Nivola Cagliari by Ilisso

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NIVOLA NIVOLA

Copertina Nivola Cagliari:Copertina Nivola Cagliari stesa

ISBN 978-88-6202-021-3

9 788862 020213

In copertina: Figura maschile con campanacci (1982-85) (particolare)

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PROVINCIA DI CAGLIARI

FONDAZIONE NIVOLA

Fondazione Banco di Sardegna

Il presente catalogo è stato realizzato in occasione della mostra

NIVOLA Cagliari, Palazzo Regio 25 giugno-31 agosto 2008

Grafica e impaginazione Ilisso Fotografia Archivio Ilisso (foto P.P. Pinna) Traduzioni dall’italiano Susan Scott (testi C. Pirovano, F. Licht) Tiziana Serra (Nota biografica) Stampa Longo Spa

2008 ILISSO EDIZIONI www.ilisso.it ISBN 978-88-6202-021-3

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INDICE

Nivola o il paradosso dell’utopia Carlo Pirovano

Il mondo e la “parrocchia” Fred Licht

Nivola or the paradox of utopia Carlo Pirovano

The World and the “Parish” Fred Licht

Opere in mostra / Works exhibited

135

Nota biografica

138

Biographical Notes

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NIVOLA O IL PARADOSSO DELL’UTOPIA Carlo Pirovano

Nelle ricorrenze celebrative imposte dallo scorrere inesorabile del tempo che favorisce la riflessione storica è possibile riscattare la ritualità meccanica della memoria e perfino le convenzionalità obbligate della comunicazione di massa (con le inevitabili semplificazioni degli slogan e la fossilizzazione dei miti) solo che si sappia sottrarre la lettura articolata di un’opera complessa e faticata dai luoghi comuni dell’effimero e dalle formule di un consumismo che tutto appiattisce e banalizza; perché proprio la consapevolezza critica di una elaborazione creativa continuamente riverificata e compromessa è il risultato esegetico più significativo che è emerso dall’opera di studio e conoscenza della personalità e dell’opera di Nivola nei due decenni che ci separano dalla scomparsa del protagonista; come anche questa mostra cagliaritana – la prima di portata complessiva che si organizzi nella sua isola – finisce per evidenziare con tutta naturalezza, affidandosi prioritariamente alle suggestioni semplici ed inequivocabili delle opere. Le sculture e i dipinti sono selezionati e presentati secondo una traccia che per grandi linee tiene presente la scansione cronologica ma, dopo una sintesi quasi emblematica d’avvio, evidenzia anche i nuclei inventivi e l’evoluzione delle soluzioni formali lungo i decenni dell’attività nivoliana: all’interno della quale, pur con significative costanti e riprese molteplici proprie di un temperamento libero, curioso e scanzonato, non mancano discontinuità e rivisitazioni radicali; ma l’elaborazione di temi e motivi (veicolati da precise soluzioni tecniche e formali come anche da opzioni di materiali assolutamente funzionali fino alla necessità più stringente) scandisce nel corpo dell’opera, nel suo complesso dinamico, capitoli elaborati con studiata concatenata sistematicità, tutt’altro che scontati e ripetitivi. In concreto bisogna prendere atto che la “fortuna” critica relativa all’artista sardoamericano ha potuto avvantaggiarsi, nei lustri che ci separano dalla sua scomparsa, di contributi di studio notevoli, con apporti in vario modo complementari e stimolanti, sviluppandosi nel solco duplice della ricerca documentaria e interpretativa (con “voci” bibliografiche di non usuale pondus editoriale: monografie dedicate rispettivamente alla pittura, alla scultura, alla terracotta) e in parallelo con esposizioni riassuntive di diverso taglio e destinazione (Roma, Pietrasanta, Milano, Firenze, Southampton); studi e mostre hanno stimolato il dibattito favorendo anzitutto la conoscenza diretta dell’opera che, vivo l’artista, di fatto aveva seguito circuiti di presentazione abbastanza marginali, per l’impostazione stessa e l’organizzazione pratica del suo lavoro, per molto tempo favorito più da commesse pubbliche monumentali, non facilmente accessibili per tutti, e meno affiancato al mercato corrente. La rassegna, anche solo approssimativa, dell’articolazione concettuale e pratica di questo servizio di sistemazione critica, di vera e propria esegesi sull’opera multiforme di Nivola, non può mancare di sottolineare la spinta fattiva, riservata e accorta (ma altrettanto caparbia) di chi ha intrecciato trama ed ordito di un progetto di conoscenza e valorizzazione di lucida consapevolezza storica: mi riferisco ovviamente a Ruth, vera e propria personificazione della fortuna di Costantino Nivola. La massa significativa di apporti critici permette oggi di delineare un quadro motivato delle componenti complesse dell’opera di Nivola; eppure per paradosso (destino per vero abbastanza ricorrente nell’avventura umana di questo protagonista delle moderne vicende dell’arte fra le due sponde dell’Atlantico) la notevole abbondanza informativa, come non esclude margini di ulteriori riscoperte e 11

