oil-based pigments, charcoal,ongraphitepaper 13 5 8 × 10 5∕8 in. 34.6 × 27.0 cm Gift of The Manuel Neri2017.2.11Trust, Standing Figure II , 1982 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature on wood base 69¼ × 17 7∕8 × 19½ in. 175.9 × 45.4 × 49.5 cm Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.059 Standing Armless Figure, 1974 Plaster, water-based pigments, oil-based pigments, mixed-media 64½ × 20½ × 20 in. 163.8 × 52.1 × 50.8 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust

OUTDOOR256 SCULPTURE INSTALLATION Anderson Collection at Stanford University MANUEL NERI: Assertion of the Figure October 2017 – December 2018 Annunciation No. 1 (Cast AP), 1982; Cast 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 46¾ × 22 × 24¼ in. 118.7 × 56.0 × 61.6 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust

257 Bull Jumper III (Cast 4/4), 1987; Cast 1989; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 29½ × 47 x 19 in. 75.0 × 119.4 x 48.3 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust La Palestra No. 5 (Cast AP), 1988; Cast 2001; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 29 × 47 × 18½ in. 73.7 × 119.4 × 47.0 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust La Palestra No. 6 (Cast 4/4), 1988; Cast 2007; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 32 × 44 × 21 in. 81.3 × 111.8 × 53.3 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust M.J. Series V (Cast 2/4), 1989; Cast 2001; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 44½ × 19½ × 29½ in. 113.0 × 49.5 × 74.9 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust On the Up No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1992; Casta 2002; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 69½ × 19¼ × 16¼ in. 176.5 × 48.9 × 41.3 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust Standing Figure I (Cast AP-I ), 1982; Cast 2005; Patina 2016 69 × 18 × 20½ in. 175.3 × 45.7 × 52.1 cm Courtesy of Hackett Mill, San Francisco and The Manuel Neri Trust

/ MUSEUMSELECTEDBIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHY&PUBLICCOLLECTIONS

261 BORN 1930 Sanger, CA EDUCATION 1949–50San Francisco City College, San Francisco, CA 1951–2University of California, Berkeley, CA 1951–6California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA 1956–8California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA TEACHING 1959–65California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA 1963–4University of California, Berkeley, CA 1965–90University of California, Davis, CA GRANTS AND AWARDS 1953Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA. First Award in Sculpture 1957Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA. Purchase Award in Painting 1959Nealie Sullivan Award, California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA 1963San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 82nd Annual Sculpture Award BIOGRAPHY Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1982 /

1968Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri

1965262National Art Foundation Award

1990San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA. Honorary Doctorate for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture

1959Spatsa Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri

2008San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. Bay Area Treasure Award

1971Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, Manuel Neri

1980–2Of ce of the State Architect, State of California. Marble sculpture Tres Marias for The Bateson Building, Sacramento, CA

1982AmericanGrantAcademy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY. Academy-Institute Award in Art

2003Iowa State University, Ames, IA. Marble sculpture Escalieta I for the Gerdin Building St. Anne’s Church, Seattle, WA. Bronze sculpture Virgin Mary

1963New Mission Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Neri Sculpture, July 20–August 1964Berkeley17Gallery, Berkeley, CA, Manuel Neri

1966Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Neri Sculpture

1975Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , April

1976Braunstein/Quay1–26Gallery, New York, NY, Neri Sculpture, March 16–April 10 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, CA, The Remaking of Mary Julia: Sculpture in Process , May 4–15

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Manuel Neri, Sculptor, September 21–November 28. Travel: Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT, March 12–May 1, 1977. Catalogue

San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, Arts of San Francisco: Manuel Neri, August 6–September 5. Brochure

1979John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY. Artist

1969Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, Manuel Neri

Davis Art Center, Davis, CA, Manuel Neri: New Sculpture, October 27–November 16

1980NationalFellowshipEndowment for the Arts, Washington, DC. Individual Artist

Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri at Quay, November

1985San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA. Award of Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Sculpture

1972Sacramento9–27

1974Art Gallery, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, Manuel Neri, February 13–March 8 Davis Art Gallery, Stephens College, Columbia, MO, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Installations , October 3–23

1987North Carolina National Bank. Marble sculpture Española for NCNB Tower, Tampa, FL

1970St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA, Manuel Neri

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1960Dilexi Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, June 20–July 16

San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri

1957The 6 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, June

The Linpro Company. Marble sculpture Passage for Christina Gateway Project, Wilmington, DE U.S. General Services Administration. Marble sculpture Ventana al Pací co for U.S. Courthouse, Portland, OR

1970–5University of California, Davis, CA. Sculpture Grant

1999Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA. Distinguished Artist Award

2006International Sculpture Center, Washington, DC. Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture

1994Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO

COMMISSIONS

State College Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA, Work by Manuel Neri, March 22–April 18

1992California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA. Honorary

1995CorcoranDoctorateSchool of Art, Washington, DC. Honorary Doctorate

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, November 17–December 19

Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , June 1–July 9

1979GalleryCataloguePaule Anglim, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, May 15–June 9

CharlesCatalogueCowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, February 7–28. Brochure The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture/ Drawings , May 7–June 5

1980 Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , April 1–30 Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA, Manuel Neri: Drawings , July Grossmont1–31 College Gallery, El Cajon, CA, Manuel Neri, November 10–December 10

1983Middendorf/Lane7–27 Gallery, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri, Sculpture and Drawings , January 26–February 22

The Art Museum Association, Manuel Neri: Drawings and Bronzes Travel through 1983: Redding Museum and Art Center, Redding, CA; Fresno Art Center, Fresno, CA; Gardiner State University Art Gallery, Stillwater, OK; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR; Abilene Fine Arts Museum, Abilene, TX; Art Museum of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA; Florida International University, Miami, FL; Spring eld Art Museum, Spring eld, MO; Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, HI; Laumeier International Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO. Brochure

Gimpel-Hanover & Andre Emmerich Galerien, Zurich, Switzerland, Manuel Neri, April 16–June 7

1986CharlesCatalogueCowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, February 1–March 1

1987Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , March 14–April 22

James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, Manuel Neri, October 29–November 27

1989Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, Manuel Neri, March 10–April 3

Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri: Sculpture of the 1980s , November 18–December 25. Catalogue

1981Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Manuel Neri, January 15–March 1.

1990John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, March 21–April 21 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Manuel Neri: Bronzes , August 10–October 21. Catalogue.

Bingham Kurts Gallery, Memphis, TN, Manuel Neri: Works on Paper, October 19–November 13

1985Robert Else Gallery, California State University, Sacramento, CA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , October 15–November 12.

Figure: Sculpture and Drawings by Manuel Neri, March 26–April 13

1988College of Notre Dame, Belmont, CA, Manuel Neri, A Personal Selection, April 14–May 21. Brochure

San Antonio Art Institute, San Antonio, TX, Manuel Neri, November 24–December 22

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Sculpture and Drawings , April 28–May 28

1984John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, Sculpture and Drawings , February 23–March 24 Middendorf Gallery, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri, March 10–31 Art Gallery, California State University, Chico, CA, The Human

1982Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, November

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, New Works: Marble and Plaster, April 29–May 27 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Plaster, May 25–July 23. Catalogue

263 1977ArtSpace/Open Ring, E. B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Sculpture and Drawings , July 22–August 20.

1994Margulies/Taplin Gallery, Boca Raton, FL, Manuel Neri, February Hearst2–23 Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA, Manuel Neri: Master Artist Tribute III , November 11–December 23. Catalogue

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, New Work: Marbles, Bronzes and Works on Paper, January 28–March 6

1991Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, February Richard2–23 L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, Manuel Neri: Drawings, Part I. 1953–1974, April 7–May 19 Eve Mannes Gallery, Atlanta, GA, Manuel Neri, April 12–June 15

1992John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, March 5–April 4 Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, MO, Manuel Neri, March 27–May 2 Margulies/Taplin Gallery, Boca Raton, FL, Manuel Neri, May 7–June Fresno11Art Center, Fresno, CA, She Said: I Tell You It Doesn’t Hurt Me, June 5–August 16

Morgan Gallery, Kansas City, MO, Manuel Neri, December 2, 1994–January 15, 1995

1997The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri: Early Work, 1953–1978 , February 1–May 5. Travel: San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, June 7–September 14; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, January 10–May 3, 1998. Catalogue

Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri, February 11–March University9 of Alabama Art Gallery, Tuscaloosa, AL, Manuel Neri— Drawings and Sculpture, March 26–May 2 Dia Center for the Arts, Bridgehampton, NY, Manuel Neri: Painted and Unpainted , July 31–September 19. Catalogue Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Work , August 31–October 2. Catalogue

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri: A Sculptor’s Drawings . Travel: Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO, June1–August 11; Academy of Art College, San Francisco, CA, April 12–May 17, 1997; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, NE, August 22–October 26, 1997; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY, February 1–March 29, 1998; Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA, April 24–June 21, 1998. Catalogue

1995Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris, France, Manuel Neri: Sculptures et Dessins , January 21–February 28

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri: Recent Marble Sculpture, February 1–May 5. Brochure San Marco Gallery, Dominican College, San Rafael, CA, Manuel Neri, March 3–29

Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris, France, Manuel Neri: Sculptures et Dessins, March 18–April 25

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, March 22–April 26

264San Marco Gallery, Dominican College, San Rafael, CA, Manuel Neri, November 15–December 15 Margulies/Taplin Gallery, Coconut Grove, FL, Manuel Neri, December 28, 1990– January 23, 1991

Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, Manuel Neri, June 1–August 31

1993Bingham Kurts Gallery, Memphis, TN, Manuel Neri, January 8–31

Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV, Manuel Neri—Classical Expressions: Sculpture and Drawings , November 16–December 31. Travel: Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, February 15–March 16, 1996; Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, July 5–30, 1996. Catalogue 1996Lisa Kurts Gallery, Memphis, TN, Manuel Neri: Recent Drawings and Sculpture, February 9–March 7

Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, Manuel Neri: Drawings, Part II. 1974–1991, October 13–December 6

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, March 11–April Campbell-Thiebaud15 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Drawings , May 23–June 24

Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri: Bronze Sculpture and Drawing, November 10, 1995–January 6, 1996

October Stremmel16Gallery, Reno, NV, Manuel Neri: Drawings and Sculpture, October 14–November 6

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri: Recent Work , December 1, 1998–January 9, 1999

265

Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri: Recent Drawings, Bronze and Marble Sculpture, November 8, 1997–January 3, 1998

2000Campbell Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, February 15–March 20 Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID, Manuel Neri: Recent Works , July 7–August 1

Campbell Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, May 27–June 28 Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Works , June 15–September 7

Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Recent Marble Sculpture, June 3–July 31 Bobbie Green eld Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, Manuel Neri: He Said, She Said , October 2–November 13

Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri: 50 Years of Work , March 3–April 4. Travel: Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, May 27–June 27. Hackett-FreedmanCatalogue Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Painted Bronzes and Plasters , April 7–June 3. Catalogue Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA, Manuel Neri: Palpable Tensions , June 21–August 21 Reva and David Logan Gallery, Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Artists’ Books/The Collaborative Process, June 28–November 27.

Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri, November 14–December 31

2005University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, Collaboration and the Creative Process: Sculpture and Artists Books by Manuel Neri and Mary Julia Klimenko, January 18–May 15

1999Galerie Simonne Stern, New Orleans, LA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture, February 6–March Campbell-Thiebaud2Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture & Drawings , May 19–June 19 Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri, September 11–

2002Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri: White Sculpture and Dream Drawings , February 9–March 4. Brochure b. sakata garo, Sacramento, CA, Manuel Neri/Japonais: Sculpture and Paintings on Paper, May 2–June 1 Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri: Sculpture/Drawings , November 1–December 28

2001Galerie Simonne Stern, New Orleans, LA, Manuel Neri, April 7–May Hackett-Freedman1 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, Paintings and Sculpture: 1958–1970, October 4–27. Catalogue

1998Galerie Simonne Stern, New Orleans, LA, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , March 7–31 Loggia, 1998 Decorators’ Show House, Crosby Estate, Hillsborough, CA, Manuel Neri, April 26–May 24

2006AmeringerCatalogue Yohe Fine Art, New York, NY, Manuel Neri: In the Classical Tradition, February 23–March 25. Catalogue

2003Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri— Metamorphosis: Recent Figurative Sculpture, February 6–March 29.

Robert Mondavi Winery, Oakville, CA, Manuel Neri, May 3–July 2 Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, Manuel Neri, October 21, 1998–January 24, 1999

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri: Recent Bronzes, Marbles , Plasters and Drawings , September 5–October 26

Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID, Manuel Neri, June 30–July 31

CharlesCatalogueCowles Gallery, New York, NY, Manuel Neri, March 22–April 19 Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID, Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings , June 29–July 28

2004San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA, Collaboration and the Creative Process: Artists’ Books by Manuel Neri and Mary Julia Klimenko, April 16–June 4

Hackett Mill at Art Basel Miami, Miami, FL, Manuel Neri, December 2–5

2016Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri: FIGURA|Form + Fragment , February 11–April 2 Yares Art Projects, Santa Fe, NM, Manuel Neri Bronzes: Singularity of Form and Surface, July 29–September 17

Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Painted Sculpture and Reliefs , March 8–April 28

2008San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA Manuel Neri: The Figure In Relief, November 8, 2008–January 17, 2009

2010Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri: Collage, 1958–1960, October 8–December 23

Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, Bronze: Recent Works by Manuel Neri, October 27–December 16. Catalogue

2017Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, Recent Acquisitions from the Manuel Neri Trust , February 18–July 16 Yares Art, New York, NY, Manuel Neri: Singularity of Form & Surface, February 23–April 8. Catalogue

2012Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri, January 26–March 10 Stanford University Libraries, Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Things that Dream/Cosas que sueñan, April 19–July 8.

Petersen Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, Manuel Neri: Ambiguity, Mystery and Allure, January 18–May 18

2018Christian2018

1957The 6 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Bruce McGaw/Manuel Neri,

1960Batman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Gang Bang, December 4, 1960–January 1, 1961

2013YaresCatalogueArtProjects, Santa Fe, NM, Manuel Neri: Mujer Pegada Series 1983–2013, July 5–August 24

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, Manuel Neri: The Human Figure in Plaster and on Paper, March–July

2009 Maisonry, Yountville, CA, Manuel Neri at Maisonry, September 11–November 30

Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, IA, Manuel Neri: The Modernist Figure, June 18–December 3. Catalogue

2011Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA, Legends of the Bay Area: Manuel Neri, October 1–November 13

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

1955The 6 Gallery, San Francisco, CA

California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, The Nude, September

2014Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri, Working in Marble: A Selection from the Carrara Studio, February 7–May 9

Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure, September 14, 2017–February 12, 2018. AndersonCatalogueCollection at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Manuel Neri: Outdoor Sculpture Installation, October 2017–December

Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, Manuel Neri: The Figure in Relief, March 18–July 8 b. sakata garo, Sacramento, CA, Manuel Neri, April 3–28 Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO, Manuel Neri, May 12–June 16 Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID, Manuel Neri: The Figure In Relief, August 1–29 Anne Reed Gallery, Ketchum, ID, Manuel Neri, November 22–December 27

1961Staemp i Gallery, New York, NY

1959SanJanuaryFrancisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, Paintings by Sam Francis, Wally Hedrick, and Fred Martin, Sculpture by Wally Hedrick and Manuel Neri, February 3–22

Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, Manuel Neri: The Figure in Relief, October 7, 2006–April 29, 2007. Catalogue Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, TX, Manuel Neri, November 17–December 23

266Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL, Manuel Neri, March 9–April 3

2007Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Manuel Neri: The Figure in Relief, January 13–February 12

1973Artists Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, CA, A Ladder Show, October 6–31. Catalogue

1962Stanford University Art Gallery, Stanford, CA, Some Points of View–’62, October 30–November 20. Catalogue Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, San Francisco 9 Primus-Stuart Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Joan Brown and Manuel Neri San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Works in Clay Staemp i Gallery, New York, NY

1963San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Some New Art in the Bay Area, March–April The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, California Sculpture Today, August 4–September 15 San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 82nd Annual Invitational

1967UniversitySeptemberArt Museum, Berkeley, CA, Funk Art , April 18–May 29.

Visiting Artists: Leonard Edmondson, Joseph Raffael, Manuel Neri, August 8–31

San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Manuel Neri and William Geis , September–October Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Sculpture

1976Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY, Graphics from the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking, February 12–March 6 San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, California Painting and Sculpture: The Modern Era, September 3, 1976–January 2, 1977. Travel: National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC. Catalogue

DavidCatalogueStuart Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Joan Brown/Manuel Neri,

1975 The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Public Sculpture/Urban Environment , September–December JPL Gallery, London, England, Sculptors as Draughtsmen

1965SanNovember–DecemberFranciscoMuseum of Art, San Francisco, CA, Bay Region: Prints and Drawings by Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud , January 12–February 21

1969Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley, CA,

Reed College, Portland, OR, Six Bay Area Artists

1972E. B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA, Sacramento Sampler I , April 1–May 7. Travel: The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA

1974San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, A Third World Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, June 8–July 28. Catalogue

1968Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, The West Coast Now, February 9–March 6. Travel: San Francisco and Los Angeles San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, On Looking Back: Bay Area, 1945–1962, August 8–September 8 University of Nevada, Reno, NV, Sculpture Invitational. Catalogue

267

JPL Gallery, London, England, California Gold (Sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency), October 15–November 21. Travel through 1978 to Museums in Europe, the Middle East, and India. Catalogue

CaliforniaCatalogue State College, Fullerton, CA, Recorded Images/ Dimensional Media, October 20–November 12

1964Stanford University Art Museum, Stanford, CA, Current Painting and Sculpture of the Bay Area, October 8–November 29.

