Nivola Museum ENG

C OSTANTINO N IVOLA F OUNDATION

NIVOLA MUSEUM Text by Ugo Collu, Luciano Caramel Carlo Pirovano, Fred Licht, Giuliana Altea

Cover and flaps Exterior of Nivola Museum Frontispiece Nivola in his garden in Springs, 1964. Photo Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Photography credits Giorgio Dettori: pages 8, 23, 30 (top), 37 (bottom), 49 (top), 62-63, 6668, 84-85, 87, 90-93, 96, 98-107, 110-123, 125, 127-131; Maria Carmela Folchetti: cover and flap photos, pages 69-83, 86, 88-89, 94-95, 97, 108-109, 126; Pietro Paolo Pinna: back cover flap photo, pages 12-13, 52 left, 124; John Reed: page 50; Robert Stahman: page 33; Donatello Tore, Ilisso Archive: pages 24 (bottom), 42; The Nivola Family Archive: pages 10, 22, 32 (top), 37 (top), 49 (bottom).

The photographs by Carlo Bavagnoli belong to Ilisso Archive.

Printed by Industria Grafica Stampacolor, Sassari

English translations by Susan Scott (Nivola, an unconventional sculptor; Sculpture for the City; Nivola and the theme of the feminine) Tiziana Serra (The Nivola Museum. A memorandum for the future; Chronology)

Š Copyright 2004 Fondazione Costantino Nivola, Orani Ilisso Edizioni, Nuoro ISBN 88-89188-27-8

Contents

9 The Nivola Museum. A memorandum for the future Ugo Collu

17 Nivola, an unconventional sculptor Luciano Caramel

29 Sculpture for the City Carlo Pirovano

35 Nivola’s materials Fred Licht

47 Nivola and the theme of the feminine Giuliana Altea

The Nivola Museum.

A memorandum for the future Ugo Collu President of the Costantino Nivola Foundation

The Nivola Museum stands in the heart of the Barbagia region of Sardinia as a beacon to a culture which risks to be overrun by the process of a creeping uniformity. The name of Costantino Nivola joins those of other outstanding figures born in Nuoro and the Barbagia area: Francesco Ciusa, Antonio Ballero, Mario Delitala, Sebastiano Satta, Grazia Deledda, Salvatore Satta, Salvatore Cambosu, to name only a few. And deservedly so: his modest origins and reserved lifestyle throw into even greater relief his artistic gift and moral commitment.

This without any taint of provinciality or local color, because Nivola captured and brought to our attention forms and meanings which go to the roots of what makes man what he is.

Those who knew him know that Costantino Nivola was a simple, straightforward man, rather taciturn, a bit abrupt perhaps in his laconic, peremptory expressions which seemed to emerge from profound silence and deep meditation. Those who knew him know that at the same time he was capable of sublime gestures and thoughtful intimacy. Genuine and a dreamer, at times he was impulsive and instinctual. Somewhat diffident with adults, he loved children and wanted to make life stop at childhood.

Interiors of the first stand of the Nivola Museum.

So it is difficult to understand his personality, and above all his work, without knowing the land he came from.

His childhood was poor, in a small town of the Barbagia. His father would have liked to have his son work with him as a stonemason.

But Costantino loved to draw, and it was not easy to help him fulfill this love. For the family, even buying a sketchbook was a luxury. So Costantino would paint wherever he could: on rocks, on the street, the steps to the house, walls.

All around him was untouched nature: granite outcroppings, reddish earth and talc, and the strangest shapes sculpted by the wind to populate his dreams and fantasy. Nivola’s childhood in that land and that family is the key to understand his work. Everything goes back to his childhood and to the child staring amazedly at the nature and life around him.

Take the ritual of bread. His mother celebrated it to his enchanted gaze and the house filled with the smell. In Sardinia, the bread for feast-days takes on quasi-religious meaning and is baked in the most elegant shapes, true works of art. Our women’s hands knead the dough at dawn with their friends in the neighborhood and with natural ease trace on the loaves elaborate embroidered designs.

