1 CIRCUMSTANTIAL TESTIMONY AND CATEGORIES

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CIRCUMSTANTIAL TESTIMONY AND CATEGORIES

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.

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

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

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7. The Bathers, 1958 Private Collection

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 8. Chanel, 1958; Re-worked 1964 Private Collection

9. Hombre Colorado, 1958 Private Collection

10. Standing Figure with Red Arm, 1958 Private Collection

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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.

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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 possibilities 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, 1958–60

BELOW 13. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Head of Woman (Flora Mayo), 1926 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris

14. Seated Female Figure, 1961 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 15. 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

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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.

LEFT/RIGHT 18. Untitled (Bird), 1957–60 Private Collection

19. Hawk, 1957–60 Private Collection

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20–21. Beach Figure, 1958 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 22–23. Armless Figure, 1959 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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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, contemporary 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.

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LEFT/RIGHT 24. Alberto 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

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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

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28–29. Seated Female Figure with Leg Raised, 1959 Private Collection

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 30. Alberto Giacometti (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

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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 suggestive 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 naturalistic 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,

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dominated by abstraction and its advocates, would remain inhospitable to guration 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. It is a journey in which Neri participates, and one in which he must be included.

In essence, 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.

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 selection was provocative by design, a deliberate intervention that proposed itself as an alternative to the hegemony of painterly abstraction, or an antidote. In an

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

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36–37. Soichi Sunami, Photographer Installation view of the exhibition New Images of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 30–November 29, 1959

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.”

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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

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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 regressive, 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

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42. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Pomona [Reclining Pomona], 1935 Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 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 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 44. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Homme qui marche I [Walking Man I], 1960 Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, Paris 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 sculptural 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

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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 meaning, 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.

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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 reference. 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 immediate 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

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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

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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

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53. Kneeling Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 54–56. Shrouded Figure, 1960; Re-worked 1964 Yale University Art Gallery

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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.

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ABOVE, LEFT/RIGHT 57. 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

BELOW 60. Window Series Sculpture I, 1968

OPPOSITE ABOVE, LEFT/RIGHT 61. 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

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65. Architectural Forms–Tula Series V [Untitled Rectangles, 1969–71], 1969 Yale University Art Gallery

OPPOSITE 66–67. Standing Armless Figure, 1974

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.

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68. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993

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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 sculpture 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.

LEFT/RIGHT 69. Babette Eddleston, Photographer Carrara Studio, 1977

70. Mary Julia Klimenko, Photographer View of Carrara Studio, 1983

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

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72–75. Carla V, 1964 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

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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 burgeoning, 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.

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