April 12

1966University of California, Irvine, CA, Abstract Expressionist Ceramics . Travel: San Francisco Museum of Art Berkeley Gallery, San Francisco, CA, The Slant Step Show,

1971The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Sculptured Lines , July 27–September 5

University of Nevada, Reno, NV, Manuel Neri and William Wiley, St.OctoberMary’s College Art Gallery, Moraga, CA, The Good Drawing Show, October 30–November 26. Catalogue

1970University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, The Eighties , March 17–

1979Independent Curators, New York, NY, Masks . Travel in US through The1981Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, 10” x 10”

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, Hassam Fund Purchase Exhibit , November 16–December 20

268San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Other Sources: An American Essay, September 17–November 7. Catalogue Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, The Handmade Paper Object , October 29–November 29. Travel: The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Jacksonville Museum of Art, Jacksonville, FL. Catalogue Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, The Biennale of Sydney, November 11–December 19. Catalogue

1982American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, Paintings and Sculpture by Candidates for Art Awards , March 8–April 4

1978University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM, Bay Area Art of the 60’s and 70’s, The Gift of Dr. Sam West , January 8–March 19. Catalogue Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878–1978 . Catalogue

Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA, The Sun Gallery, July 24–August 30. Catalogue

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, Paintings and Sculptures by Recipients of Art Awards , May 19–June 13

1981San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, San Francisco Art Institute Alumni: Selections from the Permanent Collection, January 8–March 8

1980San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA, Sculpture in California 1975–1980, May 9–June 22 International Sculpture Center, Washington, DC, The Eleventh International Sculpture Conference Exhibition, June Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, NY, Contemporary Naturalism: Works of the 1970s , June 8–August 24. Catalogue San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 20 American Artists , July 24–September 7. Catalogue

Sierra Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Davis School: Prints and Drawings , January 24–February 22

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, 100 Years of Sculpture, August 7–October 17. Catalogue

Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, DC, Paper as Medium. Travel. Catalogue Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

1977Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL, California Bay Area Art—Update, May 6–June 15. Catalogue Kenmin Prefecture Hall, Tokyo, Japan, Tokyo/Bay Area Exchange of Contemporary Art: Kenmin Prefecture Hall, Tokyo/80 Langton Street San Francisco, October 25–November 12

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, Variants: Drawings by Sculptors , October 15, 1981–May 30, 1982

Fresno Arts Center, Fresno, CA, Forgotten Dimension: A Survey of Small Sculpture in California Now. Travel by the Art Museum Association: San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, CA; Center for the Visual Arts, Illinois State University, Normal, IL; Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, Aspen, CO; Florida International University, Miami, FL; Laumeier International Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Colorado Gallery of the Arts, Littleton, CO. Catalogue

Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Memorial Union Art Gallery, and Pence Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, Sculptors at UC Davis: Past & Present , September 20–October 29. Catalogue DeSaisset Museum, University of Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA, Northern California Art of the Sixties , October 12–December 12.

1983SanCatalogueFrancisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Resource/Reservoir, CCAC: 75 Years , January 13–February 27. Brochure

Travel: Knight Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Fresno Arts Center, Fresno, CA; Loch Haven Art Center, Orlando, FL; Visual Arts Gallery, Florida International University, Miami, FL; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Jacksonville Art Museum, Jacksonville, FL. Catalogue

Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Recent West Coast Acquisitions , February 12–April 26 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Selections from the Permanent Collection/Sculpture, April–June 5 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Bay Area Collects , April 21–June 26

Travel: De Cordova and Dana Museum, Lincoln, MA; Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, TX; Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; Madison Art Center, Madison, WI. Catalogue

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980, June 15–August 18

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 36th Annual Purchase Exhibition: Hassam and Speicher Fund , November 19–December 16. Brochure

The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, Body & Soul: Aspects of Recent Figurative Sculpture, September 5–October 12.

Sarah Lawrence Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, The United States of the Arts , February 1–March 13. Brochure

Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, Monterey, CA, California Contemporary: Recent Work of Twenty-three Artists , May 1–29. RenaissanceCatalogue Society, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, The Sixth Day, May 8–June 15. Catalogue Institute of Contemporary Art of the Virginia Museum, Richmond, VA, Sculpture Now: Recent Figurative Works , October 11–November 13

1986University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA, Cal Collects , April 2–May 18.

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, Contemporary Bronze: Six in the Figurative Tradition, November 19, 1985–January 19, 1986. Travel: Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, KS; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. Catalogue

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, The 20th Century: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Collection, December 9, 1984–February 17, 1985. Catalogue 1985Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, Santa Barbara Collects, Part I , January 26–March 24. Catalogue

1984Spokane Center Gallery, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA, Figurative Bronze Sculpture, January 13–February 23 Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, Painters at UC Davis, Part I: 1950s–1960s , January 23–February 21 California State University, Long Beach, Figurative Sculpture: Ten Artists/Two Decades , March 13–April 29. Catalogue Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Drawings Since 1974, March 15–May 13. Catalogue Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, California Sculpture Show (Organized by California/International Arts Foundation), June 2–August 12. Travel: CAPC (Musee d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux), Bordeaux, France; Stadtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim, Germany; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, England; Sonja Henies og Neils Onstads Stiftelser, Høvikodden (Oslo), Norway. Catalogue The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Dilexi Years, October 13–December 1 Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA, Works in Bronze, A Modern Survey, November 2–December 16. Travel through 1986. Catalogue Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, American Sculpture: Three Decades , November 15, 1984–January 27, 1985

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, American Realism: Twentieth-Century Drawings and Watercolors from the Glenn C. Janss Collection, November 7, 1985–January 12, 1986.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, California Sculpture: 1959–1980, July 20–August 24

269

MarilynBrochurePearl Gallery, New York, NY, Figurative Sculpture: The 80s , June 10–July 3

Figurative Sculpture, January 30–March 15. Catalogue Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, Thirty From 25, April 24–May 22. Catalogue Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Contemporary Hispanic Art in the United States , May 2–July 26. Travel: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Catalogue Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, OK, The Eloquent Object , September 20, 1987–January 3, 1988. Travel: The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA. Catalogue Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, Sculptors’ Works on Paper, September 28–October 14

1987Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, California

270Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, FL, Collectors’ Choice, October 1986–February 1987

Leavenworth Carnegie Arts Center, Leavenworth, KS, Contemporary Masters Kansas Tour: Selections from the Collection of Southwestern Bell Corporation, November 4–December 26. Travel in Kansas: Baker Arts Center, Liberal; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita; Salina Arts Center, Salina; Norman R. Eppink Art Gallery, Emporia State University, Emporia; Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka. Catalogue Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, Art on Paper, November 13–December 11

1989California Museum of Science and Industry, Los Angeles, CA, Marmo: The New Italian Stone Age, March 16–April 30. Catalogue Security Paci c Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Sculptural Intimacies: Recent Small-Scale Work , November 12, 1989–January 6, 1990.

1990Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery, Davis, CA, Lyrical Vision: The ‘6’ Gallery, 1954–1957, January 12–February 23. Catalogue Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR, National Drawing Invitational, March 1–April Natsoulas/Novelozo8 Gallery, Davis, CA, 30 Ceramic Sculptors , April 6–May 3. Catalogue Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY, No Man’s Land , April 8, 1990–March 8, 1991. Catalogue. Barbara Kornblatt Gallery, Washington, DC, Manuel Neri, Erik Levine, Mel Chin, June 5–July 28

Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Bay Area Sculpture of the ‘60’s, Past to Present , June 7–July Queens Museum, Queens, NY, The Expressionist Surface: Contemporary Art in Plaster, June 9–August 1. Catalogue Butler Institute, Youngstown, OH, California A-Z and Return, June 24–August 19. Catalogue

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 39th Annual Academy-Institute Purchase Exhibition, November 16–December 13 Madison Art Center, Madison, WI, Sculptors on Paper: New Work , December 5, 1987–January 31, 1988. Travel: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970, September 29, 1988–January 27, 1989. Travel: El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, San Juan, PR; Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, FL. Catalogue

SanCatalogueFrancisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950–1965, December 14, 1989–February 4, 1990. Travel: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Catalogue

Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, Cast in Walla Walla, November 14–December 16

Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, Sheldon Sampler: One Hundred American Masterworks . Catalogue Sierra Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, West Coast Contemporary, July 14–August 14

North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND, Casting Across America: An Artist Selects , October 10–November 9

1988SheldonCatalogueMemorial

The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, CA, From Folk to Fine: Fifteenth Anniversary Celebration, December 7, 1990–April 31,

1991John1991Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Large Scale Works on Paper, February 21–March 16. Catalogue Eve Mannes Gallery, Atlanta, GA, Top Choices , June 15–August Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA, New Acquisitions , September 11–November Muckenthaler17 Cultural Center, Fullerton, CA, Sculptural Perspectives for the Nineties, October 6–December 29. Catalogue Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, Mexico City. Mexico, Pasión por Frida, October 11, 1991–January 31, 1992. Travel. Catalogue 1992Colorado University Art Galleries, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, Visiting Artist Program: 20th Anniversary Show, January 15–February 22. Catalogue Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, California North and South, February 13–April 15 Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College, Orinda, CA, The Cruci xion Through the Modern Eye, March 7–April 27 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Gifts and Acquisitions in Context , May 21–July 5 1993 The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM, The Human Factor: Figurative Sculpture Reconsidered, March 14–July 4. Catalogue Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, Beyond the Bay: The Figure, May 12–June 27 Art Museum of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA, Now and Again: Figure and Landscape, October 2–November 21 Laguna Gloria Museum, Austin, TX, Human Nature–Human Form, October 30–December 12. Brochure

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Recent Acquisitions , April Campbell-Thiebaud12–June Gallery, San Francisco, CA, The Figure, April 18–May 20 Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto, CA, Concept in Form: Artists’ Sketchbooks & Maquettes , October 5, 1995–January 7, 1996 Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA, A Bay Area Connection: Works from the Anderson Collection, November 1, 1995–January 28, 1996

271

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 45th Annual Academy Purchase Exhibition, November 8–December 5 1994Palo Alto Cultural Center, Palo Alto, CA, Lyricism & Light , January 20–April 24. Brochure

GroundsCataloguefor Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, Spring/Summer Exhibition, May 21–September 30. Catalogue Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA, The Essential Gesture, October 15–December 31. Catalogue

Frumkin/Adams Gallery, New York, NY, California in the ‘70s: Bay Area Painting and Sculpture Revisited , March 2–30

1995RobertBrochureKidd Gallery, Birmingham, MI, Figurative Concepts: John Buck, Manuel Neri, Gary Kulak , January 14–February 18 Nationsbank Plaza, Charlotte, NC, Black & White & Read All Over, January 16–October 31. Catalogue

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, Here and Now: Bay Area Masterworks from the Di Rosa Collection, March 11–May 8.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, Selections from the Permanent Collection of Painting and Sculpture (Inaugural Exhibition), January 18–April 25

The White House, Washington, DC, Twentieth Century American Sculpture at The White House, October 1994–February 24, 1995.

Frumkin/Adams Gallery, New York, NY, California in the 1960s: Funk Revisited , February 1–28 Wiegand Gallery, College of Notre Dame, Belmont, CA, Working Together: Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, 1958–1964, March 21–April 29. Catalogue Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, Spoleto Festival USA , March 26–June 11

Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, 20th Century Art from the Museum’s Collection, November Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA, A Bay Area Connection: Works from the Anderson Collection, 1954–1984, November 1, 1995–January 28, 1996. Catalogue Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Collection Highlights: 1945 to the Present , April 12, 1996–June 1, 1997

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA, The Robert Arneson Tribute Exhibition, May 22–June 15. Brochure

1997Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, The 4th Annual Artists’ Valentine, January 21–February 8

Norman R. Eppink Art Gallery, Emporia State University, Emporia, KS, Twenty-First Annual National Invitational Drawing Exhibition, February 19–March 19. Catalogue Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria, The View from Denver: Contemporary American Art from the Denver Art Museum, July 4, 1997–Spring 1998. Travel: Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Catalogue Sheehan Gallery, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, Cast Contemporary Sculpture from the Walla Walla Foundry, August 30–September 28. Brochure

Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM and Scottsdale, AZ, A Theatre of Art III , November 14–December 31. Brochure

Campbell-Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Twenty-Five Treasures , September 7–October 9. Catalogue Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Homage to the San Francisco Art Institute: Artists Who Transformed American Culture, October 1–30 The White House, Washington, DC, Twentieth Century American Sculpture at The White House: Exhibition VIII , October 1999–October 2000. Brochure

American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 48th American Academy Purchase Exhibition, November 4–December 1

GalerieCatalogueSimonne Stern, New Orleans, LA, Self Images , July 10–August 3 Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan, California Classics: Highlights from the Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , July 10–August 8. Travel in Japan: Fukui City Art Museum, August 13–September 12; Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, September 19–October 24; Tochigo Prefectural Museum of Fine Art, October 31–December 5. Catalogue Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, Modern and Contemporary Galleries , July 31–December 5

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Summer Show, August San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, Illustrious History 1871–1996, November 12–December 11. Travel: Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, New York, NY; Montgomery Gallery and John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Catalogue

272Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Beat Culture and the New America, 1950–1965, November 8, 1995–February 4, 1996. Travel: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA. Catalogue Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Treasures of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts , November 11, 1995–March 3, 1996

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Summer Exhibition, June 9–July 28

1996Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Collection Highlights: 1945 to the Present , April 12, 1996–June 1, 1997

Robert Aichele Fine Arts, Menlo Park, CA, The Figure in California Art , October 15–November 15

1999The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, What is Art For?, March–July San25 Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, Into the 21st Century: Selections from the Permanent Collection, May 23–September 12.

2000Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT, 32nd Annual Art Auction, January 29–March 10. Catalogue Museo ItaloAmericano, San Francisco, CA, Omaggio a Modesto Lanzone: Artists, Galleries & Friends , March 23–June 4

1998Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY, Works on Paper, March 21–April 25 Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, and Scottsdale, AZ, A Theatre of Art II , August 28–October 17. Brochure

2002Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, A Theater of Art IV, August 9–September 30

2003Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Color, January 18–March 20

2001Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, Kinds of Drawing, March 13–April 13. Catalogue Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, Summer Exhibition, July 21–September 16. Catalogue Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA, Julia St. North, August 19–October Hackett-Freedman14 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism—Select Works , September 6–October 27. Catalogue

Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Bay Area Artists: Select Works from the 1950s and 60s Bobbie Green eld Gallery, Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA, American Artists in Tuscany, July 9–August 23

Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, A Theater of Art VII , September 1–October 31

Hackett-Freedman Gallery at ARCO Art Fair, Madrid, Spain, February Robischon14–19Gallery, Denver, CO, Decades , January 18–March 3 Di Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA, CCA[C] Alumni @ di Rosa Preserve, May 26–July 14

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, CA, Sonoma Collects , September–October 17 Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, The Enchantment of the Artist’s Book: Selections from the Collection of the Portland Art Museum, November 20, 2004–July 10, 2005

San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA, NextNew, July 22– September 17. Brochure Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, Inaugural Exhibition, Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art , October Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Pairings II: Discovered Dialogues in Postwar Abstraction, November 3–December 23.

2006Hackett-Freedman Gallery at Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, Works on Paper, March 2–5 Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL, Manuel Neri & Akio Takamori, March 9–April 3 Di Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA, The Collection in Context

Scott White Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, Form & Conscience: Figurative Art from Mid-Century to Present , July 11–August 30

273

2004 Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Small-Scale Sculpture: Movement and Form, February 5–March 27

Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, Riva Yares 2000: The First 35 Years , September 1–October 16. Travel: Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, November 4–December 31. Catalogue

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Picasso to Thiebaud: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collections of Stanford University Alumni and Friends , February 18–June 20. Catalogue Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA, Brighton Press: The Art of the Book , April 11–June 20 Kreeger Museum, Washington, DC, The True Artist is an Amazing Luminous Fountain: Selected Works from the di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature, April 21–July 31. Travel: Di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature, Napa, CA; Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA. Catalogue Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, Co-Conspirators: Artist and Collector, The Collection of James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett, July 24–October 31. Catalogue

Hackett-FreedmanCatalogue Gallery at Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL, HackettFreedman Gallery: 20 Years , December 1–4. Catalogue

John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, Bay Area Painting, November 2007Hackett-Freedman2–30 Gallery, San Francisco, CA, A Culture in the Making, January 11–March 3. Catalogue

Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA, Sculptures by Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira, November 2004–August 2005Museum2005ofArts & Design, New York, NY, Dual Vision, The Simona and Jerome Chazen Collection, May 26–September 11. Travel: Elvehjem Museum, Madison, WI.

2008Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL, From Paradigm to the Unexpected: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Shey Collection, February 10–May 18. Catalogue Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA, Figures in Abstraction—Three Artists, Three Approaches , March 8–April 27

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, Five West Coast Artists: Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Neri, Park, and Thiebaud , March 28–July Oakland13 Museum of California, Oakland, CA, Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California, September 20, 2014–April 12, 2015

Travel: Brunnier Museum, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, February 4–March 21, 2014

2012Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, Momentum of a Movement , January 6–March 30 Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL, Masterworks of 20th Century Sculpture from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection, June 24–September 9

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Forrn in Art from the Logan Collection, March 14–June 8. Catalogue Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, CA, The Question is Known: (W )here is Latin American/Latino Art?, April 18–May 24. ARSculptorisBrochureAssociazione

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, Nashville, TN, 10 West Coast Artists , June 16–August 13

2013Thomas Williams Fine Art, London, England, The Bay Area School Paintings: Californian Artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s , May 14–June 20. Catalogue Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, Works from the Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections , June 21–September 22.

2010Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI, Contemporary Sculptors Celebrate the Legacy of Frederik and Lena Meijer, June 4, 2010–January 2, 2011 Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Extreme Makeover: A Fresh Look at the Cantor Arts Center’s Contemporary Collection, December 15, 2010–August 5,

ThomasCatalogueWilliams Fine Art, London, England, The Bay Area School: Drawings, June 25–July 6 Center for Book & Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago, IL, Form and Expression: The Written Word , September 18–December 7.

2014Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI, Committed to Paper: Master Drawings and Prints by Sculptors , January 31–April 27. Brochure Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, ¡Escultura! Selections from The Mexican Museum’s Permanent Collection, February 3–December 12

Culturale, Carrara, Italy, De migrante marmoris , August 1–September 28. Catalogue

274Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, You

2009Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, FL, Body Language: The Figure in Sculpture, February 14–May 24 Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Pop to Present , March 18–August 16 Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL, The Saint John’s Bible and The Art of the Book , October 2, 2009–June 30, 2010 Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA, Freeing the Figure, November 5, 2009–December 10, 2010

2011Nelson2012 Gallery, University of California, Davis, CA, American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection, January 15–March 13

See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Studio Art Faculty, September 27–December 9. Travel: Hearst Art Gallery, St. Mary’s College, Moraga, CA; Bakers eld Museum of Art, Bakers eld, CA; Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA. Catalogue

The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, CCA: 100 Years in the Making, October 13, 2007–January 27, 2008

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, This End Up: The Art of Cardboard, November 8, 2008–February 8, 2009

2016New York Studio School, New York, NY, As I Am: Painting the Figure in Post War San Francisco, February 4–March 16. Travel: Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, April 7–May 27 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, A Work in Progress: Plaster in the Nasher Collection, July 23–October 9 The Landing, Los Angeles, CA, The Rat Bastard Protective Association, October 1, 2016–January 7, 2017. Catalogue Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, The Beauty of a Shared Passion: Highlights from the Rebecca and Jack Benaroya Collection, October 9, 2016–April 23, 2017 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA, Out Our Way (Inaugural Exhibition), November 12, 2016–March 26, Baker2017Sponder Gallery, Boca Raton, FL, Art Concept , November 29–December 4

2015Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, Body Language: New Acquisitions of Figurative Work , January 18–May 3 Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Miami, FL, A Collector’s Legacy: Highlights from the Francien C. Runwitch and the Runwich Family Collections , April 16–September 27

Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA, Recent Gifts , April 14–June 30 Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, 75 at 75: Signi cant Works from RAM’s Collection, September 17–December 30

Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC, Disorderly Conduct: American Painting and Sculpture 1960–1990, September 21, 2017–February 25, 2018 San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA, Connect & Collec t, September 23–October 21 Hackett Mill, San Francisco, CA, Decades in the Making, October 21, 2017–2018

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Back to Life: Bay Area Figurative Drawings, October 11, 2015–May 1, 2016

2017Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI, Wustum Generations , January 22–April 30

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ARTISTS’ BOOKS — LIMITED-EDITION Klimenko, Mary Julia. Crossings/Chassé-croisé. Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2003. Photographs by M. Lee Fatherree; original artwork by Manuel Neri. Limited edition of 45 plus 10 deluxe editions. She Said: I Tell You It Doesn’t Hurt Me. San Diego, CA: Brighton Press, 1991. Handpainted etchings by Manuel Neri. Limited edition of 33.