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and hypostatically structured, but also and above all to the complex of cultural and anthropological components that on various levels may have stimulated along the way his responses to an imaginary universe solidly grafted onto a collective, communal experience: in undying remote echoes evoked with an inexhaustible capacity for dialogue with a patrimony of iconic archetypes and, more broadly, primary conceptual manifestations in essential imaginative forms – in reinvention, now panic now subtly oneiric and rarefied when not modulated by instinctive grace, above all, a material expression laden with meaning. The systematic mapping of Nivola’s multiform experimentation has helped prepare an ideal atlas of his extensive oeuvre which now needs to be put in order and evaluated using non-conventional criteria, as opposed to the current critical practice which follows preset, conventional parameters, especially of schools or –isms. Probably, the passage of time and emotional distance can by now foster a reconstruction of the complex triangulation that dynamically orchestrated the opposing poles of Nivola’s talent and life (F. Licht) so as to shed light on that sort of conceptual and methodological, more than practical and operational, disjunction which at recurrent intervals seems to subvert the consolidated poetics of the artist, with a disarming disdain for acquired certainties. Or perhaps, using an even more radical key to interpretation, which by now our detached perspective on the individual personality of the artist and even more of the context in which he worked may allow and even justify, we can identify for Nivola, as a connatural and vital, dynamically germinal and psychologically propulsive status, precisely this condition of being out of place and out of time which emerges from an analysis both of the external circumstances of his life, marked by continual, repeated uprooting, and from a reading in its context of his artistic creation, in the relentless interweave of graphics, painting, sculpture, as well as from the traces, not plentiful, to be sure, but highly meaningful, of the autograph testimony of his writings (letters and miscellaneous notes, displaying a disarming communicative effectiveness). As I hinted earlier, the thorniest problem critics have had to face – as is the case for every creative personality, to tell the truth – is that of identity, whose profile is often subjected to an incessant, elusive, and even ineffable play of splitting and dissolving outlines and figures that sometimes fit together and other times shift and even seem to shatter in fleeting disassociations. With Nivola, it does not seem arbitrary to note as determinant in the predisposition of a destiny, of life, above all, and thus of intellectual and emotional make-up, the awareness of an uprooting that is from the beginning substantial and inevitable. It is not my intention here to re-examine Nivola’s personality – at bottom simple, and I would even like to say primitive – using philosophical notions and sophisticated intellectualistic literary transpositions. But I do not think it is arbitrary to interpret the deepest reasons for his poetic in a key that may have some distant echo of romanticism but is still fully up-to-date. Its dominant motif is the search for an ideal place of origin (specifically his own, one not identifiable in any other way, a longed-for land from which all roots have been ripped up, a map from which, tragically, all the places of childhood have disappeared…). The culture of no-place (Ñu tÒpoj , utopia, in the strict etymological sense of absence of place, disappearance of the homeland) feeds into the modern sensibility in different streams, often with melancholic, if not markedly tragic, overtones; but it sinks its foundational urges, whether emotional or lucidly rational, in seasons that end up encompassing all the history of mankind in a mythic dimension. And it is precisely 24

