MANUEL NERI & THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE

MANUEL NERI &

THE ASSERTION OF MODERN FIGURATIVE SCULPTURE

BRUCE NIXON

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 prominent 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.

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

M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006

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

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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. 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.

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.

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 modernism. 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 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 abstraction 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 cultural present.

These 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 generation 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 commonalities 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

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

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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.

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 is here.

We 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.

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

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