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ARTISTS’ BOOKS — UNIQUE García Lorca, Federico; with Introduction by Mary Julia Klimenko. Nine unique artists’ books with poems by Federico García Lorca; original drawings by Manuel Neri; hand calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire; binding by Daniel E. Kelm and The Wide Awake Garage; box by Peggy Gotthold, Foolscap Press, Santa Cruz, CA, with hand decoration by Thomas Ingmire, 2007-9. El compás/Counting Time, 2007. _____. Sonámbulo, 2007. Collection of the Federico García Lorca Foundation, Spain. _____. Café Cantante, 2008. Collection of The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Es verdad/It is True, 2008. Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. _____. La fragua, 2008. _____. Saetas/Songs of the Arrows ,

_____.278Duende/Songs of Despair, 2009. Collection of the New York Public Library, New York, NY. _____. Soledad/Songs of Loneliness , 2009. Collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY. _____. Tristezas/Songs of Sadness , 2009. Collection of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Neruda, Pablo; with Introduction by Mary Julia Klimenko. Seven unique artists’ books with poems by Pablo Neruda; original drawings by Manuel Neri; hand calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire; binding by Daniel E. Kelm and The Wide Awake Garage, 2004-6. _____. La mañana, las tardes, y esta noche/Morning, Afternoons, and Tonight , 2004. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. _____. Los amores/The Loves , 2004. _____. Oda a la bella desnuda/Ode to a Beautiful Nude, 2004. Private _____.Collection. La verdad y la poesía/Truth and Poetry, 2005. Private Collection. _____. Las piedras/Stones , 2005. Private Collection. _____. Melancolia, 2005. Private Collection. _____. El mar de Isla Negra, 2006. Private Collection.

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BOOKS Albright, Thomas. Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985 Andersen, Wayne. American Sculpture in Process: 1930–1970. Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society, 1975 Anderson, Mark; Bruce, Chris; Dine, Jim; Wells, Keither. Extending the Artist’s Hand: Contemporary Sculpture from Walla Walla Foundry. Pullman, WA: Museum of Art, Washington State University, 2004. Aukeman, Anastasia. Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association. Los Angeles and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016 Barron, Stephanie; Bernstein, Sherri; Fort, Ilene Susan. Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 190 0–2000. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; University of California Press, 2000 Cancel, Luis R., et al. The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970. Bronx, NY: Bronx Museum of the Arts and Harry N. Abrams, 1988 . Cándida Smith, Richard. Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA, and London: University of California Press, 1995 Clark, Garth; Hughto, Margie. A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878 –1978 . New York, NY: E. P. Dutton in association with Everson Museum of Art, 1979 Clinton, Hillary Rodham (Foreword); Finn, David; Monkman, Betty C. 20th-Century American Sculpture in the White House Garden. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000

Knight, Gregory G., et al. The Chicago Public Art Guide. Chicago, IL: Department of Public Affairs, 2005. Krantz, Les. American Artists: An Illustrated Survey of Leading Americans Chicago, IL: The Krantz Company Publishers, 1985. Langland, Tuck. From Clay to Bronze: A Studio Guide to Figurative Sculpture. New York, NY: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1999.

Congdon, Kristin G.; Hallmark, Kara Kelley. Artists from Latin American Cultures: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2002 . Gilbert, Rita. Living with Art. New York, NY: Random House, 1985 Hopkins, Henry. 50 West Coast Artists . San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, _____.1981.Foreword to Artists: The Creative Personality, Photographs by Jim Arkatov. Seattle, WA: University ofWashington Press, 1998

Mamiya, Christin J. “Manuel Neri” in Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. Karen O. Janovy, ed. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Manhart, Marcia; Manhart, Tom, eds. The Eloquent Object . Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1987.

Nixon, Bruce. Things That Dream: Contemporary Calligraphic Artists’ Books/ Cosas que sueñan: Libros de artistas caligra cos contemporáneos Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2012. Paz, Octavio; Beardsley, John; Livingston, Jane. Hispanic Art in the United States . New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1987. Plagens, Peter. Sunshine Muse. New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Quirarte, Jacinto. Mexican American Artists . Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1973. Saeks, Diane Dorrans. San Francisco Interiors . San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1995. Sayre, Henry. A World of Art (7th ed.). London: Pearson Education, 2012.

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Bishop, Janet, et al. California Classics: Highlights from the Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Tokyo: APT International, Inc., Bledsoe,1999.Jane K. Figurative Sculpture: Ten Artists/Two Decades . Long Beach, CA: University Art Museum, California State University, 1984

_____. Sculptors at UC Davis: Past and Present . San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1982. Barilleaux, Rene Paul. Sculptors on Paper: New Work . Madison, WI: Madison Art Center, 1987. Bates, Mary; Moulton, Susan. Works in Bronze: A Modern Survey. Rohnert Park, CA: Sonoma State University, 1984.

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Bischoff, David A. Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Drawings . Sacramento, CA: Robert Else Gallery, California State University, 1985.

CATALOGUES Abrams, Harry N. American Images: The SBC Collection. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Adelphia Society. A Bid for Human Rights . San Francisco, CA: Adelphia Society, 1988. Albright, Thomas. Manuel Neri. San Francisco, CA; John Berggruen Gallery; Santa Monica, CA: James Corcoran Gallery; New York, NY: Charles Cowles Gallery, 1988. Albuquerque Museum. The Human Factor: Figurative Sculpture Reconsidered. Albuquerque, NM: The Albuquerque Museum, 1993.

Boas, Nancy. As I Am: Painting the Figure in Post-War San Francisco. San Francisco, CA: Hackett Mill, 2016 Bolomey, Roger. Forgotten Dimension—A Survey of Small Sculpture in California Now. Fresno, CA: Fresno Arts Center, 1982. Boynton, James, ed. San Francisco 9. Houston, TX: Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, 1962.

Amnesty International. Artists for Amnesty. Davis, CA: Amnesty International, 1987. Anderson, Maxwell L. Manuel Neri: In the Classical Tradition. New York, NY: Ameringer-Yohe Fine Art, 2006. Antenucci Becherer, Joseph. “Continuity and Change: Manuel Neri and the Human Figure” in Manuel Neri. San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2003.

Solomon, Holly; Anderson, Alexandra. Living with Art. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publishers, Inc., 1985. Williams, Thomas. The Bay Area School: Californian Artists of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s . London: Lund Humphries, 2013.

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Faberman, Hilarie, et al. Picasso to Thiebaud: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Collections of Stanford University Alumni and Friends . Stanford, CA: Leland Stanford, Jr. University, 2004 FitzGibbon, John. California A–Z and Return. Youngstown, OH: The Butler Institute of American Art, 1990 Flood, Richard. The Sixth Day: A Survey of Recent Developments in Figurative Sculpture. Chicago, IL: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1983 . Foley, Suzanne. Remember: It’s Only Art . Walnut Creek, CA: Civic Arts Gallery, 1981 Fuller Goldeen Gallery. Casting: A Survey of Cast Metal Sculpture in the ‘80s . San Francisco, CA: Fuller Goldeen Gallery, 1982 Garduño, Blanca; Rodriguez, Jose Antonio. Pasión por Frida. Mexico City, Mexico: Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, 1991. Geldzahler, Henry. Manuel Neri: Sculpture, Painted and Unpainted Bridgehampton, NY: Dia Center for the Arts, 1993 _____. Manuel Neri: Classical Expressions/Sculpture and Drawings . Las Vegas, NV: Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, in association with Riva Yares Gallery, 1995 Gettings, Frank. Drawings 1974–1984. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1984. Goodwin, Erin. A Survey of Sculptural Directions of the Bay Area. Cupertino, CA: De Anza College, 1975 Grounds for Sculpture. Spring/Summer Exhibition 94. Hamilton, NJ: Grounds for Sculpture, 1994 _____. Summer Exhibition. Hamilton, NJ: Grounds for Sculpture, 2001. Guenther, Bruce. The Essential Gesture. Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1994

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281 _____.

Bronze: Recent Works by Manuel Neri. San Francisco, CA: Hackett Mill, Hackett-Freedman2016 Gallery. Hackett-Freedman Gallery: 20 Years . San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2005 Harn Museum of Art. From Paradigm to the Unexpected: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Shey Collection. Gainesville, FL: Harn Museum of Art, 2008 Hayward Area Festival of the Arts. 17th Annual Hayward Festival of the Arts . Hayward, CA: Hayward Area Festival of the Arts, 1978 . Henning, Robert, Jr., et al. Santa Barbara Collects . Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1985 Holland, Katherine Church. The Art Collection. San Francisco, CA: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 1986 _____, et al. A Bay Area Connection: Works from the Anderson Collection, 1954–1984. Santa Clara, CA: Triton Museum of Art, 1995 Hopkins, Henry T. (Intro.) Sculpture and Works in Relief. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery, 1986. J.P.L. Fine Arts. California Gold . London, England J.P.L. Fine Arts, 1975. John Berggruen Gallery. John Berggruen Gallery. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery, 1986. Works on Paper. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery, 1988. Large Scale Works on Paper. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery, 1991. Jones, Caroline A. Manuel Neri: Plasters . San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989. Journal of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University: Vol. 1, 1998–1999. Stanford, CA: Leland Stanford Junior University, 2001. Kagawa, Paul, et al. Other Sources: An American Essay. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1976. Karlstrom, Paul. San Francisco Art Institute: Illustrious History, 1871–Present San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1996 Kastner, Carolyn. M. Lee Fatherree’s Photography: Evidence of Artists at Work 1978–2007. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, 2007 Kiechel, Vivian. Contemporary Bronze: Six in the Figurative Tradition. Lincoln, NE: Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, 1985. Kimball, Cathy, et al. Into the 21st Century: Selections from the Permanent Collection. San Jose, CA: San Jose Museum of Art, 1999 Lagoria, Georgianna M.; Martin, Fred. Northern California Art of the Sixties Santa Clara, CA: De Saisset Museum, University of Santa Clara, 1982. Laguna Gloria Art Museum. Human Nature Human Form. Austin, TX: Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 1993 . Landauer, Susan. San Francisco Abstract Expressionism. San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2001 LaPlante, John D., ed. San Francisco Bay Area Painting and Sculpture: Some Points of View–1962. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Art Gallery, Linhares,1962 Philip. Here and Now: Bay Area Masterworks from the Di Rosa Collections . Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1994 _____, et al. Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA . Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 2007 Lombino, Mary-Kay. Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection. Poughkeepsie, NY: The Frances Lehman Loeb Center, Vassar College, 2008 Lucie-Smith, Edward. Riva Yares 2000. Scottsdale, AZ, and Santa Fe, NM: Riva Yares Gallery, 2000 _____. Manuel Neri: Fifty Years of Work . Scottsdale, AZ, and Santa Fe, NM: Riva Yares Gallery, 2005. Magloff, Joanna, ed. Current Painting and Sculpture of the Bay Area. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Art Museum, 1964 Matilsky, Barbara C. The Expressionist Surface: Contemporary Art in Plaster. Queens, NY: Queens Museum, 1990 Matthews, Gene. Visiting Artist Program: 20th Anniversary Show. Boulder, CO: CU Art Galleries, University of Colorado, 1992. McCormick, Jim. 30 from 25. Reno, NV: Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, 1986 McCullough, Tom; Thomas, Daniel; Nicholson, Harry. Three Views on the 1976 Biennale—Recent International Forms in Art . Sydney, Australia: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1976 Morris, Dan W. (Intro.) National Drawing Invitational. Little Rock, AR: Arkansas Art Center, 1990 Moss, Stacey. The Howards: First Family of Bay Area Modernism. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1988

Richard L. Nelson Gallery. Sculptors at UC Davis: Past and Present . Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, 1972.

Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery, with foreword by John Natsoulas. 30 Ceramic Sculptors . Davis, CA: Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery, 1988. _____. 30 Ceramic Sculptors . Davis, CA: Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery, 1990.

Cultural Center. Sculptural Perspectives for the Nineties

_____.

Perl, Jed. “A Tale of Two Cities” in A Culture in the Making: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s and ‘60s . San Francisco, CA: HackettFreedman Gallery, 2006. Pritikin, Renny; Reynolds, Jock; Sadler, Simon. You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Studio Art Faculty. Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis.

“Funk Art: A San Francisco Phenomenon” in Painters at UC Davis . Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, 1984.

Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery, with foreword by John Allen Ryan. Lyrical Vision: The ‘6’ Gallery 1954–1957. Davis, CA: Natsoulas/Novelozo Gallery Press, 1989.

_____. Directions in Bay Area Painting: A Survey of Three Decades, 1940–1969. Davis, CA: Regents of the University of California, 1983.

Neubert, George. Manuel Neri, Sculptor. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1976. The Brook House Sculpture Invitational. Albany, CA: Brook House and Victor Fischer Fine Arts, 1982.

The Oakland Museum. 100 Years of California Sculpture. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1982. Oki, Kazuki, et al. De migrante marmoris . Carrara, Italy: ARSculptoris Associazione Culturale, 2008. Orr-Cahall, Christina, ed. The Dilexi Years 1958–1970. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1984.

Project Sculpture. Project Sculpture. Oakland, CA: Project Sculpture, 1982. Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The Sun Gallery. Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 1981.

Muckenthaler282

Rannells, Susan; Richardson, Brenda. Free. Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1970. Rasmussen, Jack; Cohn, Terri, et al. The True Artist is an Amazing Luminous Fountain: Selected Works from the di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature Napa, CA: di Rosa Preserve: Art & Nature, 2004.

_____. Painters at UC Davis . Davis, CA: Richard L. Nelson Gallery, University of California, 1984.

Fullerton, CA: Muckenthaler Art Center, 1991 Nash, Steven. Abstract and Figurative: Highlights of Bay Area Painting. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery, 2009 Nassau County Museum of Fine Art. Contemporary Naturalism: Works of the 1970s . Roslyn, NY: Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, 1980.

Nierengarten-Smith, Beej. Laumeier Sculpture Park First Decade, 1976–1986. St. Louis, MO: Laumeier Sculpture Park, 1986.

_____. Manuel Neri: Artists’ Books/The Collaborative Process . San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in association with Hudson Hills Press, 2005. _____, et al. Manuel Neri: The Figure in Relief. Hamilton, NJ: Grounds for Sculpture; Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum; San Jose, CA: San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, in association with Hudson Hills Press, _____.2006.Manuel Neri: Matters of Form & Construction. Clarinda, IA: Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum; Ames, IA: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2017. _____. Manuel Neri: Singularity of Form & Surface. New York, NY: Yares Art, Novakov,2017.Anna.

_____. Bay Area Sculptors of the 1960s: Then and Now. San Francisco, CA: Braunstein/Quay Gallery, 1990.

Nierengarten-Smith, Beej; McCue, George, et al. Laumeier Sculpture Park: Second Decade, 1987–1996. St. Louis, MO: Laumeier Sculpture Park and Museum, 1998. Nixon, Bruce. Manuel Neri: Painted Bronzes and Plasters . San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2005.

_____. The Art of California: Selected Works from the Collection of The Oakland Museum. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum; San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1984.

Restany, Pierre. Manuel Neri. San Francisco, CA: John Berggruen Gallery; New York, NY: Charles Cowles Gallery; Zurich, Switzerland: Gimpel-Hanover + Andre Emmerich Galerien, 1984.

Natsoulas, John; Nixon, Bruce, eds. 30 Years of TB-9: A Tribute to Robert Arneson. Davis, CA: John Natsoulas Gallery, 1991.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Twenty American Artists . San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1980. 50th Anniversary Commemorative Program 1985. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985.

San Diego Museum of Art. San Diego Museum of Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection. San Diego, CA: San Diego Museum of Art, 1993.

Zakian, Michael. California Figurative Sculpture. Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1987.

_____. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: The Painting and Sculpture Collection. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution. Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Washington, DC: National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, 1977. Sarah Spurgeon Gallery. Second Annual Invitational Drawing Exhibition. Ellensburg, WA: Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, Central Washington University, Schipper,1979.Merle. Marmo/Marble: A Contemporary Aesthetic . Los Angeles, CA: California Museum of Science and Industry, 1989. Schönholzer, Annette; Spiegler, Marc. Art Kabinett 2010 (Art Basel/Miami Beach). Basel, Switzerland: Art Kabinett|MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd., Schwartz,2010.Joyce Pomeroy; Rossback, Janet. Black & White & Read All Over Charlotte, NC: LaSalle Partners at Nationsbank Plaza, 1995. Scios Nova. Ventriloquist . Baltimore, MD: Scios Nova, 1993. Scott, Sue; Rubinstein, Raphael. Co-Conspirators: Artist and Collector, The Collection of James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett . Orlando, FL: Orlando Museum of Art, 2004.

283

San Francisco Art Institute. Other Sources: An American Essay. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1976.

Taragin, Davira S., et al. Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey. Racine, WI: Racine Art Museum and Gardiner Museum, 2009. University of Nevada. 1968 Sculpture Invitational. Reno, NV: University of Nevada, 1968. University of New Mexico Art Museum. Bulletin: The University of New Mexico Art Museum. Albuquerque, NM: College of Fine Arts, The University of New Mexico, 1978.

_____. The Good Drawing Show. Moraga, CA: St. Mary’s College, 1976.

_____. Re ections: Alumni Exhibitions, San Francisco Art Institute. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1981.

Rodriguez, Peter. The Mexican Museum. San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, Rogers-Lafferty,1981.Sarah.

Cincinnati, OH: The Contemporary Arts Center, 1985. St. Mary’s College Art Gallery. The Small Format . Moraga, CA: St. Mary’s College, 1973.

Starr, Sandra Leonard. Lost and Found in California: Four Decades of Assemblage Art . Santa Monica, CA: James Corcoran Gallery, 1988.

Riva Yares Gallery. Manuel Neri: Sculpture of the 1980s . Scottsdale, AZ: Riva Yares Gallery, 1989.