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along this line, more lyric-elegiac than philosophic, that the ulterior expressive value of the word u-topia is developing towards its connotations of beneficent, optimistic, and universal dream: from non-homeland to positive plan for the future. Naturally, a knowledge of Nivola’s life history and consequently a reading of his different creative phases rules out nuances of the personal tragic witness in a catastrophic sense which often distinguishes the story of many “rootless” figures who have left their mark on modern poetry and art (Mandelshtam comes to mind, as do Pollock, Celan, Kafka…). The assignment of Nivola’s personality to the host of the lost of the spirit, of time, and of history, even before that of the political exiles or nomads by necessity, is easily justified by the external circumstances of his life: from having to leave his home town as a young boy to earn his bread as an apprentice to his stonemason father, to the much sharper break with the island of Sardinia for scholastic and professional training on the Italian continent (Monza-Milan in the 1930s), to his definitive flight across the Atlantic, compelled by political (and even more odiously, racial) constraints, followed by the final rupture marked by the war, total separation and then a laborious, radical regeneration, comparable to a veritable metamorphosis, definitively ratified in the early 1950s. But along this existential outline, this destiny as a nomad predestined by an inexorable fate, is delineated with even greater gravity the recurrent cadence of a psychological, emotional, and in the end conceptual precariousness which from season to season readily redesigns ex novo operative plans and relative professional supports, when necessary, with unconditioned openness and even melodramatic flexibility. The calling cards of Nivola the explorer were always marked by the most stimulating willingness, even bordering on precariousness. In some ways, the system of multiple potentials that characterized the pedagogical philosophy of the Monza School, on which the fecund maieutic of Le Corbusier would be grafted at the end of the 1940s (which occurred in the terrible vacuum of the artist’s insertion into the context of Europe-America), optimally pre-defined the deepest decision-making mechanisms of a personality by nature unattached to the very idea of resting on one’s laurels. Even a cursory overview of the course of Nivola’s life readily reveals in its successive phases numerous meaningful breaks, to which correspond profound mutations and adaptations in his creative work. At the start of his career, right out of school, he was a brilliant communications operator (we would say today), designing advertising graphics and exhibitions with an attentive eye also to architecture. This would be his lifebuoy during the difficult early years of his time in America, 1939-1945 (working as art director for Interiors), when he also devoted assiduous efforts to painting and (finally!) to sculpture in its function as a decorative component of architectural design. This “specialization” would be the fundamental turning point of his life, in the wake of the unbelievable success of his invention for the Olivetti showroom, which would continue to bring him fame and fortune for at least a decade. His working dialectic unfolded in the midst of calls for inventions coming from architects of the caliber of BBPR, Sert, Saarinen, etc. And yet, a close analysis of this golden period in Nivola’s career, far from delineating a picture of well-defined, fulfilling “certainties,” reveals a strongly risky option, absolutely unconventional and, at bottom, decidedly bucking the trend, precisely because it happened at the moment when the New York School was taking shape, a mythic phenomenon but at the same time one with a shrewd eye on the market. Nivola was a friend of the protagonists of that context of experimentation (beginning with Pollock, who met his death right by Nivola’s doorstep near East Hampton), 25

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1. Bozzetto per la copertina de Il popolo dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Italia illustrato, 1934 tempera allâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;amido su cartoncino, 31 x 21,5 cm, Monza, Musei Civici. 2. Bozzetto per la rivista Lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Isola, 1934 tempera e collage su carta, 17 x 18,5 cm, Monza, Musei Civici.

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3. Roggia nel parco (1934) tempera su tavola, 58 x 74 cm, Monza, Musei Civici. 4. Gruppo di persone in un interno (1934) tempera su supporto parietale intelaiato, 150 x 105 cm, Monza, Musei Civici.