Many of us have watched Costantino Nivola work the clay with the same gestures that his mother used to shape bread for holidays. An 9

So nature is sacred to Nivola, it is the true source of art. She nourishes the artist’s intuition and furnishes the simple, real materials for an ontologically resistant art.

In this sense Nivola opposes himself to the distortions of modernity and appears as a survivor of an animistic renaissance that professes the inseparability of subject and object and finds essence and truth only in wholeness, in totality.

To capture one’s individuality in the context of all humanity is a difficult task in our times, poisoned by localism or universalism. Even just a few decades ago, the optimal process of attaining intellectual maturity moved in concentric circles from the village outwards toward an awareness of the moral unity of mankind.

Electronic and telematic communications, by eliminating spatial distances and contracting the globe, have almost reversed this process.

Our first awareness today is of a total space that only the most enlightened then draw into their place of being, the places of birth and living which press in on the unconscious.

Without this interpenetration between living and being one cannot speak of personal, intellectual and artistic identity. And Nivola expressed this interpenetration in an exemplary way.

The cultural springs of his childhood work in him like rising sap throughout all his career. In some manner, one could say, his art speaks Sardinian. The ethical referents, the resonance and tones of his poetics are Sardinian or at least can be found in that Mediterranean civilization in which Sardinian civilization is immersed.

A handful of simple values, material and spiritual, whose eclipse is at the base of the moral crisis of our time, are offered by Nivola as an ancestral memory and at the same time as the Utopian yeast of a therapy for the planet. A real project for the future.

The evocation of work and labor, the representation of the eros and the suffering of manifold faces, the synthesis of the human divinities (mother, family, work), the exaltation of humble, healthy materials (sand, clay, cement, bronze, wood…), are indications of a new kind of signposts to point the direction to mankind.

And in this way Costantino Nivola is at the same time and inseparably a child of Orani and of the whole world, a man true to his roots and for just this reason capable of openness and willingness toward the entire planet.

Art is freedom, but it must also be for good. Many times Nivola would say that his intention, especially in his work for the public, was to transmit joy and good feelings. Thus he felt a duty and responsibility toward his fellow men; he listened to an internal daimónion which whispered to him limits and opened to him horizons of meaning.

Beauty and Good must not be separated.

For this reason, standing in front of his works, one can trace out the shape of a “visual philosophy” which, to be sure, is not so very hidden.

A universe of bases and meanings offered as the framework for a leap toward a new humanity: a pharmacy of principles to combat the diseases of prejudice, individualism, over-reliance on technology, consumption, nihilist relativism, all the fruits of the late capitalist age.

The Sardinian mother and the hope for the marvelous child – repre14

Nivola, Cagliari, 1987. Photo Daniela Zedda.

sented with the protrusion of her polished belly to indicate the urgency of what is to come – takes on the tones of a luminous symbolism: we can look toward the future of mankind with optimism only if we pick up the vibrations of childbirth and devote all our resources to bringing about its full fruition.

The Museum which the Autonomous Region of Sardinia has dedicated to Nivola’s work – a Museum now enlarged with a Second Stand where his sand-cast works are displayed, and to which hopefully new spaces for his paintings, showrooms and a Park will be added – should thus be experienced more as a moral commitment than contemplated as a memory. It announces a future of which we can glimpse only transparencies from the threshold.

The passage requires courage and intelligence. Nivola has given us numerous signposts toward its entrance: it falls to men of good will to work them out and to cross that threshold.

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Detail of Olivetti showroom panel, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1953.

Olivetti showroom, New York, 1953–1954.

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or small pieces, a conglomerate of cement and sand for the monumental panels) that hardens, creating the definitive sculpture, a mirror image of the original preparatory composition.

This “gradual” procedure from rapid, easy, flowing modeling in the sand to the hardening cement was Nivola’s preferred technique for his large-scale works made for the American urban landscape in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was working in collaboration with prestigious figures in the very forefront of architecture,4 who often were variously, and even eclectically oriented from the formal point of view, but were always faithful to the essential line of absolutely functional, stripped-down and essential, rationalism. These are architects who certainly shared progressive political and cultural premises, underpinned by a kind of populism which was the direct consequence of pre-war Roosevelt ideals, right at the moment when the new Kennedy vision of society was coming to maturity. This didactic, generously utopian aspiration drew freely on the egalitarian ferment that has always nourished the young American nation, but also on the technical-progressive tendencies of the great design innovations and suggestions typical of avant-garde European architecture between the two world wars, which had just been absorbed, not without some opposition, into the local taste, starting with the big cities on the Eastern seaboard, New York first and foremost.