_____.

Body & Soul: Aspects of Recent Figurative Sculpture

Salow, David. Pairings II: Discovered Dialogues in Postwar Abstraction. San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2005.

Selvin, Nancy. 2002 Scripps College 58th Ceramic Annual. Claremont, CA: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, 2002.

Vanderlip, Dianne Perry, et al. The View from Denver: Contemporary American Art from the Denver Art Museum. Vienna, Austria: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1997.

Selz, Peter, ed. Funk Art . Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1967. Selz, Peter; Moser, Joann. Nathan Oliveira. Berkeley and San Jose, CA: University of California Press and San Jose Museum of Art, 2002. Southwestern Bell Corporation. Contemporary Masters Kansas Tour: Selections from the Collection of Southwestern Bell Corporation. Wichita, KS: Southwestern Bell Corporation, 1988.

Vicario, Gilbert. Phyllis Barlow: Scree. Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 2014.

Western Association of Art Museums. Catalogue of Exhibition. San Francisco, CA: Western Association of Art Museums, 1968. Yellowstone Art Museum. 32nd Annual Art Auction. Billings, MT: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2000.

Richardson, Trevor. Kinds of Drawing. Amherst, MA: Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, 2001.

Community Arts, Inc. The Downtown Foot Show. San Francisco, CA: Community Arts Inc., 1988.

Corcoran Gallery of Art. Manuel Neri: Recent Marble Sculpture Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1997. Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. Sculpture Blooms . Grand Rapids, MI: Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, 2004.

Riva Yares Gallery. Manuel Neri: White Sculpture and Dream Drawings Scottsdale, AZ: Riva Yares Gallery, 2002.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Resource/Reservoir, CCAC: 75 Years . San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1983.

San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. NextNew. San Jose, CA: San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, 2005.

Charles Cowles Gallery. Manuel Neri. New York, NY: Charles Cowles Gallery, 1981.

In Crossings/Chassé-croisé. Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2004. Walters, Sylvia Solochek (Intro.) Counter Visions: Pioneers in Bay Area Art San Francisco, CA: Art Department Gallery, San Francisco State University, 1988.

Sarah Lawrence College Art Gallery. The United States of the Arts Bronxville, NY: Sarah Lawrence College, 1983.

Rodriguez, Peter. Cinco de Mayo Inaugural Exhibit at the Fort Mason Center San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1982.

Butter eld, Jan. Manuel Neri: Drawings & Bronzes . San Francisco, CA: Art Museum Association, 1981.

_____. Committed to Paper: Master Drawings and Prints by Sculptors . Grand Rapids, MI: Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, 2014.

Torres, Anthony. The Question is Known: (W )here is Latin American/Latino Art? San Francisco, CA: Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2008. University of California, Davis. Department of Art . Davis, CA: University of California Publications, 1982.

Hackett-Freedman Gallery. Manuel Neri: Sculpture and Paintings, 1958–1978 . San Francisco, CA: Hackett-Freedman Gallery, 2001.

Heyman, Ira Michael; Elliott, James. Cal Collects 1. Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1986.

Nordland, Gerald. Manuel Neri. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1971.

284 BROCHURES

Albrecht, Herbert. “Die Farbe hat die Plastik Wieder.” Die Welt (Mannheim, Germany), Feb. 18, 1985. Albright, Thomas. “Rooted in the Tradition of the Human Figure—A Sense of Magical Equilibrium.” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 13, 1971, 38. _____. “Neri: Still Sticking with Humans.” San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 5, 1975, 33. _____. “Manuel Neri: A Kind of Time Warp.” Currant , 1:1, Apr.–May 1975, _____.10-6.“The Magni cence of Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 30, 1976, 49-50. _____. “The Cream of the Shows.” San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 11, 1976, _____.50.“Forceful Masterpieces from Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 1979, 47.

SELECTED ARTICLES

Sharp, Lewis I. Twentieth Century American Sculpture at The White House: Exhibition VIII . Washington, DC: The White House, 1999.

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. 36th Annual Purchase Exhibition—Hassam and Speicher Fund . New York, NY: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1984.

Leonard, Michael. The Triumph of the Figure in Bay Area Art: 1950–1965. San Francisco, CA: 871 Fine Arts, 1987. May eld, Signe. Lyricism and Light . Palo Alto, CA: Palo Alto Cultural Center, 1994. The Mexican Museum. Los Primeros Cinco Años/Fifth Anniversary Exhibit San Francisco, CA: The Mexican Museum, 1981. Museum of Anthropology, California State University. Sons of the Shaking Earth. Hayward, CA: California State University, 1983. Neri, Kate. Manuel Neri, A Personal Selection. Belmont, CA: Wiegand Art Gallery, College of Notre Dame, 1988. Neubert, George W. Twentieth Century American Sculpture at The White House. Washington, DC: The White House, 1994.

Van Melle, Paul; Futterman, Armelle. “Word and Image: A Collaboration.”

Art-In-Architecture Program. Hispanic Heritage. Washington, D.C.: Art-InArchitecture Program, U.S. General Services Administration, 1996.

Katie. “Manuel Neri.” ARTnews , 98:3, Mar. 1999, 134-5.

_____. “The Figure’s Beauty Realized in the Abstract.” San Jose Mercury News , Jun. 4, 1989. _____. “Working Together: Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, 1958–1964.” Artnews , 94:8, Oct. 1995, 157. Butter eld, Jan. “Ancient Auras—Expressionist Angst: Sculpture by Manuel Neri.” Images and Issues , Spring 1981, 38-43. Caldwell, Sandra. “Manuel Neri, Sculptor.” Oakland Museum Bulletin, Sep. Campion,1976.

_____. “Figuration’s mainstay has found a niche since illuminating his model’s poetry. Neri show at Legion gets inside the covers.” San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 2005, E1-2.

Applebome, Peter. “The Varied Palette of Hispanic Art in America.” New York Times , Jun. 21, 1987, Arts & Leisure, 31. Atkins, Richard. “From Photography to Funk.” Horizon, Jul./Aug. 1981. Baker, Kenneth. “The Two Sides of Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 1988, E2. “Odd Poses Lend Tension to Manuel Neri’s Sculptures.” San Francisco Chronicle, Jun. 4, 1989, Review, 14-5. “Sublimated Eroticism and Frenzied Funk.” San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 9, 1993, Datebook, 42-3.

285 _____. “The Growth of Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 11, 1980, _____.58.“Bay Area Art: Time of Change.” Horizon, 23:7, Jul. 1980, 24-35. _____. “Manuel Neri’s Survivors: Sculpture for the Age of Anxiety.” Artnews , 80:1, Jan. 1981, 5-9. _____. “Neri’s Contradictions.” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 3, 1981, 76. _____. “Magni cent New Figures From Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 1, 1984, 58. “An intimate, intense bond.” Los Angeles Times , Oct. 15, 2004, E29.

_____. “Manuel Neri’s work to be displayed at S.F. studio.” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 6, 2014, Datebook. Bamsey, Ben. “Soul Mates.” Artworks , 9, Winter 2006, 36-45. Bell, J. Bowyer. “Manuel Neri.” The Review (New York), Apr. 15, 1997, 8-9. Bellet, Harry. “Dans Les Galeries.” Le Monde (Paris), Feb. 26-7, 1995, 19. Blum, Walter. “A Showcase for Contemporary Art.” San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 10, 1980, 16-20. Boettger, Suzaan. “Manuel Neri—Recent Work.” Artweek (CA), Sep. 13, 1977, 7. Bonetti, David. “San Jose or Bust.” San Francisco Examiner, Jul. 30, 1997, B1, Braff,B9.Phyllis. “Life-Size Figures and Reality Relating to Fantasy.” New York Times , Aug. 29, 1993, 16. Brenson, Michael. “Figurative Sculpture of the 80s.” New York Times , Jun. 13, 1986, C1. _____. “Plaster as a Medium, Not Just an Interim Step.” New York Times , Jun. 1990. _____. “The State of the City as Sculptors See It.” New York Times , Jul. 27, 1990, C1, C22. Brown, Erica. “Precision with Playfulness.” New York Times , Jul. 9, 1979, Sunday Magazine, 53. Burkhart, Dorothy. “Splashy Figures at Mexican Museum: Manuel Neri’s Sculptures Show Mysterious Quality.” San Jose Mercury News , Jun. 7, 1981, The Tab, 10-1.

_____. “Battered Forms Put Humanity Back on Display.” San Jose Mercury News , Sep. 23, 1992, 1D, 7D.

_____.

_____. “Manuel Neri’s Hands-on Bond with His Models.” San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 7, 1997, E1, E5.

_____. “Art Notes: Award to Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 2006, Datebook, E2.

Chang, Dewitt. “Manuel Neri.” Visual Art Source (visualartsource.com), May 2014. Chipp, Herschel B. “Exhibition in San Francisco.” Artnews , 59:6, Oct. 1960, Clifford,50.

Peter. “Manuel Neri: Hackett-Freedman Gallery.” Sculpture Magazine, 25:1, Jan./Feb. 2006, 70. Carpenter, Kim. “Color in Sculpture: An Integral Component.” Sculpture Review, 43:1, Spring 2014, 8-13. Casasco, Ermanno. “La Casa di Una Collezionista d’Arte Moderna: Paule Anglim.” Casa & Giardino (Milan, Italy), 132, May 1983, 40-5.

_____.

_____. “D.C. Exhibitions.” San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 31, 1997, Datebook, E1, E6.

_____. “Public Art and The Abstracts in The Modern Era.” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, Sep. 19, 1976, This World, 35.

_____. “Manuel Neri: Life with the Figure.” Artweek (CA), Nov. 13, 1976, 1, 7. Fahlman, Betsy. “Manuel Neri: Sculpture of the 1980s.” Latin American Art, Winter 1990, 65. Fauntleroy, Gussie. “Neri Pares Down to Create Volumes of Feeling.” Pasatiempo (Santa Fe, NM), Jul. 5-11, 1996, 20, 61.

Feeser, Sigrid. “Frischer Wind von der Westkuste.” Rheinpfalz (Mannheim, W. Germany), Feb. 8, 1985. Feinsilber, Pamela. “Fine Figures.” San Francisco, 53:7, Jul. 2006, 50-1.

_____. “A Gallery Full of Sculpture.” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 29, 1976, 36.

Cohen,286Mark Daniel. “Manuel Neri: Marking Our Time.” Review, 4:7, Dec. 15, 1998, cover, 5-7. Cohn, Terri. “Abstraction and Figuration Integrated.” Artweek (CA), 20:25, Jul. 15, 1989, 3. Coplans, John. “Sculpture in California.” Artforum, Aug. 1963, 3-6.

Drohojowska, Hunter. “A Northwestern Passage.” Architectural Digest , Sep. 1990, 196-201. Dunham, Judith. “Images ofWoman.” Artweek , 6:41, Nov. 29, 1975, 13-4.

French, Christopher. “Manuel Neri: Figures Out of Time.” Artweek (CA), 15:11, Mar. 17, 1984, 1.

_____. “The Nude: Drawings by Alvin Light, Manuel Neri, Gordon Cook, Joan Brown.” Artforum, Nov. 1963, 39. _____. “Circle of Styles on the West Coast.” Art in America, 52:3, Jun. 1964, 30. _____. “Abstract Expressionist Ceramics.” Artforum, 5:3, Nov. 1966, 34-41. Coplans, John; Leider, Philip. “West Coast Art: Three Images.” Artforum, 1:12, Jun. 1963, 21-5. Corcoran Gallery of Art. “Manuel Neri: Early Work 1953–1978.” Night & Day (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Jan.-Feb. 1997, 6. Couzens, Julia. “Early UC Davis artists de ed elitism as ‘Out Our Way’ shows.” Sacramento Bee, Nov. 17, 2016. Curtis, Cathy. “The Female Formed.” Los Angeles Times (Orange County edition), Jan. 22, 1998, Calendar Weekend, cover, 6-8. Dalkey, Victoria. “Icons of the Flesh.” Sacramento Bee, Nov. 3, 1985, Encore, 28. _____. “Cultural Crossroads.” Horizon, 31:1, Jan./Feb. 1988, Valley Arts, 12-4. _____. “Forms of Expression.” Sacramento Bee, Aug. 26, 1990, Encore, 10. _____. “Back to Basics.” Sacramento Bee, May 12, 2002, Encore, 11. Delehanty, Hugh J. “Manuel Neri: Cast From A Different Mold.” Focus Magazine, Jan. 1982, 24-7. Dial, Karla. “Artist’s Works Figure Prominently.” The Desert Sun (Palm Springs, CA), Oct. 20, 1998, D1, D8.

_____. “Innovative Sculptor of the Life Cast.” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 25, 1979, 49.

Fried, Alexander. “Violent Fantasy in Art.” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 1959. Fuller, Mary. “San Francisco Sculpture.” Art in America, 52, Jun. 1964, 52-9. Genocchio, Benjamin. “Art20.” New York Times , Nov. 10, 2006, B36.

_____. “Neri’s Sketchbooks Opened to Public Eye.” Contra Costa Times (CA), Nov. 11, 1994, Time Out, 23. _____. “Model Finds Inspiration, Support for Poetry from Artist.” Contra Costa Times (CA), Nov. 11, 1994, Time Out, 24.

_____. “Looking Back to the Dilexi.” Artweek , 15:37, Nov. 3, 1984, 1.

Figoten, Sheldon. “Building and Painting the Figure.” Artweek (CA), Jun. 20, 1981, 5-6. “Four Drawings: Manuel Neri.” Artforum, 2:10, Apr. 1964, 32-3.

Fowler, Carol. “The Art of Plaster: Love of the Craft Shapes Neri’s Style.” Contra Costa Times (CA), May 19, 1989, Time Out, 12-3.

_____. “The Look of Love.” New York Times , Apr. 8, 2007, Arts & Entertainment, 11. Gidfrey, Dominique. “Art Contemporain Bordeaux: Un Octobre Californien.” TV Loisirs (Bordeaux, France), Sep. 16, 1984, 35. Glowen, Ron. “Neri’s Figures Are Striking and Gaunt—ART SHOW.” Everett Herald (WA), Feb. 5, 1981, 2C. Glueck, Grace. “Manuel Neri.” The New York Times , Jan. 1, 1999. Gomez, Edward M. “The San Francisco Rebellion.” Time, Feb. 5, 1990, 74-5. Grif th, Jackson. “On paper, elegant.” Sacramento News & Review, May 9, 2002, 41

Frank, Peter. “Manuel Neri (Braunstein/Quay).” Artnews , 75:5, May 1976, 128.

Frankenstein, Alfred. “The Old and the New in Oakland Shows.” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, May 28, 1972, This World, 34-5.

Monte, James. “Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud.” Artforum, 3:44, Mar. 1965.

Kimmelman, Michael. “30 Hispanic Artists at the Brooklyn Museum.” New York Times , Jun. 9, 1989, B12.

287

Mills, Paul. “Bay Area Figurative.” Art in America, 52:3, Jun. 1964, 44.

“Manuel Neri: Escultura y Dibujos.” Art Nexus , May 1991, 112-3 “Manuel Neri wins Lifetime Achievement Award for Sculpture.” artinfo.com, May 4, 2006. Marmer, Nancy. “Los Angeles.” Artforum, 3:4, Jan. 1965, 13-4.

Eleanor. “Manuel Neri at Charles Cowles.” Art in America, 79:5, May 1991, 175-6 Hemphill, Chris. “Sculptural Drama.” Architectural Digest , Mar. 1980, 68, 120. Huber, Alfred. “Wenn die Linie einen Bogen kreuzt.” Mannheimer Morgen (Mannheim, Germany), Feb. 4, 1985. Hughes, Robert. “Heritage of Rich Imagery.” Time, 132:2, Jul. 11, 1988, 62-4. “Idée Fixe.” The New Yorker, 74:43, Jan. 25, 1999, 14. Johnsrud, Even Hebbe. “Fantasi-utfordring.” Aftenposten (Oslo, Norway), Sep. 13, 1985. Jones, Marianna. “Manuel Neri: Obsession with Depicting Human Forms Distinguishes Californian’s Art Work.” Walla Walla Union Bulletin (WA), Apr. 3, 1980. Juris, Prudence. “Neri’s Second Skins.” Artweek , 2:41, Nov. 27, 1971, 12. Kangas, Matthew. “Rebirth of Venus.” Sculpture, 9:6, Nov./Dec. 1990, 48-55. Katz, Vincent. “Manuel Neri at Charles Cowles.” Art in America, 83:10, Oct. 1995, 129. Kaufman, Charles. “Neri Leads New Exhibits at Arts Center.” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), Apr. 2, 1982, 1C.

_____. “Curator Scores with First Exhibit of SAM’s Modern Art.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jul. 18, 1996, C1, C5.

Lofstrom, Mark. “Character of Our Age & History in Sculpture.” Cultural Climate (Honolulu), Apr. 1983, 7. Long, Robert. “Artist’s Style Presents Paradox.” Southampton Press (Long Island, NY.), Sep. 9, 1993, 21, 24.

Leider, Philip. “Manuel Neri.” Artforum, Sep. 1963, 45. _____. “California After the Figure.” Art in America, 51:5, Oct. 1963, 77.

_____. “Neri Elevates the Human Form.” Denver Post , Dec. 19, 2002, 1F, 12F.

Maclay, Catherine. “Faithful to the Female Form.” San Jose Mercury News , Jun. 27, 1997, Eye Section, 45. MacMillan, Kyle. “Drawings by Manuel Neri Explore Another Dimension.” Sunday World Herald (Omaha, NE), Oct. 5, 1997, 13, 22.

Mendenhall, Lauri. “Manuel Neri—Figurative Jazz.” Coast (Corona del Mar, CA), 7:5, Feb. 5, 1998, 29. Mennin, Mark. “Innovations with the Figure: The Sculpture of Manuel Neri.” Arts , 60:8, Apr. 1986, 76-7.

_____. “Statue of Mary pulls Queen Anne Church into contemporary art scene.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Oct. 21, 2003.

Knaff, Devorah. “An un inching brush with mortality.” Orange County Register, Feb. 8, 1998, Encore, 33. Kohen, Helen L. “Sculpting the Everyman in Brash, Bold Bronze.” Miami Herald , Oct. 29, 1982, 2D. Kramer, Hilton. “Art: First Solo Show for Manuel Neri.” New York Times , Feb. 27, 1981.

_____. “Reaching New Heights.” Artnews , 103:1, Jan. 2004, 69-70.

McDonald, Robert. “Manuel Neri.” Artweek , Jun. 2, 1979, 1, 19.

_____. “Neri Work is a First for Seattle.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Sep. 4, 1991, C6.

Lewis, Jo Ann. “Peopled Paradox.” The Washington Post , Feb. 3, 1983.

