10 HEADS: MOTIFS FROM THE GREAT FIGURATIVE TRADITION

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 consideration. 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 achievement. The Makiko heads advance an array of the artist’s ongoing interests,

313. Joanne Leonard, Photographer Benicia studio, 1972

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including the evocative nature of his materials and how they can be in ected by handling, particularly when his constructive techniques move against art-historical 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.

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.

Marini’s portraits — unlike those of Giacometti — are unequivocal sculptural 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

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?

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.

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 documented 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.

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 protuberance — 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.

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

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317–318 . 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 expressive 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

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322–323. Head of Joan Brown, 1959 Private Collection

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 324. David Park (1911–1960) Couple, 1959 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

325. Plaster Mask I, 1960 Private Collection

BELOW 326. Plaster Mask III, 1960 Private Collection

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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.

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

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

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

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331–332. Markos, 1958; Re-worked 1963 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

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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, tailored 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 disturbances. 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 preoccupation 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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struggle to maintain a tightrope balance between resemblance and personally communicative form.

For Neri, then, portraiture is not synonymous with exacting physical replication 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.

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.”

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.”

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

335. Mary Julia’s Head II – Cast Paper (Black) and Mary Julia’s Head I – Cast Paper (White), 1975

BELOW 336. Mary Julia Head I, 1974 Private Collection

337–338. Untitled Head IV, 1976 Yale University Art Gallery

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LEFT/RIGHT 339. Makiko I, 1980 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 340. Makiko Drawing I, 1980 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 341–342. Makiko I, 1980 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum

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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,

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 exhilaration 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.

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.

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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, Pistoia

BELOW 345. Marino Marini (1901–1980) Ritratto di America Vitale [Portrait of America Vitale], 1938 Museo Marino Marini, Pistoia

LEFT/RIGHT 346–347. Makiko II, 1980 Private Collection

348. Makiko III, 1980

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

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

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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.

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.

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

353–354. Makiko No. 4 (Cast 1/4), 1980; Cast 1981; Painted 1983 Private Collection

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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 stereotype. 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

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358–359. Makida II, 1994; Re-worked 1997 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 360–362. Makida I, 1994; Re-worked 1997 Private Collection

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.

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.

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

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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

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366–367. Makiko II (Cast AP-I), 1980; Cast 2014; Patina 2016

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eyes that feel eroded, hardly more than indentations. The coiffures are accentuated 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.

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

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LEFT/RIGHT 370. Mary Julia Klimenko, Photographer Benicia studio, 1995

371. Photographer Unknown Marino Marini in his studio

OPPOSITE 372. Photographer Unknown Carrara Studio, 1993

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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

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 determination 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 accomplish this as art, they must establish for themselves the authority that approbates their speech.

During 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.

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