Nivola’s original procedure, still essentially artisan in nature but adaptable to application on a grand constructional scale (including dismantling, transportation, and installation in challenging positions, also in terms of size) lent itself to a very free and easy style both in the planning and in the execution stages, in which the summary nature of the modeling meant the work could be broken down into different panels to be assembled on site. Moreover, the rough material consistency of the concrete conglomerate could stand up to the challenge of extreme exposure to the elements, compensating empirically the requirements of elasticity and hardness and of an urban camouflage

Bridgeport Post Newspaper Building, Bridgeport Connecticut, 1966.

Kansas City Gazette relief.

that was technologically advanced to the limit of brutalism, offering suggestions of a remote primitivism recalled to memory with the nuances of a utopian, yet anything but Arcadian, nostalgia.

If from the viewpoint of the mechanisms of communication in relation to its urban destination, Nivola’s evocative discourse presupposes emotional involvement on a grand choral scale, accentuated by the long caesuras of his narrative meter, formally his work is characterized by a particular elaboration of the rhythm of space that imposes on the modules of the volumes an indefectible continuity, with imperceptible transitions in the plastic modulation that bends even the roughest materials (in this case concrete conglomerate) to react with the atmosphere in an exceptional way and even to set off sophisticated light effects.

Naturally (as I had occasion to point out when I presented these exceptional sculptural-urbanistic pieces in Florence),5 this particular modulation of the image under the iron rule of continuity implies the elimination from the compositional process of any predetermined aggregation point as well as a preferred axis for reading, in favor of a sort of free emergence in space resulting in a total emotional involvement in response to stimuli that solicit a choral perception, which in its mythical-sacred aspect is something different from mass psychology.

These imposing reliefs abolish the classical scheme, raised up as a paradigm in the humanist and Renaissance conventions (as laid out

by Brunelleschi) of one-point perspective, which implies a strongly individualistic critical reading, to offer a vision of juxtaposed modules that we could compare to the expressive continuum of a large part of archaic decoration, but also to the unexpected tonal combinations of some ethnic forms of music re-interpreted according to avantgarde models. For the American spirit, jazz could be something more than a mental habit or a mere pretext for playfulness.

The inventive processes and the compositional application refined by Nivola for these interventions in the urban fabric (in which sand-casting would be integrated along the way by other techniques, from graffito to painted decoration, to sculpture in the round)6 respond completely naturally to the particular operative ease (characteristic of the most highly skilled artisans, almost sleight-of-hand artists) that characterized the teaching program of the school in Monza, where the premise of the unitary nature of all the arts was the basis for some of the noble experiments attempted all over Europe (the mind goes immediately to the Bauhaus), but was in fact the point of arrival and the sublimation of the exercise of the profession as a practical application of art which was the legacy of a great tradition indigenous to the lower Alpine valleys between Lombardy and the Ticino canton of Switzerland; the passage from “decoration” to “communication” responded to new social functions.

Forming the cultural background of this former student at ISIA, too, were the resonances and stimuli of Sironi’s great querelle in the early 1930s on the subject of wall painting, approached also in terms of the results of late Cubist experimentation in France (Léger especially),7 which Nivola may have seen directly in Paris before his flight to America 31

Traditional formal dress, Orgosolo, 1970.

Totem, ca. 1950 plaster, 123 x 57 cm.