Magloff, Joanna. “California Sculpture at the Oakland Museum.” Artnews , 62:9, Jan. 1964, 51. “Manuel Neri: Early Work, 1953-1978.” Southwest Art, Jul. 1997, 71-2.

Le Van, Brook B. “The Bemis Experience.” Sculpture, 7:3, May/Jun. 1988, 26-7.

McCann, Cecile N. “Geis and Neri at SFAI.” Artweek , 1:31, Sep. 26, 1970, 3.

Hackett, Regina. “Woman’s Many Facets.” Artweek , 6:41, Nov. 29, 1975, 13-4.

Harper, Paula. “Sculptor’s Nudes Embody Mankind.” Miami News , Nov. 5, Heartney,1982.

McHenry, Eric. “Neri Infuses Visual Arts Master Class with Spirit of Collaboration.” B.U. Bridge (Boston), Feb. 5, 1999, 1, 6.

_____. “Sculptor Content with his Body of Work.” Omaha World-Herald , Oct. 14, 1997, 31.

McLellan, Marian. “Calculated, Distilled: Manuel Neri, Margaret Evangeline.” N.O.A.R. (New Orleans Art Review), 18:5, May/Jun. 2001, 28-30.

Isabelle von. “Olympischer Nachgeschmack.” Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (Mannheim, Germany), Mar. 5, 1985. Nieto, Margarita. “Manuel Neri.” Latin American Art, 1:2, Fall 1989, 52-6. Nixon, Bruce. “The Way Things Were.” Artweek , 21:1, Jan. 11, 1990, 1, 8.

Scarborough, James. “A Dialog of Color and Form.” Artweek , 18:16, Apr. 25, 1987, 4. Seed, John. “The Early Life of Bruce Conner and his Rat Bastard Selz,bastard-bohemia/,Hyperallergic.com/33217/the-early-life-of-bruce-conner-and-his-rat-Bohemia.”Oct.27,2016.Peter.“AModernLooksatItself:SanFrancisco.” Arts , 59:8, Apr. 1985, _____.89-93.“Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980.” California Monthly, 96:2, Dec. 1985, 10. _____. “Figural Poetry: A Conversation with Manuel Neri.” Sculpture, 25:8, Oct. 2006, 23-5.

Shere, Charles. “Show by Sculptor-Painter Neri One of Magni cence.” Oakland Tribune, Dec. 3, 1981, D14-5.

_____. “Sculpture that is Drawing With Vitality.” Oakland Tribune, Jan. 21, 1982, I24. Slivka, Rose C. S. “From the Studio.” East Hampton Star, Aug. 12, 1993, H9.

Morch,288Al.“San Francisco.” Artforum, 5:2, Oct. 1966, 56. _____. “We’re Still in the Bronze Age.” San Francisco Examiner, Aug. 2, 1982, E6. Morris, Gay. “Sculptor Manuel Neri Brings Figurative In uence to the Female Form.” Oakland Tribune, May 30, 1989. Morse, Marcia. “A Fascination for the Human Figure.” The Sunday StarBulletin and Advertiser (Honolulu), May 8, 1983. Moss, Stacey. “Neri Sculptures: An Art Show that Renews the Faith.” Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto, CA), May 25, 1979, C1, C11. Nadaner, Dan. “Direct Marks and Layers of Mystery.” Artweek , 18:21, May 30, 1987, 1. “Neri Posture.” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, Jun. 7, 1981. “Neri’s Quartet.” San Francisco Chronicle, Sep. 30, 1976, 50. “Neri Receives ISC Lifetime Award.” Artweek , 37:6, Jul.-Aug. 2006, 2-3. “Neri Takes on Local Figurative Movement with Sculptures.” Alameda Times Star, Jun. 2, Neumann-Cosel-Nebe,1989.

_____. “Words Compliment Art: Poem-letters, interactive text enhance exhibits.” San Jose Mercury News , Jul. 20, 1997, 4G.

_____. “The Form in Time: Manuel Neri’s Relief Sculptures.” Sculpture, 25:8, Oct. 2006, 20-2. “Northern California’s Guggenheims.” San Francisco Chronicle, Apr. 12, 1979, Paglia,27.Michael. “The Beat Goes On.” Westword (CO), Dec. 6-12, 1995, 65. “Un ‘passaporto’ da scultore.” Nazione Carrara (Carrara, Italy), Nov. 20, Pincus,1987.Robert L. “The Making of Manuel Neri.” Sculpture, Jan.-Feb. 1994, “The34-7.Prospect Over the Bay.” Arts , 37,:4, May-Jun. 1963, 20. Ratcliff, Carter. “And the Beats Go On.” Art in America, Mar. 1996, 62-7. “Review.” Artforum, 1:5, Oct. 1962, 39. Rice, Nancy N. “Manuel Neri.” New Art Examiner, Oct. 1983, 21. Richard, Paul. “Carving Out a Niche.” Washington Post, Feb. 12, 1997, D7. Richardson, Brenda. “Bay Area Survey.” Arts , 45:1, Sep. 1970, 52-3. Robinson, Walter. “Manuel Neri at Charles Cowles.” artnet.com, Apr. 16, Ronck,1997.Ronn. “Manuel Neri.” Honolulu Advertiser, May 3, 1983. Rosen, Steven. “Manuel Neri’s Feminist Views.” Denver Post , Nov. 15, 1995, 1, 5E, 10E. Rubin, Jeff. “Manuel Neri.” New Orleans Art Review, 16:4, Mar.-Apr. 1998, 6-8. Rubin, Michael G. “Neri Sculpture at Laumeier.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat , Jul. 2-3, 1983, 7E. “San Francisco.” Artforum, 9:3, Nov. 1970, 89-90. “San Francisco.” Arts , 39:1, Oct. 1964, 23, 25. “San Francisco: Manuel Neri at Paule Anglim.” Art in America, Oct. 1979. “San Francisco Sculptor Neri Given Art Award.” San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 1959. Sanders, Luanne. “Manuel and Mary.” Creative Loa ng (Atlanta), Apr. 20, 1991, 69-70. Santiago, Chiori. “The Marriage of Two Minds.” San Jose Mercury News , Apr. 16, 1995.

“The Manuel Neri/Pablo Neruda Book Project.” Bound & Lettered , 5:2, Spring 2006, 18-21. Thym, Jolene. “Artist’s Obsession.” The Argus (Fremont and Union City, CA), Jul. 20, 1997, Cue, 1, 5 Torres, Anthony. “Manuel Neri: Metamorphosis.” New Fillmore (San Francisco), 17:11, Mar. 2003, 14. Tromble, Meredith. “A Conversation with Manuel Neri.” Artweek , Apr. 8, 1993, 20. Tuchman, Phyllis. “A Sculptor Captive to Body Language of the Female Form.” Newsday, Feb. 16, 1986, part 2, 15. _____. “The Sunshine Boys.” Connoisseur, 217:901, Feb. 1987, 62-9. Van Proyen, Mark. “Commemorating a Critic’s Eye.” Artweek , 16:25, Jul. 13, 1985, 1. _____. “Nuances of the Particular.” Artweek , 18:37, Nov. 7, 1987, 1. _____. “Manuel Neri at Hackett-Freedman.” Art in America, 6, Jun. 2003, _____.132.“The Muses of Manuel Neri.” Art LTD. (Woodland Hills, CA), Jan. 2007, 24-30. Venturi, Anita. “The Prospect over the Bay.” Arts , May 1963, 19-21.

_____. “Work from Walla Walla Foundry.” Seattle Times , Jan. 7, 1993. Taylor, Robert. “Neri’s limited-edition books dense with detail.” Contra Costa Times (CA), Sep. 4, 2005, C5.

_____. “Manuel Neri at the Oakland Museum and Braunstein Quay.” Art in America, Jan. 1977, 131. _____. “San Francisco: Manuel Neri at Paule Anglim.” Art in America, Oct. Sullivan,1979.Megan. “Cover Story: In Relief.” Tempo (Princeton, NJ), Dec. 15, 2006, cover, 3. Tamblyn, Christine. “Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965.” Artnews , Apr. 1990, Tanguy,175.Sarah. “Manuel Neri: Early Works 1953–1978.” Sculpture, 16:5, May-Jun. 1997, 64-5. Tarshis, Jerome. “Jazz Shapes Caught in Marble.” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 4, 1988, 30-1. Tarzan Ament, Deloris. “Engineer Training Shows in Neri’s Work.” Seattle Times , Jun. 8, 1989, F1-2.

_____. “Making his Mark in Art.” Rocky Mountain News , May 17, 2004.

H. J. “Bay Area Sculpture Survey.” Artweek , 7:10, Mar. 6, 1976, 9. “White House Sculpture Garden.” Art in America, 82:11, Nov. 1994, 152. Williams, Thomas. “Drawings of the Bay Area School.” Master Drawings , 51:4, Winter 2013, 481-520. Wilson, William. “Sculpture: California Dreaming.” Los Angeles Times , Aug. 29, 1982, Calendar, 82. Winokur, Scott. “Manuel Neri—At Home with His Plaster Ladies.” Oakland Tribune, Mar. 2, 1977, 15-8. Witt, Diego. “Tres Grandes Artistas de Origen Mexicano/Three Great Artists of Mexican Origin.” Vuelo/San Francisco (Mexicana Airlines), Sep. 1997, 38. Zickerman, Lynne. “In Art with Manuel Neri.” Daily Californian Arts Magazine (Berkeley, CA), Sep. 20, 1972, 12-3, 18.

Smallwood, Lyn. “Manuel Neri Lets the Ghosts of Art History Surface from His Sculptures.” Seattle Post Intelligencer, Jun. 8, 1989, C7.

Voelz Chandler, Mary. “Neri Shapes Human Form into Natural Force.” Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Dec. 7, 2002.

Sokolov, Raymond. “What’s New at the White House? It’s the Art, Stupid.” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 15, 1994, A14. Speer, Robert. “Manuel Neri’s ‘Spirit Figures’.” Chico News & Review (CA), Mar. 29, 1984, 45. Spring, Justin. “Manuel Neri: Corcoran Gallery.” Artforum, 36:1, Sep. 1997, Stiles,129-30.Knute. “San Francisco.” Artforum, 10:3, Nov. 1971, 87-8.

Wallace, Dean. “Action Sculpture by Manuel Neri.” San Francisco Chronicle, Jul. Wasserman,1980.Burton. “Manuel’s Musings.” Art Matters (Philadelphia), Feb. 2007, 15. Webster, Mary Hull. “Mysteries of Death and Light.” Artweek , Apr. 23, 1992, Weeks,20.

289

_____. “San Francisco: A Field Day for Sculptors.” Arts , 38:1, Oct. 1963, 64. _____. “Manuel Neri.” Contemporary Sculpture: Arts Yearbook 8 , 1965, 138.

A Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California B Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Joanne Leonard,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1972

Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, California C Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California

D De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, California Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa Di Rosa Art Preserve, Napa,

MUSEUMCalifornia & PUBLIC COLLECTIONS/

Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

291

Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California

Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas

Hawaii State Council on the Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

292

P Palm Springs Museum of Art, Palm Springs, California

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California

L Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, Missouri

The Mexican Museum, San Francisco, California

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada

H Harold Washington Library, City of Chicago, Illinois

Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC

Mandeville Library, Special Collections, University of California, San Diego, California Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California

I Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana

G Grove Isle Sculpture Garden, Coconut Grove, Florida

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey

R Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin

Morgan Library and Museum, New York, New York

Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas

Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Iwate University, Tokyo, Japan

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee

F Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

New York Public Library, New York, New York

Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona

N Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii

Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California

The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California

Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia, Washington Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York Y Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut

293

S San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, California San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Stanford, California State of California, The Bateson Building, Sacramento, California

T Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida U U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Courthouse, Portland, UniversityOregonMuseums, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder, Colorado University of New Mexico Fine Arts Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico

295 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSPAGEXHarrisonTruong,PhotographerABOVE/BELOWMaryMargaretandHarryW.AndersonattheAndersonCollectionatStanfordUniversitywithManuelNeri’s Standing Figure II , 1982, Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature, 69¼ × 17 7∕8 × 19½ in./175.9 × 45.4 × 49.5 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, The2014.1.059Andersons with Standing Figure II , and David Park (1911–1960), Four Women, 1959, Oil on canvas, 57 × 75 3∕8 in./ 144.8 × 191.5 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.007, © The Estate of David Park, Courtesy of Hackett Mill, representative of the Estate of David Park / NOTE: Dimensions are listed as height × width × depth PAGE BabetteII Eddleston, Photographer Carrara Studio, 1977 PAGE PhotographerIV Unknown Carrara Studio, 1980 PAGE PhotographerVI Unknown Carrara Studio, 1996 PAGE RichardVIIIOlcott/Ennead Architects Design drawing for the Anderson Collection at Stanford University © Richard Olcott/Ennead Architects Steve Moore,BeniciaPhotographerStudio,1980

JohnnaPAGE296XIArnold, Photographer Galleries of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, PhilipLEFT/RIGHT2014Guston(1913–1980), The Coat II , 1977, Oil on canvas, 69 1 8 × 92 1∕8 in./175.6 × 234.0 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.047, © The Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, New York; Sam Francis (1923–1994), Red in Red, 1955, Oil on canvas, 78 3∕8 × 78 3∕8 in./199.1 × 199.1 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.011, © Sam Francis Foundation, California / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Lucifer, 1947, Oil and enamel on canvas, 413∕16 × 105½ in./104.6 × 268.0 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.019, © The PollockKrasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), ClyffordNYStill (1904–1980), 1957-J No. 1 (PH-142), 1957, Oil on canvas, 113 3∕8 × 146 7∕8 in./288.0 × 373.1 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.038, © City and County of Denver, Courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum; and Peter Voulkos (1924–2002), Untitled Stack , 1981, Wood- red stoneware, 35 1∕8 × 16 3∕8 × 16 3 8 in./89.2 × 41.6 × 41.6 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.056, © Voulkos Family Trust AdolphBELOW Gottlieb (1903–1974), Trans guration III , 1958, Oil on canvas, 90 × 601 8 in./228.6 × 152.7 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.029, Art © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; and Franz Kline (1910–1962), Figure 8 , 1952, Oil on canvas, 80 7∕8 × 63 3 8 in./205.4 × 161.0 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and

Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.028, © The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York PAGE PhotographerXII Unknown Carrara Studio, 1996 PAGE XIV–XV Joan Brown Seated , 1959; Unique Cast 1963; Patina Aluminum,2016 oil-based pigments 30¼ × 12½ × 27 in. 76.8 × 31.8 × 68.6 cm Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.2.01 PAGE WillemXVIde Kooning (1904–1997 ) Woman Standing—Pink , 1954–55 Oil and charcoal on canvas 48 × 36 in. 121.9 × 91.4 cm Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.018 © 2014 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: M. Lee Fatherree PAGE NathanXVIIOliveira (1928–2010) Reclining Nude, 1958 Oil on canvas 48 7∕8 × 60 1∕8 in. 124.1 × 152.7 cm Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.009 © Nathan Oliveira Estate, Courtesy John Berggruen Gallery Photo: Ian Reeves

La Martyre, grand modele [ The Martyr, large version], 1899–c. 1900; Cast 1983 60½Bronze× 41½ × 14 in. 153.7 × 105.4 × 35.6 cm Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection, 1998.351

PAGE XXVIII M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006

Photo: M. Lee Fatherree

PAGE HarrisonXXIITruong, Photographer Standing Figure II, 1982, on exhibit at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, PAGE2014 HarrisonXXIIITruong, Photographer LEFT/RIGHT Standing Figure II , 1982, and Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), Girl on the Beach, 1957, Oil on canvas, 52 1∕8 × 57¼ in./132.4 × 145.4 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.005, © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation; and Berkeley #26, 1954, Oil on canvas, 56¼ × 49¼ in./142.9 × 125.1 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.004, © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation Standing Figure II , 1982, and David Park (1911–1960), Four Women, 1959, Oil on canvas, 57 × 75 3∕8 in./144.8 × 191.5 cm, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.007, © The Estate of David Park, Courtesy of Hackett Mill, representative of the Estate of David Park AugusteXXIVRodin (1840–1917 ) Martyre, grand modele [ The Martyr, large version] (Detail), 1899–c. 1900; Cast 1983 60½Bronze× 41½ × 14 in. 153.7 × 105.4 × 35.6 cm Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection, 1998.351 Photo: M. Lee Fatherree PAGE XXVI Carriona Figure No. 1, 1981 Marble, oil-based pigments 66½ × 18½ × 18¼ in. 168.9 × 47.0 × 46.0 cm Private Collection Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, promised gift of Thomas J. Davis and Shirley Ross Sullivan, L.37.1.2004

La Porte de l’Enfer [ The Gates of Hell ], 1880–c. 1900; Cast 1981 250Bronze¾× 158 × 33 3∕8 in. 636.9 × 401.3 × 84.8 cm Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection, 1985.86

PAGE

Photo: M. Lee Fatherree PAGE AugusteXXIRodin (1840–1917 )

297 PAGE PhotographerXVIII Unknown Carrara Studio, 1980 PAGE AugusteXX Rodin (1840–1917 )

MANUEL298 NERI & THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE 1. Mary Julia (Cast 1/4), 1990; Cast 1991; Painted 1992 Bronze, oil-based pigments 65 × 19 × 15 in. 165.1 × 48.3 × 38.1 cm Private Collection 2. Mary Julia (Cast 2/4), 1990; Cast 1991; Painted 1992 Bronze, oil-based pigments 65 × 19 × 15 in. 165.1 × 48.3 × 38.1 cm Private Collection 3–4. Mary Julia (Cast 3/4), 1990; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 65 × 19 × 15 in. 165.1 × 48.3 × 38.1 cm 5. Mary Julia (Cast 4/4), 1990; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 65 × 19 × 15 in. 165.1 × 48.3 × 38.1 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.88.15 CHAPTER 1 6. James Mitchell, Photographer 9 Mission Street Studio, 1959 7. The Bathers , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 39 × 44¼ × 37 in. 99 × 112.4 × 93.9 cm Private Collection 8. Chanel, 1958; Re-worked 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 67¼ × 17 × 19 in. 170.8 × 43.2 × 48.3 cm Private Collection 9. Hombre Colorado, 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 69 × 16 × 20¼ in. 175.3 × 58.9 × 41.3 cm Private Collection 10. Standing Figure with Red Arm, 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 61 × 22 × 16¼ in. 154.9 × 58.9 × 41.3 cm Private Collection 11. Carla III (Detail), 1958–60 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 68 × 23 × 17 in. 172.7 × 58.4 × 43.2 cm 12. Carla III , 1958–60 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 68 × 23 × 17 in. 172.7 × 58.4 × 43.2 cm 13. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Head of Woman (Flora Mayo), 1926 Plaster with pigments 12 1∕16 × 9 1∕8 × 3 5∕16 in. 31.2 × 23.2 × 8.4 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 14. Seated Female Figure, 1961 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 28 × 56 × 36 in. 71.1 × 142.2 × 91.4 cm Private Collection 15. Wood Figure No. 1, 1956–57 Wood, cloth, mixed media 35 3 8 × 20¾ × 18¾ in. 89.7 × 52.7 × 47.6 cm Private Collection 16. Wire Figure No. 2, 1956–57 Wire, cloth, mixed media 15¾ × 9¼ × 4¼ in. 40.0 × 23.5 × 10.8 cm Private Collection

299 17. Wire Figure No. 1, 1956–57 Wire, cloth, mixed media 18 × 9½ × 13 in. 45.7 × 24.1 × 33.0 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul LeBaron Thiebaud, 1998.187 18. Untitled (Bird ), 1957–60 Cardboard, plaster, mixed media 15¾ × 15 × 9¼ in. 40.0 × 38.1 × 23.5 cm Private Collection 19. Hawk , Cardboard,1957–60plaster, mixed media 14¼ × 8½ × 8 in. 36.2 × 21.6 × 20.3 cm Private Collection 20–21. Beach Figure, 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 48¼ × 18¾ × 17¼ in. 122.6 × 47.6 × 43.8 cm Private Collection 22–23. Armless Figure, 1959 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 60 × 22½ × 18 in. 152.4 × 57.2 × 45.7 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, William L. Gerstle Collection, William L. Gerstle purchase 24. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme qui marche [ Walking Woman I ] [ Woman Walking ], 1932 (version of 1936) Plaster coated with parting compound 59 7∕8 × 11 × 15 5∕16 in. 152.1 × 28 × 38.9 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 25. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Venere [ Venus], 1942 46Plaster3∕8× 11¼ × 10 in. 117.8 × 28.6 × 25.4 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 26. Germaine Richier (1902–1959) Die Kröte, 1942 Patinated plaster 7 11∕16 × 12 × 10 1∕16 in. 19.5 × 30.5 × 25.5 cm Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland, Gift of Hélène and Marcel Perincioli, Muri, Inv. No. Pl 82.009 © ProLitteris, Zürich / ARS, New York, NY Photo: Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Bern 27. Untitled [Armless Figure IV ], 1974 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature on wood base 64¼ × 17 5∕8 × 29 3∕8 in. 163.2 × 44.8 × 74.6 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Charles Cowles 91.101 28–29. Seated Female Figure with Leg Raised , Plaster,1959 oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 67¼ × 25¼ × 23¼ in. 170.8 × 64.1 × 59.1 cm Private Collection 30. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) City Square, 1948 8½Bronze×25 3∕8 × 17¼ in. 21.6 × 64.5 × 43.8 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York Art(Purchase)©Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 31. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta (Nuda femminile) [ Young Girl (Female Nude)], 1938 58¼Terracotta×15 × 11 in. 148.0 × 38.0 × 28.0 cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Sergio Anelli; Mondadori Portfolio / Art Resource, NY 32. Carla VI , 1958–60 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 64 × 13¾ × 10½ in. 162.6 × 34.9 × 26.7 cm Private Collection

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 38. Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of Alberto Giacometti sculptures in the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 30–November 29, 1959

Gelatin-silver print 7½ × 9½ in. 19.1 × 24.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 37. Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 30–November 29, 1959

Gelatin-silver print 7½ × 9½ in. 19.1 × 24.1 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 39–40. Figure with Arms Raised , 1968 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 85½ × 16½ × 17 in. 217.2 × 41.9 × 43.2 cm Private Collection 41. David Park (1911–1960) The Model, 1959 Oil-based pigments on canvas 66½ × 59 in. 168.9 × 149.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of Karen, Lawrence, and Ellen Eisner, in memory of their mother, Anita Brand Eisner; gift of Laila Twigg-Smith, by exchange; and purchased with Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, Fund; Walter H. and Margaret Dwyer Clemens, B.A. 1951, Fund; Director’s Discretionary Fund for the Yale University Art Gallery; Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; The Iola S. Haverstick Fund for American Art; The Heinz Family Fund; Katharine Ordway Fund; Joann and Gifford Phillips, Class of 1942, Fund; and George A., Class of 1954, and Nancy P. Shutt Acquisition Fund, 2014.71.1 The Estate of David Park, Courtesy of Hackett Mill, representative of the Estate of David Park Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery 42. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona [Reclining Pomona],

1935 Bronze with patina 30 11 16 × 62 3∕16 × 18 7 8 in. 78.0 × 158.0 × 48.0 cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan 43. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Composition avec trois gures et une tête (la place) [ Three Figures and a Head ( The Small Square)], 1950; Cast 2007 Bronze with patina 22½ × 21 × 15 7∕8 in. 57.2 × 53.3 × 40.3 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 44. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche I [ Walking Man I ], 1960 Bronze with patina 71 1∕16 × 10 5 8 × 38 3 16 in. 180.5 × 27.0 × 97.0 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 45–46. Armless Figure in Silver II , 1960 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 65 × 14 × 21 in. 165.1 × 35.6 × 53.3 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 47–48. La Palestra No. 6, 1988 Plaster, water-based pigments 43 × 34 × 22 in. 109.2 × 86.4 × 55.9 cm

Photo:

33–35.300Exhibition catalogue, New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 36.1959Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 30–November 29, 1959

Gelatin-silver print 7½ × 9½ in. 19.1 × 24.1 cm

301 49–50. Male Figure I , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 37¼ × 10½ × 6¾ in. 94.6 × 26.7 × 17.1 cm 51–52. Female Figure I , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 38 × 11 × 6½ in. 96.5 × 27.9 × 16.5 cm 53. Kneeling Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 28½ × 18¼ × 20 in. 72.4 × 46.4 × 50.8 cm Private Collection 54–56. Shrouded Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 28 × 32 × 15 in. 71.1 × 81.3 × 38.1 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of Philip Anglim, B.A. 1973, 57.2017.86.1 Pastel Study for Window Series No. 11, 1959 Oil-based pigments, collage, mixed media on 13½paper× 10½ in. 34.3 × 26.7 cm Private Collection 58. Pastel Study for Window Series No. 7, 1959 Oil-based pigments, collage, mixed media on 13½paper× 10½ in. 34.3 × 26.7 cm Private Collection 59. Pastel Study for Window Series No. 14, 1959 Oil-based pigments, collage, mixed media on 13½paper× 10½ in. 34.3 × 26.7 cm 60. Window Series Sculpture I , 1968 Plaster, wood, mixed media 33 × 27 11 ∕16 × 21 1 8 in. 83.8 × 70.3 × 53.7 cm 61. No Hands Neri Sketchbook , Page 75 verso, Water-based1966 pigments, graphite on paper 10¾ × 13 7∕8 in. 27.3 × 35.2 cm 62. No Hands Neri Sketchbook , Page 83 verso, Water-based1966 pigments, mixed media on paper 10¾ × 13 7∕8 in. 27.3 × 35.2 cm 63. Geometric Sculpture I , 1966 Aluminum, oil-based pigments, wood armature 58½ × 29 × 16 1∕8 in. 148.6 × 73.7 × 41.0 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 64. Geometric Sculpture II , 1966 Aluminum, oil-based pigments, wood armature 61 × 42 × 23 in. 154.9 × 106.7 × 58.4 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 65. Architectural Forms–Tula Series V [Untitled Rectangles, 1969–71], 1969 Plaster, mixed media, wood armature 25¾ × 25¼ × 26 in. 65.4 × 64.1 × 66.0 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 66–67.2017.88.41Standing Armless Figure, 1974 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 64½ × 20½ × 20 in. 163.8 × 52.1 × 50.8 cm 68. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993 69. Babette Eddleston, Photographer Carrara Studio, 1977 70. Mary Julia Klimenko, Photographer View of Carrara Studio, 1983 71. Darren Cox, Photographer Etruscan Temple Ruins at the Fiesole Archaeological Area outside Florence, Italy, 2007

1976 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 52 × 17 × 38 in. 132.1 × 43.2 × 96.5 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 106–107.2017.88.35Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976 108–110. Sometimes We Forget [Mrs. C. I.] (Detail), 1976 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 66½ × 19½ × 14½ in. 168.9 × 49.5 × 36.8 cm Private Collection 111-113. Sometimes We Forget [Mrs. C. I.], 1976 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 66½ × 19½ × 14½ in. 168.9 × 49.5 × 36.8 cm Private Collection

72–75.302 Carla V, 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 67 × 22½ × 20 in. 170.2 × 57.2 × 50.8 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust CHAPTER 2 76. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Manuel Neri working with Mary Julia Klimenko, Benicia Studio, 1985 77. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1979 78–80. Seated Female Figure I , 1979 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 39 × 15 × 25 in. 99.1 × 38.1 × 63.5 cm Private Collection 81–83. Standing Figure No. 1, 1976; Re-worked 1979 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 66¼ × 20 × 14 in. 166.3 × 50.8 × 35.6 cm Private Collection 84–85. Posturing Series No. 2, 1978 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 31 × 21½ × 12 in. 78.7 × 54.6 × 30.5 cm Private Collection 86–87. Julia, 1976; Re-worked 2010 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 67 × 19½ × 13¾ in. 170.2 × 49.5 × 34.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 88.2017.88.34M.Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1992 89. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1980 90. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1995 91–94. Mary and Julia, 1979 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 52 × 44 × 34½ in. 132.1 × 111.8 × 87.6 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, Gift of Agnes Cowles

CHAPTERBourne 3 95. Steve Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1980 96. Standing Figure, 1972 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 61¼ × 20 × 17¼ in. 155.6 × 50.8 × 43.8 cm Private Collection 97. Photographer Unknown Neri with sculptures in process, San Jose State University Art Gallery, San Jose, California, 1974 98. Photographer Unknown Sculptures in process, San Jose State University Art Gallery, San Jose, California, 1974 99–103. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976 104–105. Re-making Mary Julia No. 6,

303 CHAPTER 4 114. Philip Galgiani, Photographer Sculptures in progress in the exhibition The Remaking of Mary Julia, 80 Langton Street, San Francisco, 1976 115. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche [ Walking Man], 1947 66Bronze7∕8× 7 7 8 × 20 7∕8 in. 170.0 × 20.0 × 53.0 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, Alberto Giacometti Stiftung, 1964 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo © 2014 Kunsthaus Zurich 116. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Piazza, 1947–48; Cast 1948–49 8¼Bronze×24 5∕8 × 16 7∕8 in. 21.0 × 62.5 × 42.8 cm The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 76.2553.135 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: David Heald / The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY 117–118. Mary Julia [Standing Figure V ], 1976 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 66 × 19 × 13 in. 167.6 × 48.3 × 33.0 cm Private Collection 119. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1948–50 30Bronze5∕8× 511 ∕16 × 7 11 16 in. 77.8 × 14.5 × 19.5 cm Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Adam Rzepka / © CAN/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 120–121. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme assise [Seated Woman], 1956; Cast 1981 20Bronze3∕16× 6 1∕8 × 9 5 ∕16 in. 51.3 × 15.6 × 23.7 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: J-P. Lagiewski/Courtesy Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti 122–123. Mary Julia Seated [Seated Female Figure No. 1], 1976 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 57¾ × 16 × 31 in. 146.7 × 40.6 × 78.7 cm Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 124. Alberto Giacometti sculptures on exhibit at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: allOver Images/Alamy Stock Photo 125–126. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme qui chavire [ The Man Who Capsizes] [Falling Man], 1950 23Bronze58× 8 5∕8 × 14 3 ∕16 in. 60.0 × 22.0 × 36.0 cm Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Mathieu Rabeau / © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY 127. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Grand femme [ Tall Woman], 1958 Painted plaster 74 1 8 × 11 5 ∕16 × 16 1∕8 in. 188.3 × 28.7 × 41.0 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 128–129. La Niña de la Piedra, 1978 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 65½ × 23¼ × 13¾ in. 166.4 × 59.1 × 34.9 cm Private 130–131.Collection Standing Male Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 70 × 13¼ × 19 in. 177.8 × 33.7 × 48.3 cm Private Collection

132.304 Acha de Noche II , 1975 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 19¼ × 62 × 26¼ in. 48.9 × 157.5 × 66.7 cm 133. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 61Bronze×20½ × 20½ in. 155.0 × 52.0 × 52.0 cm Uf zi, Florence; 0091774 Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: SCALA / Art Resource, New York 134. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1941 61Plaster13∕16× 22 1 16 × 22 7 ∕16 in. 157.0 × 56.0 × 57.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 135. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], , 1932–34 31Wood78× 12 3∕8 × 10 5 8 in. 81.0 × 31.5 × 27.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 136–137. Rosa Negra No. 1 (Cast AP), 1982; Cast Bronze,1998silver-nitrate patina 67 × 34¼ × 17¼ in. 107.2 × 87.0 × 44.0 cm Private Collection 138. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Torso di donna [Female Torso], 1929 23Plaster×18 5 ∕16 × 42 5 ∕16 in. 58.5 × 46.5 × 107.5 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini CHAPTER 5 139. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1979 140–141. Colonata No. 1, 1982 72Marble×16 × 22 in. 182.9 × 40.6 × 55.9 cm Private Collection 142. Pisano Marble Torso, 1985 34½Marble× 38½ × 20 in. 87.6 × 97.8 × 50.8 cm Private Collection 143–144. Bull Jumper III , 1987 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 30¼ × 21½ × 42 in. 76.8 × 54.6 × 106.7 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 145.2017.88.32 Bull Jumper II , 1987 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 19½ × 30 × 60½ in. 50.0 × 76.2 × 129.1 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa 146. Sancas I , 1991 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 47¼ × 19 × 19½ in. 120.0 × 48.3 × 49.5 cm 147–148. Sancas Plaster Maquette, 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 17 × 7 × 6½ in. 43.2 × 17.8 × 16.5 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust

305 149–150. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Popolo (La couple) [People (Couple)], 1929 Terracotta, unique 26 × 43 × 18½ in. 66.0 × 109.0 × 47.0 cm Museo del Novecento, Collection Marino Marini, Milan Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Luca Carrà / Bridgeman Images 151. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [Young Girl], 1938 61Plaster13∕16× 18 7∕8 × 14 9 16 in. 157.0 × 48.0 × 37.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 152. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Nudo femminile [Female Nude], 1932 63¾Plaster× 215 ∕16 × 20½ in. 162.0 × 55.0 × 52.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 153. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Giovinetta [ Young Girl ], 1938 53Plaster316× 17 5 ∕16 × 14 9 ∕16 in. 135.0 × 44.0 × 37.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 154. Figurine of a Concubine, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIIth Dynasty (1991–1786 BCE ) 4Bone7∕8in. high 12.4 cm high Musée du Louvre, Paris Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY 155. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme au chariot [ Woman with Chariot], 60Plaster,1943–45wood13∕16×12¾ × 13 7∕8 in. 154.5 × 32.4 × 35.3 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 156. Fertility Figure, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, XIth–XIIth Dynasty Clay, mixed media 7½ in. high 19.0 cm Aegyptischeshigh Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Photo: Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY 157. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 158–159. M.J. Series V, 1989 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 46 × 21½ × 31½ in. 116.8 × 54.6 × 80.0 cm Private Collection 160. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) La forêt [ The Forest], 1950 22Bronze7∕16× 24 × 18 5∕8 in. 57.0 × 61.0 × 47.3 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 161. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), AlbertoPhotographerGiacometti working with plaster, c. Art1960©Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 162. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini

165. Makiko Nakamura, Photographer Carrara Studio, 1983 166. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016),

DetailPhotographerinAlberto Giacometti’s studio: sideboard with sculptures, c. 1954 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

163.306Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 2003 164. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2004 CHAPTER 6

167. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016),

169. Chula [Carla I ], 1958–60 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 46 × 14 × 16½ in. 116.8 × 35.6 × 41.9 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California,

DetailPhotographerinAlberto Giacometti’s studio: wall with sculptures, c. 1954 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

Gift of Mary Heath 170.KeeslingM.Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1988 171–172. Standing Female Figure No. 4, 1978 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 64½ × 24½ × 14½ in. 163.9 × 62.2 × 36.8 cm Private 173–175.Collection Posturing Series No. 5, 1978 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 30 × 14 × 11½ in. 76.2 × 35.6 × 29.2 cm Private 176.CHAPTERCollection7Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1982 177. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), ViewPhotographerofAlberto Giacometti’s studio with un nished sculptures, c. 1962 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 178. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Femme debout (Poseur II) [Standing Woman], c. Painted1954 plaster 22 11 ∕16 x 4 5 ∕16 x 7 1 8 in. 57.6 x 11.0 x 18.0 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Courtesy of Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 179. Malcolm Park, Photographer Alberto Giacometti sculptures in retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, May 8, 2017 (Detail) Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Malcolm Park editorial/Alamy Live News 180. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona, 1945 65Plaster15∕16x 27¾ x 22¼ in. 167.5 x 70.5 x 56.5 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 181–183. La Palestra No. 5, 1988 Plaster, oil-based pigments, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 30 × 51 × 19¾ in. 76.2 × 129.5 × 50.2 cm Private Collection

168. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), AlbertoPhotographerGiacometti modelling, c. 1965 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich

307 184–185. Kneeling Figure, 1991 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 40¼ × 28 × 18¼ in. 102.2 × 71.1 × 46.4 cm Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2001.798 186–187. Annunciation No. 1, 1982 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 51½ × 23 × 21½ in. 130.8 × 58.4 × 54.6 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 188–189.2017.88.31Armless Figure III , 1970 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 61 × 26 × 30 in. 155.0 × 66.0 × 76.2 cm Private 190–191.Collection La Palestra No. 6 (Cast AP), 1988; Cast 2007; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 32 × 21 × 44 in. 81.3 × 53.3 × 111.8 cm University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 192–194. Prietas Series II (Cast 1/4), 1993; Painted 1994 Bronze, oil-based pigments 68½ × 17½ × 24 in. 174.0 × 44.5 × 61.0 cm Private Collection 195–197. On the Up No. 1, 1992 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 69½ × 19¼ × 16¼ in. 176.5 × 48.9 × 41.3 cm Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 198.CHAPTER2016.26.28M.LeeFatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1997 199. Caryatid I (Cast 1/4), 2008 Bronze, oil-based pigments 29 7∕8 × 6 7∕8 × 7 in. 75.9 × 17.5 × 17.8 cm Private 200–201.Collection Seated Figure Maquette, 2007 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 12¼ × 7¾ × 8½ in. 31.1 × 19.7 × 21.6 cm Private 202–203.Collection Torso (Cast AP), 1978 Bronze, oil-based pigments 26½ × 18¾ × 18 3∕8 in. 67.3 × 47.6 × 46.7 cm Private Collection 204. Seated Girl II (Bather), 1963 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 44 × 29½ × 23¼ in. 111.8 × 74.9 × 59.1 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Gift of Susie Schlesinger in gratitude to her father, Peter Schlesinger, 2011.62 205. Female Torso III [Untitled Torso III ], 1960 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 23½ × 13½ × 8 in. 59.7 × 34.3 × 20.3 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 206. Female Torso II [Untitled Torso II ], 1960 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 24 × 14 × 6 in. 61.0 × 35.6 × 15.2 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 207. Two Figures (Bather Series), 1964 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 49 × 17 × 18 in. (each gure) 124.5 × 43.2 × 45.7 cm Private Collection Photo: Courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York, and Cecilia Dan Fine Art, California