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the simplest ones, it is enriched by geometric motifs; in others it gives rise to a more complex play of planes and positive-negative effects, in combination with oval (as in the work visible on the pedestal in a photo of the works installed at the De Nagy gallery, in which the torso of a cross-like figure is dug out of a raw block) or cylindrical shapes. Less abstract than the others is a work made public at the 1999 retrospective exhibition in Milan,20 whose shape brings to mind a female figure wearing a vest, long skirt, and apron; the contour line, the relationship between the bust and the lower part of the body, and the range of colors suggest surprising analogies with the traditional dress of certain towns in the interior of Sardinia, for example Orgosolo.21 In other words, in the early sculptures, the theme of the feminine takes shape at the crossroads between the evocation of prehistoric times and memories of a peasant life still governed by archaic customs and rhythms. We should perhaps mention in passing that by remarking these references we do not intend to diminish the value of Nivola’s work by circumscribing its meaning to a local sphere, nor do we want to emphasize his Sardinian cultural roots at the expense of his relationship with the American context that was crucial for his

coming of age artistically. Rather, these references take on meaning precisely in relation to that context and the search for a figurative discourse with ambitions of universality. We should not forget that in the United States, from the 1930s on, the idea was in circulation that the premises for the creation of an engagé-type art had to be sought in the reference to mythologies and autochthonous symbols; with its entrance into World War II, faith in the capacity of the “local” dimension—represented as much by the nation as by the unconscious—to offer access to the universal acquired even greater credibility.22 While the artists of the New York School, starting with the Mythmakers Gottlieb, Newman, Rothko, and Still, drew from “primitive” pre-Columbian and Native American cultures, Nivola immersed himself in the culture of his own origins to look there for the roots of all civilizations. The reference to the ancient Sardinian matriarchy coincides with the celebration of a primeval and mythical femininity, identified as the generating force of the earth and—through the technique of sand-casting—literally drawn out of it.23 It is no coincidence that at the moment when Nivola—at the end of a phase of reflection and research lasting several years—begins to construct his artistic identity under the banner of sculpture, he does this by adopting the dyad female-primitive as his conceptual core.

The reference to the primitive (and to woman, who is seen as the embodiment of the primitive, the instinctive, and the natural)24 performs its usual task for him, too: that of reinforcing the definition of the modern identity through a comparison with the “other.”25 From this point of view, however, Nivola’s position is different from that of many of his American colleagues. In the 1940s, the notion of the primitive had a dual connotation for them: on one hand it implied an idea of spirituality and community ties in contrast with the materialism, scientism, and individualism of modernity; on the other it was the synonym of uncontrolled fear, violence, and brutality, mirroring the anguish of contemporary man.26 Between these two aspects, in the atmosphere of anxiety generated by the war, the specter of totalitarianism, and the tragedy of Hiroshima, the second one prevailed, fueling an art in which the evocation of primeval evil and terror found ample space.27 Nivola did not share this interpretation of primitivism; highlighting their essential independence from Surrealist models,28 Fred Licht has noted that the 1950 sculptures do not evoke “anything menacing, anything that belongs to a hidden world from which we would rather flee. Confidence and pride are the keynotes of these figures.”29 Although Nivola’s vision of a legacy of archetypal forms inherited from a distant past, as well as that of a universe polarized between the two principles of male and female, feels the influence of the Jungian climate pervading the New York School, with him we are far away from the dark, lunar femininity associated with disturbances of the unconscious that we find in Pollock and other artists of that same world.30 If the primitive appears in a positive light in Nivola’s eyes, this is because he does not see in it a radical otherness, nor the disquieting presence of the evil and violence buried in the recesses of the human mind. A man with a split identity, he lives a singular situation: 53

Pages 62-63 Interiors of the first stand of the Nivola Museum.

Maquette for Olivetti showroom panel, New York, ca. 1953 concrete, sand, 45 x 233 x 6,8 cm.

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Portrait of Nivola’s mother and brother, 1957 bronze, h 21,8 cm.

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Model for the Brigata Sassari monument, 1963 bronze, 9,2 x 35,7 x 49,2 cm.

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Bed, 1962 terracotta, 23,3 x 16,6 cm.

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Bed, 1965–1972 terracotta, 15 x 11 cm.

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Master mason, 1974 cement, 76,2 x 57 x 35,2 cm.

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Hodman, 1974 cement, 74,8 x 52,5 x 32,5 cm.

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Su muru pringiu (The pregnant wall) from a model of 1981–1987 Trani marble, 125,4 x 169 x 53 cm.

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Feminine figure, from a model of 1981–1985 travertine, 127,7 x 116 x 20,5 cm.