208.308 Seated Female Figure III , 1979 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 32½ × 37 × 30 in. 82.6 × 94.0 × 76.2 cm Private Collection 209. Seated Female Figure IV, 1979 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 33¾ × 28 × 21½ in. 85.7 × 71.1 × 54.6 cm The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, 210.California Blue Blond , 1979 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 34 × 18 × 25 in. 86.4 × 45.7 × 63.5 cm Private Collection 211. Seated Figure Study No. 28 , 1981 Water-based pigments, ink, graphite on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm 212. Seated Figure Study No. 31, 1981 Water-based pigments, ink, graphite on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm 213. Seated Figure Study No. 30, 1981 Water-based pigments, ink, graphite on paper 11 × 8½ in. 27.9 × 21.6 cm Bound in the artists’ book Tristezas/Songs of Sadness ; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri 214–215.TrustStanding Figure No. 3 (Cast AP-II), 1980; Painted 1992 Bronze, oil-based pigments 66 × 20 × 13½ in. 167.6 × 50.8 × 34.3 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 216–217. Isla Negra Series I (Cast AP), 1989; Cast 1993; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 18½ × 15 × 10 in. 47.0 × 38.1 × 25.4 cm 218. Catun No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1986; Cast 2003; Patina Bronze,2016oil-based pigments 67 × 19 × 24 in. 170.2 × 48.3 × 61.0 cm 219. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 1/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Bronze, oil-based pigments 315∕8 × 34 × 27 in. 80.3 × 86.4 × 68.6 cm Private Collection 220. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 4/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Bronze, oil-based pigments 315∕8 × 34 × 27 in. 80.3 × 86.4 × 68.6 cm Private Collection 221. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 2/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Bronze, oil-based pigments 315∕8 × 34 × 27 in. 80.3 × 86.4 × 68.6 cm Private Collection 222. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 3/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Bronze, oil-based pigments 315∕8 × 34 × 27 in. 80.3 × 86.4 × 68.6 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, The Twigg-Smith Collection, Gift of Thurston Twigg-Smith, B.E. 1942, 223–225.2001.148.64Annunciation No. 1 (Cast 3/4), 1982; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 46¾ × 22 × 24¼ in. 118.7 × 55.9 × 61.6 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2014.129.1

309 CHAPTER 9 226. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1985 227. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XI , 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 24½ × 17½ × 3 in. 62.2 × 44.5 × 7.6 cm 228. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 10], Charcoal,1987oil-based pigments, graphite on paper 14 × 10½ in. 35.6 × 26.7 cm Private Collection 229. Arcos de Geso [Carrara IV ], 1984 Pastel, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10 5∕8 in. 34.9 × 27.0 cm Private Collection 230. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IV, 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 24¼ × 16¼ × 3 in. 61.6 × 41.3 × 7.6 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 231.Connecticut Arcos de Geso Study No. 4 (Diptych), 1984 Oil-based pigments, charcoal, graphite on paper 13 5∕8 × 20 7∕8 in. 34.6 × 53.0 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 232. Arcos de Geso Study [Amal No. 4] (Diptych), 1984 Oil-based pigments, charcoal, ink on paper 17 × 24 in. 43.2 × 61.0 cm University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 233. Arcos de Geso II , 1985–89 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 78 × 57 × 16½ in. 198.1 × 144.8 × 41.9 cm Private Collection 234. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette V, 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 23¼ × 16½ × 5½ in. 59.1 × 41.9 × 14.0 cm 235. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast Bronze,1986oil-based pigments 70 × 56 × 10 in. 177.8 × 142.2 × 25.4 cm Private Collection 236. Arcos de Geso V, 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 72¾ × 57½ × 12¾ in. 184.8 × 146.1 × 32.4 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.88.44 237. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 70 × 56 × 10 in. 177.8 × 142.2 × 25.4 cm 238. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast AP), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 70 × 56 × 10 in. 177.8 × 142.2 × 25.4 cm Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2016.26.1 239. Omaha No. 5, 1986 Oil-based pigments, charcoal on paper 31 × 22 in. 78.7 × 55.9 cm Private Collection 240. Omaha No. 4, 1986 Water-based pigments, oil-based pigments, charcoal on paper 30 13 ∕16 × 22 in. 78.3 × 55.9 cm Private Collection 241. Omaha No. 1, 1986 Oil-based pigments, charcoal on paper 30¾ × 22 in. 78.1 × 55.9 cm Private Collection 242. Omaha No. 8 , 1986 Oil-based pigments, charcoal on paper 31¼ × 22 in. 79.4 × 55.9 cm Private Collection

1986; Cast 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 42¾ × 32¾ × 10¾ in. 108.6 × 83.2 × 27.3 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 255. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 43¼ × 34¼ × 10¾ in. 109.9 × 87.0 × 27.3 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa 256. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 6 (Cast 2/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 42½ × 32½ × 10½ in. 108.0 × 82.6 × 26.7 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 257. Relief Study No. 15, 1983 Charcoal, ink, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in. 34.9 × 27.3 cm Private Collection 258. Mujer Pegada Study [Gustavo No. 11], 1985 Charcoal, oil-based pigments, graphite on paper 13 5∕8 × 10 5 8 in. 34.6 × 27.0 cm

246. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XII , 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 23¼ × 16½ × 5½ in. 59.1 × 41.9 × 14.0 cm Collection

Private

243.310 Omaha No. 3, 1986 Oil-based pigments, charcoal on paper 31¼ × 22 in. 79.4 × 55.9 cm Private Collection 244. Pisano No. 48 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Oil-based pigments, charcoal, pastel, graphite on 16½paper×12 1∕8 in. 41.9 × 30.8 cm Private Collection 245. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 11], Charcoal,1987oil-based pigments, graphite on paper 14 × 10½ in. 35.6 × 26.7 cm Private Collection

248. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette VII , 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 22¾ × 16 × 4½ in. 57.8 × 40.6 × 11.4 cm 249. Ree Schonlau, Photographer Bemis Project, Omaha, Nebraska, 1986 250. Maha – Ceramic Relief I , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Fired clay, slip glaze 48 × 36 × 12 in. 121.9 × 91.4 × 30.5 cm Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 251. Maha – Ceramic Relief II , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Fired clay, slip glaze 48 × 36 × 12 in. 121.9 × 91.4 × 30.5 cm Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 252. Maha – Ceramic Relief III , 1986; Re-worked 2010 Fired clay, slip glaze 48 × 36 × 12 in. 121.9 × 91.4 × 30.5 cm Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 253. Maha – Ceramic Relief IV, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Fired clay, slip glaze 48 × 36 × 12 in. 121.9 × 91.4 × 30.5 cm Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 254. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 1 (Cast 2/4),

247. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette X , 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wire armature 23¼ × 16½ × 5½ in. 59.1 × 41.9 × 14.0 cm Private Collection

259.

34.9 × 27.3 cm Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude ; Private Collection 266. Arcos de Geso X , 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 79 × 56½ × 17½ in. 200.7 × 143.5 × 44.5 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 267.2017.88.37 Relief Study No. 1, 1983 Ink, charcoal, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in. 34.9 × 27.3 cm Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude ; Private Collection 268. Buddha No. 8 , 1984 Water-based pigments, pastel, graphite on 13¾paper×10 5∕8 in. 34.9 × 27.0 cm Private Collection 269. Mary Julia, 1973 Water-based pigments, charcoal, graphite on 41¾paper×30 5 ∕16 in. 106.0 × 76.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.88.55 270. Emborados Series XV (Diptych), 1976 Water-based pigments, mixed media on paper 41 × 59 ½ in. 104.1 × 151.1 cm Private Collection 271. Mary Julia – Side I , 2001 Water-based pigments, charcoal on paper 44 7∕8 × 237∕8 in. 114.0 × 60.6 cm 272. Arcos de Geso VII , 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 79 x 57 × 14¾ in. 200.7 × 144.8 x 37.5 cm Private Collection 273. Relief Study No. 11, 1983 Charcoal, ink, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in. 34.9 × 27.3 cm 274. Relief Study No. 12, 1983 Charcoal, ink, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in. 34.9 × 27.3 cm 275–276. Mujer Pegada Series No. 3 (Cast 2/4), 1985; Cast 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 77¾ × 55 × 12½ in. 197.5 × 139.7 × 31.8 cm Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift by Manuel Neri in recognition of Curator Hilarie Faberman’s support of California artists, 2011.69

44.5

311 Maha Study – Carrara I , 1984 Water-based pigments, oil-based pigments, charcoal, pastel on paper 30 1∕8 × 22 1∕8 in. 76.5 × 56.2 cm Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 260–261. Mujer Pegada Series No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast 2005 Bronze, oil-based pigments 84½ × 54½ × 15¼ in. 214.6 × 138.4 × 38.7 cm 262. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XIII , Plaster,1984–85mixed media 24½ × 17½ × 3 in. 62.2 × × 7.6 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 263. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Isla Negra Study No. 9], 1987 Charcoal, water-based pigments, graphite on paper 14 × 10½ in. 35.6 × 26.7 cm Private Collection 264. Arcos de Geso (Diptych)(Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Bronze, oil-based pigments 79 × 110½ × 13½ in. 200.7 × 280.7 × 34.3 cm 265. Relief Study No. 3, 1983 Ink, charcoal, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in.

28 1∕8 × 10 × 4 in. 71.4 × 25.4 × 10.2

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VI mixed media, wire armature cm University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust,

292.2017.88.8

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VIII mixed media, wire armature cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust,

, 1983 Plaster,

28 1∕8× 10 × 2 7∕8 in. 71.4 × 25.4 × 7.3

2017.88.10

293.2017.88.9

, 1983 Plaster,

22 × 6¾ × 2½ in. 55.9 × 17.2 × 6.4 cm

Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VII mixed media, wire armature Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust,

Yale

277.312 Mary Julia, 1999 Water-based pigments, charcoal on paper 40 7∕8 × 24¼ in. 103.8 × 61.6 cm 278. Arcos de Geso [Pisano No. 53], 1982; Re-worked 1984 Pastel, graphite on paper 16½ × 12 1∕8 in. 41.9 × 30.8 cm 279. Arcos de Geso III (Detail), 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 78¾ × 56 × 14½ in. 200.0 × 142.2 × 36.8 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 280. Recuerdo Benicia No. 8 , 1993 Water-based pigments, charcoal on paper 40¾ × 26 in. 103.5 × 66.0 cm Private Collection 281. Arcos de Geso I (Diptych), 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 80 × 114 × 12½ in. 203.2 × 289.6 × 31.8 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 282. Arcos de Geso Study [Rock No. 48], 1984 Water-based pigments, charcoal, graphite on 10½paper×13 5 8 in. 26.7 × 34.6 cm 283. Arcos de Geso Study [Rock No. 47 ], 1984 Water-based pigments, graphite on paper 10½ × 13 5∕8 in. 26.7 × 34.6 cm 284–286. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1988 287. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief I , 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 28 × 9½ × 3½ in. 71.1 × 24.1 × 8.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 288.2017.88.11 Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief II , 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 23 7 8 × 7¼ × 3 in. 60.6 × 18.4 × 7.6 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 289.2017.88.12 Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief III , 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 28 × 10 1 ∕16 × 3½ in. 71.1 × 25.6 × 8.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.88.13 290. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief V, 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 28 1∕8 × 10¼ × 3½ in. 71.4 × 26.0 × 8.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 291.2017.88.7

313 294. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IX , 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 22 1∕8 × 6¾ × 2½ in. 56.2 × 17.2 × 6.4 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 295.2017.88.6Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IV, 1983 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 26 7 8 × 10 1 8 × 3½ in. 68.3 × 25.7 × 8.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 296.2017.88.14 Mujer Pegada No. 4, 1985 68¾Marble× 22½ × 11 in. 174.6 × 57.2 × 27.9 cm San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, California 297. Mujer Pegada No. 8 , 1985; Re-worked 2012 Marble, oil-based pigments 82 × 35 1∕8 × 12½ in. 208.3 × 89.2 × 31.8 cm Private Collection 298. Mujer Pegada No. 7, 1996 Marble, oil-based pigments 74 13∕8 × 25½ × 11 in. 188.9 × 64.8 × 27.9 cm Private Collection 299. Maha – Ceramic Maquette I , 1986 Fired clay, slip glaze 20¼ × 15½ × 4 in. 51.4 × 39.4 × 10.2 cm Private Collection 300. Relief Study No. 9, 1983 Ink, charcoal, graphite on paper 13¾ × 10¾ in. 34.9 × 27.3 cm 301. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IX , 1984 Plaster, mixed media, wire armature 24½ × 17¼ × 3¼ in. 62.2 × 43.8 × 8.3 cm 302. Carrara No. 5, 1984 Water-based pigments, pastel, graphite on 13¾paper×10 5∕8 in. 34.9 × 27.0 cm 303. Carrara No. 6, 1984 Water-based pigments, pastel, graphite on 13¾paper×10 5∕8 in. 34.9 × 27.0 cm Private Collection 304. Pisano No. 17 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Oil-based pigments, pastel, charcoal, graphite on paper 16½ × 12 1 8 in. 41.9 × 30.8 cm Private Collection 305. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006 306–307. Standing Figure I , 1982 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 69 × 18 × 20½ in. 175.3 × 45.7 × 52.1 cm 308–309. Standing Figure No. 6, 1978 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 65½ × 19¾ × 15½ in. 166.4 × 50.2 × 39.4 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 310–311. Arcos de Geso XI , 1985 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 87 × 57 × 15½ in. 221.0 × 144.8 × 39.4 cm University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 312. Mary Julia Standing VII , 2009 Charcoal, water-based pigments on paper 40 × 26¼ in. 101.6 × 66.7 cm

CHAPTER314 10 313. Joanne Leonard, Photographer Benicia studio, 1972 314. Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957 ) Muse endormie I [Sleeping Muse I ], 1909–10 6¾Marble×10 7 8 × 8 3∕8 in. 17.2 × 27.6 × 21.2 cm Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris Photo: Cathy Carver/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution 315. Makiko IV, 1980 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 15 × 10½ × 10 in. 38.1 × 26.7 × 25.4 cm 316. Portrait Series I , 1959 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 32 × 16 × 16 in. 81.3 × 40.6 × 40.6 cm Private 317–318.Collection Mi China, 1969; Re-worked 1974 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 28 × 14½ × 13 in. 71.1 × 36.8 × 33.0 cm Private Collection 319–321. Dr. Zonk , 1958 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 22 × 10¼ × 10¼ in. 55.9 × 26.0 × 26.0 cm Private 322–323.Collection Head of Joan Brown, 1959 Plaster, graphite, mixed media, wood armature 16 × 7 × 8 in. 40.6 × 17.8 × 20.3 cm Private Collection 324. David Park (1911–1960) Couple, Oil-based1959paints on canvas 26 × 48 in. 66.0 × 121.9 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Partial gift of the Morgan Flagg Family Foundation, 1995.21.6 © The Estate of David Park, Courtesy of Hackett Mill, representative of the Estate of David Park 325. Plaster Mask I , 1960 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 9 7∕8 × 6¼ × 5 5∕8 in. 25.1 × 15.9 × 14.3 cm Private Collection 326. Plaster Mask III , 1960 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 9 × 6 × 4 in. 22.9 × 15.2 × 10.2 cm Private Collection 327. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Head of Father (Mask ), c. 1927–29 5Plaster78×4 1 8 × 1 3∕8 in. 15.0 × 10.5 × 3.7 cm Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Bridgeman Images 328. Untitled Male Head , 1958 Plaster, graphite, mixed media 14 5∕8 × 10¾ × 6½ in. 37.1 × 27.3 × 16.5 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, Gift of Robert B. 329–330.HowardMale Head No. 4, 1969; Re-worked 1974 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 29 × 24 × 20 in. 73.7 × 61.0 × 50.8 cm Private 331–332.Collection Markos , 1958; Re-worked 1963 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 29 × 18 × 9½ in. 73.7 × 45.7 × 24.1 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Gift from the Thiebaud family, 1993.99.2

315 333. Head of Markos , 1963 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 111 8 × 6½ × 8¾ in. 28.3 × 16.5 × 22.2 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 334.2017.88.3Mary Julia Head (Cast 2/4), 1980; Re-worked 1994 Bronze, oil-based pigments 18½ × 8½ × 9½ in. 47.0 × 21.6 × 24.1 cm Private Collection 335. Mary Julia’s Head II – Cast Paper (Black ) and Mary Julia’s Head I – Cast Paper ( White), Cast1975 paper Each 9 × 6 × 4½ in. Each 22.9 × 15.2 × 11.4 cm 336. Mary Julia Head I , 1974 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, wood armature 28 × 16 × 17 in. 71.1 × 40.6 × 43.2 cm Private 337–338.Collection Untitled Head IV, 1976 Plaster, oil-based pigments, mixed media 10 × 8 × 11 in. 25.4 20.3 × 27.9 cm Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 2017.88.5 339. Makiko I , 1980 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 16¾ × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 340. Makiko Drawing I , 1980 Charcoal, water-based pigments on paper 39 × 29¼ in. 99.1 × 74.3 cm Private 341–342.Collection Makiko I , 1980 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 16¾ × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust 343. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Marina, 1940 10Bronze3∕8× 7 3 8 × 7½ in. 26.3 × 18.3 × 19.0 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 344. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Marina, 1940 10¾Plaster× 7 3∕8 × 7 3∕8 in. 27.3 × 18.7 × 18.8 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 345. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Ritratto di America Vitale [Portrait of America Vitale], 1938 11Plastert9∕16× 6 11 16 × 8 9 ∕16 in. 29.4 × 17.0 × 21.8 cm Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia Art © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome Photo: Courtesy of Fondazione Marino Marini 346–347. Makiko II , 1980 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 10¾ × 10½ × 9½ in. 27.3 × 26.7 × 24.1 cm Private Collection 348. Makiko III , 1980 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media 15 × 13 × 10 in. 38.1 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm 349. Makiko No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Bronze, oil-based pigments 15½ × 11½ × 9½ in. 39.4 × 29.2 × 24.1 cm Private Collection 350. Makiko No. 2 (Cast 2/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Bronze, oil-based pigments 15½ × 11½ × 9½ in. 39.4 × 29.2 × 24.1 cm di Rosa Collection, Napa, California

28.6

23.5

61.6

22 in. 61.0

41.3 × 56.5

24¼

Private

363.