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Pages 108-109 Workers, 1983, bronze.

Painter (Workers series), 1983 bronze, h 25,5 cm.

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Faggot-bearer (Workers series), 1983 bronze, h 25,7 cm.

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Chronology

1951 Takes part in the 9th Street Show in New York.

1911 Born in Orani (Nuoro). Son of a mason, since his youth Costantino learns and follows his father’s trade.

1953 Realizes the sandcast bas-relief for the Olivetti Showroom in New York.

1926–1931 Is apprenticed to painter Delitala in Sassari and becomes his assistant. He models plaster and works as a stucco decorator.

1954 Designs the Monument to the Four Chaplains for the War Memorial in Washington. Opens a one-man exhibition at the Peridot Gallery in New York. Sert calls him to teach and later to direct the Design Workshop in the Architectural School of Design (later to become Carpenter Center) at Harvard University.

1931 At the age of 20 the Chamber of Commerce of Nuoro gives him a scholarship to the ISIA (Istituto Superiore d’Arte), in Monza. Among his teachers are Marino Marini, De Grada, Semeghini, architects Pagano and Persico, and designer Nizzoli.

1934 ca.

Meets Ruth Guggenheim, a student at ISIA, whom he marries in 1938.

Outdoor party for the exhibition at Orani, 1958.

Photo Carlo Bavagnoli.

1955 Realizes eight panels for the garden of Raymond Loewy House, 1025 Fifth Avenue, New York. Opens his second one-man exhibition at the Peridot Gallery.

1935 Attains his diploma as a “Master in Arts”.

1936 His murals are displayed at the Triennale of Milan.

1937 At the age of 26 works as an art director for Olivetti in Milan. Collaborates to the urban plan of the Valle d’Aosta. Realizes the murals for the Italian stand at the International Exposition of Paris.

1938–1939 Spends nine months in Paris, where he meets Giorgio de Chirico.

1939 Moves to the United States of America.

1940 Settles at Greenwich Village in New York, where the artistic scene is being changed due to the arrival of many European artists who have taken refuge in America.

1941 Works for six years as an art director for the architectural review Interiors and Industrial Design (later to become Progressive Architecture). At the same time he is art director for the review You. Working in the world of publishing he has the chance to meet famous photographers and architects with many of whom he will make long-lasting friends.

1954–1957 Directs the Design Workshop at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard.

1942–1943 Together with Saul Steinberg, he takes part to a group exhibition at the Betty Parson Gallery in New York.

1944 His paintings and sculptures are exhibited, with Steinberg’s, at the Wakefield Gallery in New York. His son, Pietro, was born.

1945 ca.

José Lluis Sert introduces Nivola to Le Corbusier and they become close friends: they share the same studio for four years.

1947 His daughter, Claire, was born.

1948 Buys a house in East Hampton, Long Island, strenghtening his relationship with the American artists who had already moved to the eastern side of Long Island. Among them Jackson Pollock, Ibram Lassaw, James Brooks, John Little, Hans Namuth.

1949 Invents the technique of sandcasting.

1950 First one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Exhibits at the Quadriennale of Rome.

1956 Receives an “Excellence Certificate” from the American Institute of Graphics. The Graduate School of Design of Harvard University mounts a one-man exhibition of his works.

1957 ca.

Receives the Enrico Fermi Competition Award together with Huson Jackson, Vincent Solomita and Joseph Zalewski.

1958 His works are exhibited at the Architectural League in New York. In Orani, he decorates the façade of the church of Sa Itria and his sculptures are displayed in the streets. Realizes a sandcast bas-relief for the International Legal Studies Building at Harvard. With architect Richard Stein he takes part in the competition for the Bataan–Corregidor Monument, which is never to be realized. Paints a mural for Gagarin House in Litchfield, Connecticut.

1959 A one-man exhibition is organized at the Galleria del Milione in Milan where Nivola is taking part in the Triennale. One-man exhibitions are organized at the Stable Gallery in New York and the Signa Gallery in East Hampton, NY. He realizes a 3600 square meters bas-relief for the McCormick Plaza Exposition Center in Chicago; murals and sculptures for the

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