IV (Cast 4/4), 1980; Cast 2012; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 16¾ × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm 366–367. Makiko II (Cast AP-I), 1980; Cast 2014; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 16¾ × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm 368–369. Makiko I (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast Bronze,2008oil-based pigments 16¾ × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm Private Collection 370. Mary Julia Klimenko, Photographer Benicia studio, 1995 371. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio 372. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993 CHAPTER 11 373. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1983 374–376. Prietas Series VI , 1993 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 68½ × 19½ × 13 in. 174.0 × 49.5 × 33.0 cm Private 377–379.Collection Kneeling Figure, 1991 (Cast 1/4), 1991 Bronze, oil-based pigments 40 × 18 × 25 in. 101.6 × 45.7 × 63.5 cm Private Collection 380. George Segal (1924–2000) Walk, Don’t Walk , (1976) Plaster, cement, metal, painted wood, electrical light 109 1 8 × 72 × 74 3∕8 in. 277.2 × 182.9 × 188.9 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Seymour M. Klein, President, the Gilman Foundation, Inc., the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. and the National Endowment for the Arts, 79.4a-f Art © The George and Helen Segal Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

15¼

351–352.316Makiko No. 3 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Bronze, oil-based pigments × 11¼ × 9¼ in. × × cm 353–354.Collection Makiko No. 4 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Bronze, oil-based pigments × 11¼ × 9¼ in. 38.7 × × cm 355–357.Collection Makida III , 1997 Marble, oil-based pigments × × × × cm Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, California, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust, 358–359.2017.2.02Makida II , 1994; Re-worked 1997 Marble, oil-based pigments × 16¼ × 22¼ in. × × cm 360–362.Collection Makida I , 1994; Re-worked 1997 Marble, oil-based pigments × 16¼ × 22¼ in. × cm Collection Makiko I (Cast 2/4), 1980; Cast 2008 Bronze, oil-based pigments × 13 × 10 in. 42.5 × 33.0 × 25.4 cm Private 364–365.Collection Makiko

23.5

Private

40.6

41.3

56.5

24¼

15¼

Anderson

16¾

38.7

55.9

Photo: J-P. Lagiewski/Courtesy Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Walking Quickly Under the Rain, 1949 18¾Bronze× 30 × 6 in. 45.2 × 76.2 × 15.2 cm Museum of Modern Art, NY © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos 386. Inge Morath (1923–2002), Photographer Studio of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, Art1958© Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY © The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum Photos 387. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) L’Homme au doigt [Man Pointing ], 1947 70½Bronze× 40¾ × 16 3 8 in. 179.0 × 103.4 × 41.5 cm

New York, Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 385. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), SwissPhotographersculptor Alberto Giacometti in his studio, 1945–46. Paris. The 14th arrondissement. Rue Hippolyte Maindron. Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York,

Photo:

383.

Art

Fondation

382.

Art

Photo:

Each

Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 391. Rene Burri (1933–2014), Photographer Rue Hippolyte Maindron. The studio of Alberto Giacometti, Swiss painter and sculptor © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

Photo © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos 392. Julia (Cast 1/4), 1976; Cast 1998 Bronze, oil-based pigments 66 × 18¾ × 13¾ in. 167.6 × 47.6 × 34.9 cm Collection

Private

317 Duane Hanson (1925–1996) Rita the Waitress , 1975 Polyester resin, berglass, polychromed in oil, mixed media, and accessories × 26 × 22 in. × 66.0 × 55.9 cm © Estate of Duane Hanson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Tom Powel Imaging, New York/Courtesy of Van de Weghe, New York John DeAndrea (b. 1941) Three Versions of Ariel [Ariel I, Ariel II, Ariel III ], Bronze,2011 oil-based pigments approx. 64 in. high Each approx. 162.6 cm © John DeAndrea Courtesy of Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Simone de Beauvoir, 1946 Painted plaster × 19 ∕16 × 15 ∕8 in. 13.9 × 4.0 × 4.1 cm Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

381.

Art

5½

388. Gordon Parks (1912–2006), Photographer Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) surrounded by sculptures in his studio, 1952 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

168.0

Photo: Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images 389. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), AlbertoPhotographerGiacometti painting in his Paris studio; in the foreground is La Grande Tête, c. 1960 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

The

384.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 390. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), AlbertoPhotographerGiacometti with two sculptures, 1954 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY

Art

393–394.318Carrara Figure No. 1, 1979–80 Marble, oil-based pigments 68 × 23 × 14 in. 172.7 × 58.4 × 35.6 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, Gift of the Hamilton-Wells Collection 395–396. Carriona Figure No. 1, 1981 Marble, oil-based pigments 66½ × 18½ × 18¼ in. 168.9 × 47.0 × 46.4 cm Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California, promised gift of Thomas J. Davis and Shirley Ross Sullivan, L.37.1.2004 397–398. Etrusca, 1989 70½Marble× 21 × 12½ in. 179.1 × 53.3 × 31.8 cm Private 399–401.CollectionRe-making Mary Julia No. 1 (Cast AP), 1976; Cast 2006; Painted 2008 Bronze, oil-based pigments 64 × 21 × 13 in. 162.6 × 53.3 × 33.0 cm 402–403. Standing Figure No. 4 (Cast AP), 1980; Cast 1982 Bronze, oil-based pigments 69½ × 22½ × 13¾ in. 176.5 × 57.2 × 34.9 cm Private Collection CHAPTER 12 404. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1992 405–407. Carriona Figure No. 2, 1981 Marble, oil-based pigments 58 × 16 × 12 in. 147.3 × 40.6 × 30.5 cm Harold Washington Library, Chicago, Illinois 408–410. M.J. Series II (Cast 2/4), 1989; Cast 1990; Patina 2016 Bronze, oil-based pigments 68½ × 20½ × 14 in. 174.0 × 52.1 × 35.6 cm 411–412. Cipolina No. 1, 1983 72¼Marble× 23 × 23¼ in. 183.5 × 58.4 × 59.1 cm Private Collection 413. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), ViewPhotographerofAlberto Giacometti’s working desk, detail, c. 1952 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 414. Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), ViewPhotographerofAlberto Giacometti’s studio with sculptures, Paris, c. 1955 Art © Giacometti Estate/Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2017 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zurich 415–416. Carrara Figure No. 3, 1979–80 39¾Marble× 15½ × 25 in. 101.0 × 39.4 × 63.5 cm Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii 417. Carriona Figure No. 3, 1981 Marble, oil-based pigments 67 × 14 × 14 in. 170.2 × 35.6 × 35.6 cm Private 418–419.Collection Aurelia No. 3, 1995 77¾Marble× 21¾ × 23 in. 197.5 × 55.2 × 58.4 cm Private 420–421.Collection Aurelia No. 2, 1992; Re-worked 1998 Marble, oil-based pigments 62 × 21 × 18½ in. 157.5 × 53.3 × 47.0 cm Private 422–423.CollectionRe-making Mary Julia No. 8 , 1976 Plaster, mixed media, steel armature 65¼ × 23 × 14¼ in. 165.7 × 58.4 × 36.2 cm Private Collection 424. Annunciation No. 2 [Penance No. 3 ], 1982; Re-worked 1984 Plaster, water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 49 × 16 × 25 in. 124.5 × 40.6 × 63.5 cm Private Collection

319 425. Escalieta, 1989 80Marble×22 × 25½ in. 203.2 × 55.9 × 64.8 cm Private Collection 426. Odalisque I , 1989 12Marble×57 × 26 in. 30.5 × 144.8 × 66.0 cm 427. Escalieta, 1989 80Marble×22 × 25½ in. 203.2 × 55.9 × 64.8 cm Private Collection 428. Escalieta No. 2, 1988 Marble, oil-based pigments 75¾ × 20 × 17 in. 192.4 × 50.8 × 43.2 cm Private Collection 429. Odalisque IV, 1994 19¾Marble× 60¼ × 48 in. 50.2 × 153.0 × 121.9 cm Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan 430. Seated Marble Figure [Mujer Pegada No. 5], 1985 38½Marble× 20½ × 39 in. 97.8 × 52.1 × 99.1 cm Private Collection 431. Escalieta No. 2, 1988 Marble, oil-based pigments 75¾ × 20 × 17 in. 192.4 × 50.8 × 43.2 cm Private 432–433.Collection Bardilia No. 3, 1983 62½Marble× 18 × 16 in. 158.8 × 45.7 × 40.6 cm Private Collection 434. Escalieta No. 4, 1987 70Marble×21 × 19 in. 177.8 × 53.3 × 48.3 cm Private Collection Pages 250, 275, 323 M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, (2017See pages 252–257 for a list of works in the exhibition Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure) Page 258 M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1983 Page Photographer260 Unknown Carrara Studio, 1982 Page 276 Leo Holub (1916–2010), Photographer Manuel Neri, Benicia 1984 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California; Given in honor of Leo Holub by Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, 2007.31.115 © The Estate of Leo Holub Page Joanne290Leonard, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1972 Page Steve294Moore, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1980 Page Photographer320 Unknown Carrara Studio, 1995

A PUBLICATION OF SUCH SCALE AND COMPLEXITY requires the coordinated efforts and support of many people. The Anderson Collection at Stanford University gratefully acknowledges the support and contributions of: Manuel Neri and his many friends and relatives for their enthusiastic support of this publication and exhibition project. We are especially grateful to Max Neri and Anne Kohs, Trustees of The Manuel Neri Trust.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alexander Nemerov, Thoma Provostial Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, for his thoughtful Introductory text written for this publication, and to art writer and independent scholar, Bruce Nixon, whose extended essay places Manuel Neri’s work and ideas within a revelatory historical and contemporary context; Sydney S. Simon, PhD Candidate in Art History at Stanford University for writing exhibition text; and Jodi Roberts, PhD, Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Cantor Arts Center for making an introduction to Stanford University Press. Alex Harvey, Director, Kate Wahl, Publishing Director and Editor-in-Chief, and Leah Pennywark, PhD, Assistant Editor, Stanford University Press, for their guidance through the publication protocols, and their enthusiastic support for this project.

321

Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1995

Text editing and compiling information for the list of illustrations, captions, and the artist’s biography, bibliography, and collections was skillfully handled by Diane Roby. Final copy editing was done by Pam Rino Evans and Jean MacDougall.

For their help and guidance in the overall project and related activities: George Neubert, Director, Flatwater Art Foundation, Brownville, NE; Bruce Guenther, Independent Curator and Arts Advisor, Portland, OR; Roberto G. Trujillo, Head, Department of Special Collections at Stanford University Libraries; Rachel Teagle, Founding Director of the Manetti Shrem Museum, University of California, Davis; and Timothy Anglin Burgard, Ednah Root Curator of American Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

322 For photography, special thanks are due to M. Lee Fatherree who has been Manuel Neri’s photographer for over thirty years, and who also photographed the Anderson Collection at Stanford University building. Harrison Truong who photographed the installation of the Neri plaster in the galleries, including photographs of Hunk and Moo Anderson; Johnna Arnold who provided installation photographs of the galleries at the Anderson Collection. Also, Babette Eddleston, Makiko Nakamura, and Mary Julia Klimenko, who provided the photographs of Neri’s Carrara studio. James Mitchell, who photographed Neri’s Connecticut Street studio in 1959; Joanne Leonard, who photographed Neri’s studio in 1972; Steve Moore, who photographed the Benicia studio in 1976 and 1980; Philip Galgiani, who documented the 1976 work-in-progress installation by Neri, The Remaking of Mary Julia, organized by Jock Reynolds at 80 Langton Street in San Francisco; and Ree Schonlau, who photographed Neri at The Bemis Project, Omaha in 1986. The coordination of the photog raphy and digital images for this publication was handled by Pam RinoForEvans.their assistance in procuring photography and permission to reproduce images: Eléna Martin and Émilie Le Mappian, Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris; Jennifer Belt and Ken Johnston at Art Resource, New York; Michael Shulman, Magnum Photos; Larissa Rubic, VAGA; Addie Warner and Pablo Navarro MacLochlainn, Bridgeman Images; Anna Brinkmann, Scheidegger Archive, Zurich; Todd Leibowitz and J’Aimee Cronin, Artists’ Rights Society, New York; Anita Duquette and Annie Bartholomew, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Julia Murphy and Jenna Shaw, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Eva Rivlin, George Adams Gallery, New York; Christophe Van de Weghe and Jenn Viola, Van de Weghe, Ltd., New York; Frank Bernarducci, Bernarducci Meisel Gallery, New York; John and Lorraine DeAndrea; Cecile Brunner, Kunsthaus, Zurich; Maria Grazia Conti, Museo del Novecento, Milan; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan; David Oester, Kunstmuseum Bern; Maria Teresa Tosi, Director and Francesco Burchielli, Curator, Fondazione Marino Marini, Pistoia, Italy; Carla Verri;Tess Fleming, Ennead Architects LLP; Jennifer Lynn Daly, Assisstant Registrar, Image Rights & Digitization, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; Jean MacDougall, Senior Registrar, Anderson Collection at Stanford University; Sheetal Varma, Hackett Mill, San Francisco. Securing images and licensing was handled by Diane Roby, Anne Kohs & Associates, Inc.

It is through the generous support of Hackett Mill that the Anderson Collection has been able to include several bronzes by Manuel Neri in an outdoor installation as an adjunct to the exhibition Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure with the assistance of Michael Hackett, Francis Mill, Jessica Phillips, Sheetal Varma, John Obrecht, and Ben Cressy. Conservation of Manuel Neri’s artwork was done by Mikhail Ovchinnikov, Oakland, CA. Initial delivery of the Neri artwork to the Anderson Collection was coordinated by Lawrence Fine Arts Services, South San Francisco, CA; with the outdoor sculpture installation by Atthowe Fine Art Services, Oakland, CA. Additional support for the exhibition has

I would like to express my appreciation for those directly involved in the creation of this publication: John Hubbard (EMKS, Finland) who designed the layout that documents Manuel Neri’s work as a sculptor and presents a more complete view of his ideas and working methods; Gary Hawkey, John Bailey, Stephanie Lock, and staff at iocolor, LLP, Seattle for their expert color man agement and coordination of catalogue production; and for the professional, high-quality printing and binding of this publication by Artron Color Printing Company, China.

323 been provided by Dennis Yares, Manuel Garcia, and Nicolas Graille, Yares Art/New York, NY, Santa Fe, NM, and Palm Springs, CA.

Finally, I’d like to express gratitude to everyone who makes possible the wonderful exhibitions at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson and Mary Margaret “Moo” Anderson, and Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence. The Anderson Art Collection Staff: Michelle Jones, Karen Saracino, Keith Southern, and Joe Tehar. The Of ce of the Vice President for the Arts at Stanford University, especially Harry Elam, Vice President for the Arts; Matthew Tiews, Associate Vice President for the Arts; and Mimi Wai, Senior Director of Finance and Administration. The Anderson Collection at Stanford University Staff: Randy Bricco, Preparator; Devin Garnick, Finance Administrator; Virginia Girard, Registration Intern; Ferdinand Luis, Director of Facilities and Operations; Jean MacDougall, Senior Registrar; Darryl Marshall, Director of Security; Indya McGuf n, Marketing Intern; Inesh Nand, Security Manager; Betty Noguchi, Programs and Events Coordinator; Aimee Shapiro, Director of Programming and Engagement; Celeste Scholz, Visitor Services Coordinator; as well as the security staff and enthusiastic volun teers who are always willing to lend their support to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Jason Linetzky, Director Anderson Collection at Stanford University

Stanfordandanderson.stanford.eduUniversityPress,

Copyright for this publication is held by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, 2017. All rights

First published in 2017 by Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford University, Stanford, CA Stanford, CA

The Anderson Collection has organized this exhibition in celebration of an extraordinary gift of art from The Manuel Neri Trust. Additional works included in the exhibition are on loan from the Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson., The Manuel Neri Trust, and Hackett Mill, San Francisco. The Anderson Collection gratefully acknowledges support of the exhibition from Museum Members and the accompanying publication from The Manuel Neri Trust.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure, Gifts from the Manuel Neri Trust presented by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, September 14, 2017 — February 12, 2018.

Copyright of artwork by Manuel Neri is held by The Manuel Neri Trust. Text copyrights published in the catalogue are held by their respective authors. Photography copyrights are held by their respective photographers or agencies. Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by M. Lee Fatherree Photography, Oakland, CA. No parts of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

MANUELreserved. NERI

Manuel Neri’s work is represented by Hackett Mill, San Francisco; Robischon Gallery, Denver; and Yares Art, New York, Palm Springs, and Santa Fe.

Cataloguing-in-Publicationsup.org Data is available at the Library of CatalogueISBNCongress978-1-5036-0548-0concept,research, and project coordination by Anne Kohs & Associates, Inc., Portola Valley, California. Designedartistsforum.combyJohn Hubbard / EMKS, Finland Typeset in Gill Sans Standard Light by EMKS, Finland Color and print management by iocolor, LLP, Seattle, Washington Printed and bound by Artron Color Printing Company, China COVER, FRONT AND BACK Arcos de Geso I (Diptych), Plaster,1985 water-based pigments, mixed media, steel armature 80 × 114 × 12½ in. 203.2 × 289.6 × 31.8 cm Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, Gift of The Manuel Neri Trust FLY SHEET Arcos de Geso [La Figura/ Isla Negra Study No. 9], 1987 Charcoal, water-based pigments, graphite on paper 14 × 10½ in. 35.6 × 26.7 cm Private Collection

MANUEL NERI and the Assertion of Modern Figurative Sculpture

Articles inside

COLOPHON

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BIOGRAPHY

10 HEADS: MOTIFS FROM THE GREAT FIGURATIVE TRADITION

AN ALTERNATE HISTORY

11 A TALISMAN OF CONFRONTATION AND EXCHANGE 12 THE EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE OF MODERNISM /

9 THE FIGURE IN RELIEF

ARTIST RATHER THAN FIGURAL REALISM

7 AUTHENTICITY OF EXPERIENCE 8 IDIOMATIC COLOR / A REQUIREMENT OF THE

5 THE SPIRITUAL TERRAIN OF MODERNITY

6 STRANGENESS THAT COEXISTS WITH THE FAMILIAR

2 SECOND SELVES

4 UNEQUIVOCALLY MODERN

3 PLASTER / A FUNCTIONAL METAPHOR

1 CIRCUMSTANTIAL TESTIMONY AND CATEGORIES

MANUEL NERI & THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE