NEVELSON - ATCHUGARRY, Dialogue in black and white by Quadrifolium Group

NEVELSON ATCHUGARRY DIALOGUE IN BLACK AND WHITE

December 1, 2019 March 30, 2020

NEVELSON | ATCHUGARRY DIALOGUE IN BLACK AND WHITE December 1, 2019 March 30, 2020

5520 NE, 4th Avenue Miami | USA Photo credits Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Ugo Mulas, Bonhams & Butterfields, Giorgia Panzera, Daniele Cortese Translation Caleidos Translations SL - Madrid (Spain) Graphic Design Quadrifolium Group Srl - Lecco (Italy) Print Editoria Grafica Colombo - Valmadrera (Italy) © 2019 Fundación Pablo Atchugarry All rights reserved Acknowledgments Bruno Corà Giuseppe Colangelo Alessandro Bonfanti Darlene e Jorge Perez To all the collectors who have loaned their works. Sponsor Piero Atchugarry Gallery

ATCHUGARRY AND NEVELSON: LONGING FOR UNITARY TENSION

Bruno CorÃ

LOUISE NEVELSON AND PABLO ATCHUGARRY

Exhibited works

154 LOUISE NEVELSON

Biography

174 PABLO ATCHUGARRY

Biography

ATCHUGARRY AND NEVELSON: LONGING FOR UNITARY TENSION Bruno Corà

Establishing a link between the works of two sculptors such as Pablo Atchugarry and Louise Nevelson is a bold undertaking, although audacity alone will not suffice to accomplish it: the possible elements that justify the relationship that one has imagined must be identified. However, a dialectic exercise like this one can only be pursued on the strength of a difference that must be acknowledged, compared and ultimately rendered credible by means of a hermeneutic key that must be revealed. A question then emerges: “What is it that makes this dialog possible?”. When you look at Atchugarry’s work in marble, one of the qualities, among others, that jumps out at you immediately is an unmistakable “sinuousness” that the nature of the actual material should preclude. The stony solemnity of the Carrara statuary marble that he uses in many of his sculptures is born of a vital and titanic effort to coax the marble out of its ultra-millennial geological slumber to embark upon a new life defined by fascinating morphologies that attest to the artist’s sensitivity. To my mind, all of Atchugarry’s works have a unitary organic structure in terms of conception and form; they contain no separate elements, barring the holes, deliberately devised inside the sculpture, consubstantial to its organicness and spatial development. The marble’s luminous candor is embodied and disseminated through the myriad shadows that Atchugarry crafts out of each block by means of sensitive impulses transferred to the stone by means of folds, curves, reductions, spindling, cavities, axils, hollows and needles that often evoke anatomical elements and permeate the work with geological reminiscences. The work of imagining a form or shape that must be extracted, and therefore released and revealed, removing any superfluous matter from the marble block, is a consolidated practice among the great sculptors, from the Greek world and the Renaissance to our days. This concept lies at the core of organic sculpting and is underpinned by the principle of consistency that “unites the parts of a living organism, be it a human, animal or vegetal representation”1. Organicness “does not permit interruptions of continuity between its parts: from the trunk to the branches to the topmost leaves of the tree, we can follow, with our senses of sight and touch, the continuous and convex form, the logical and harmonious development” of the plant. Atchugarry’s sculptures, irrespective of whether their forms and images stem from nature or from his imagination, become organic through their morphological continuity. On the basis of this first aspect, an evident differences distinguishes them from Louise Nevelson’s work. In fact, although the work of the North American artist reflects plastic compositions pregnant with harmonious syntheses, it is the result of assembling pieces of wood recovered from obsolescence and reused to breathe life into the work. Whereas Atchugarry’s work is a new creature which, from the marble’s entrails, is born into the light and into the life of art through the artist’s hands, Nevelson’s work shares the notion of “nature morte”. And this despite the fact that in her assemblages, nature is not represented by animals, by fruits or flowers or even by objects with a specific form, such as a glass or bottle, but rather by wood remains. These remains are effectively “nature” because wood is vegetal, and they are also “dead” nature, since more often than not Nevelson utilizes cast-off objects, utensils and furniture doomed to oblivion and brings them back to life through art. Moreover, Atchugarry’s work has a decided vertical slant; the plasticity of the numerous folds that he extracts from the marble is almost always ascending, like Gothic or vegetal tensions. Then there are the colors that characterize Atchugarry’s work, so often white, a lactescent white whose provenance are the statuary marbles of the Apuan Alps chosen by the Uruguayan artist, whereas Nevelson’s work is black, always opaque (although neither did she frown upon chromatic variations in white and even gold). Just like the color, the materials employed by both artists are also antinomical: Atchugarry’s algid and moderately cold marble set against Nevelson’s painted, shadow-less wood. Atchugarry’s modeling, so desirous of light and haptic quality, in contrast to Nevelson’s assemblages, melancholic and eclipsed by silences and experiences. 1 Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Organicità e astrazione, Feltrinelli, Milan 1956, p.7.

Further opposing qualities between the work of both sculptors could also be singled out and other differences between them brought to light were it not also necessary and fitting to highlight their by no means negligible affinities. If until now we have provided a broad outline of what distinguishes the work of Atchugarry and Nevelson, it is no less surprising to also find certain distinctive dialectic traits in each one of them which, while not exactly identical, are at least shared by both of them. I am referring particularly to the two linguistic embodiments, namely the “folds” and “fragments” which, while they may be antinomical, are equally essential to the formal structure of the work created by both artists. The “folds”, so influential and present in Atchugarry’s marble structures, originate from the texture of fabrics and, in philological terms, the draping of the apparel used in the ancient world until the end of the 18th century. Similarly, the “fragments” pertain to objects that drift across all eras, and particularly to the centuries straddling the Neolithic age through to consumer civilization. “Folds” and “fragments”, while also creating conceptual and formal plastic experiences of different structures, have a certain kinship in the work of Atchugarry and Nevelson through an underpinning linguistic koiné which, through neohumanism, permeates the Baroque and extends to the neoclassic era. Atchugarry’s folds belong morphologically to the functionality and vitality of the Baroque, in the good sense of the word, on account of this ascensionality generated by the forms of his sculptures, which would appear to be intent upon continuing to extend towards the light and infinite space. This was already noted, with great insight, by Gilles Deleuze, when he said that the distinctive trait of the Baroque is represented by the fold that extends to infinity: “Thus a Baroque line [...] that would bring together architects, painters, musicians, poets, and philosophers. […] what period and what style would fail to recognize the fold as a trait of painting or of sculpture?[…] It is not only in clothing, but includes the body, rocks, walers, earth, and line.” If the fold’s genetic element is the inflection, the latter is inseparable from the clarity and the obscurity, since in folds “clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity”2. A great deal more could be said about the fold, but not here, on account of space; suffice it to concur, for the purpose of our account of the parallelism between the work of Atchugarry and Nevelson, that despite their divergence, folds and fragments converge in the notion of things multiple. By dedicating particular attention to the works of Nevelson and Atchugarry that make up this exhibition, we must restate, in detail, their outstanding diversity, which naturally does not cast any doubt on the existence of a dialog between them. What keeps the pieces of wood of Nevelson’s assemblages together is not only that kind of box which physically contains each one of the elements that the artist avails herself of to reach compositional equilibrium, but also, and in a way that can never be understated, a mnemotechnic valency with which tout se tient [it all hangs together]. This point of union that stems from the exercise of memory provides the stage for the forms contained in Nevelson’s frontal assemblages, like the arrangement, in loci (places) and imagines agentes (evocative images), that characterized the neoplatonic mnemotechnic systems of the Renaissance. The fragments contained in Nevelson’s wooden boxes, as components of an as-yet undeciphered visual hieroglyphic language, retain their hidden meaning — which is nevertheless no less suggestive — and invite the observer to use their imagination to give them meaning. Chair seats, wooden disks, furniture legs, backrest ornaments, pieces of frames, molds or waste material from the workshops of cabinetmakers or carpenters, placed simply alongside each other along an axis that arranges their alignment with a deft compositional gesture, make up the formal muted landscape of these magic assemblages. While most of the works by the North American artist in this exhibition are black, it is well known that her repertoire also leverages white and gold, as can be seen in this work, in whose center there is a volute which, on account of its form and luminosity, justifies the use of the 2 Ibid., p. 49.

word “Baroque” to describe Nevelson’s assemblages and of quoting these words uttered by the artist herself: “I wanted to show that wood picked up on the street can be gold”3. In Atchugarry’s works, there is an evident predominance of marble in this exhibition, particularly Carrara statuary marble, as in La porte des Rêves, 1995, Untitled, 2018 (135 x 40 x 27.5 cm) and Untitled, 2019 (150 x 27.5 x 23 cm), although there is also Portuguese Rosa marble, as in Untitled, 2015 (112 x 47 x 26 cm), a work which sets out on the difficult undertaking of accomplishing a bilateral symmetry that is never perfect, since such a degree of excellence cannot even be attained in nature, although the outcome is highly convincing. Neither did Atchugarry relinquish the experience of working with black Belgian marble in Fuerza primordial [Primordial Force] 2006 (105 x 33 x 22 cm) and with other materials, such as bronze. In all the works in this exhibition, the verticality of forms constantly evokes, in my mind’s eye, the conquering of suspension announced by Michelangelo in the Pietà Rondanini (1564) work of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. The transition between the curved volumetry of the forms and the fine needles of the marbles which ascend like tongues of fire produces the sensation of an extreme force and tension in the observer which spill out from the plastic matter into the space above and around the work. In Vita marina, 2000, which together with Luce delle Apuane, 2019 and other works was exhibited this year in Pietrasanta en plein air, the volumes, the needles, spindle-like lines, the convergence of the elements towards a vertex where all the folds culminate, seem to embody the essence of sea creatures trapped in the water’s movement, somehow following the example of Brancusi’s awesome Oiseau dans l’espace, 1927, where the bird’s body conveys the essence of flight. As occurs with the eye of the needle, emptiness determines Atchugarry’s sculpture just as much as the folds do. Both of them breathe life into the body of his marbles. Before concluding this brief reflection on both artists, Nevelson and Atchugarry, I would suggest that one of the commonalities of their work is an evident tendency towards achieving conceptual and formal unity. Both of them seek to construct the work: Nevelson, by uniting what was once separated; Atchugarry, by extracting the organic from formless matter to extend it in space, seeking to achieve, and accomplishing, a high degree of unitary intensity.

3 Louise Nevelson, in Jean Lipman and Hilton Kramer, Nevelson’s World, Hudson Hills Press, New York, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1983, p. 138.

Louise Nevelson in her studio Photo Ugo Mulas, ÂŠ Ugo Mulas Heirs

Pablo Atchugarry in his studio Photo Giorgia Panzera

LOUISE NEVELSON Dusk shadows, 1971 Painted wood 93 3/4 x 68 x 13 3/4 in (238 x 173 x 35 cm) Fundaciรณn Pablo Atchugarry

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Continuaciรณn del pensamiento, 2011 Statuary Carrara marble 80 x 17 1/4 x 12 1/4 in (203 x 44 x 31 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Untitled, c. 1976-78 Painted wood 72 x 48 x 15 in (183 x 122 x 38 cm) Private collection

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Envueltos en la armonÃa, 2008 Statuary Carrara marble 51 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 15 in (131 x 52 x 38 cm)

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Fuerza primordial, 2006 Black Belgian marble 41 3/4 x 11 1/2 x 6 in (105 x 29 x 15 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Open zag #1, 1974 Painted wood 54 3/4 x 37 1/2 in (139 x 95 cm) Private collection

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2015 Pink Portugal marble 44 x 18 1/2 x 10 1/4 in (112 x 47 x 26 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Untitled, 1960 Painted wood 30 1/4 x 20 x 9 in (77 x 50,5 x 23 cm) Private collection

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Vuelo al infinito, 2013 Pink Portugal marble 65 x 15 x 14 1/2 in (165 x 38 x 37 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Untitled, 1959 Painted wood 31 1/2 x 19 1/4 x 3 1/4 in (80 x 49 x 8 cm) Fundaciรณn Pablo Atchugarry

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2009 Bronze with patina 27 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in (70 x 29 x 21 cm)

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2006 Black Belgian marble 40 1/2 x 11 x 4 1/4 in (103 x 28 x 11 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Untitled, 1960 Painted wood 39 1/4 x 28 1/4 x 4 1/4 in (100 x 72 x 11 cm) Private collection

PABLO ATCHUGARRY La port de revÃªs, 1995 Statuary Carrara marble 63 x 47 1/4 x 27 1/2 in (160 x 120 x 70 cm)

LOUISE NEVELSON Untitled, 1958 Painted wood 22 3/4 x 65 1/4 x 4 in (58 x 166 x 10 cm) Private collection

PABLO ATCHUGARRY Origen de la luz, 2011 Statuary Carrara marble 71 1/4 x 21 3/4 x 10 1/4 in (181 x 55 x 26 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON Pennsylvania Round, 1973 Painted wood 56 1/4 x 35 1/2 x 3 1/2 in (143 x 90 x 9 cm) Private collection

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 59 x 10 3/4 x 9 in (150 x 27,5 x 23 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON Night Zag IV, 1973 Painted wood 31 x 38 1/2 x 6 1/4 in (79 x 97,5 x 16 cm) Private collection

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Thinking of Love, 2007 Statuary Carrara marble 76 x 12 1/4 x 15 in (193 x 31 x 38 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 31 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 5 3/4 in (79,5 x 21 x 14,5 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON End of the day XV, 1972 Painted wood 34 1/4 x 18 3/4 x 3 1/2 in (87 x 47,5 x 9 cm) Fundaciรณn Pablo Atchugarry

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2018 Statuary Carrara marble 53 1/4 x 15 3/4 x 10 3/4 in (135 x 40 x 27,5 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON Vertical Cloud, 1971 Painted wood 121 x 66 x 11 in (307 x 168 x 28 cm) Darlene and Jorge Perez Collection

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Esprit de Paris, 2018 Statuary Carrara marble 87 x 17 x 10 3/4 in (221 x 43 x 27 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 34 1/4 x 9 1/2 x 5 in (87 x 24 x 12,5 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON Musique de Nuit, 1980 Painted wood 41 x 36 1/4 x 9 3/4 in (104 x 92 x 25 cm) Fundaciรณn Pablo Atchugarry

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Photo Bonhams & Butterfields

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2016 Statuary Carrara marble 41 1/4 x 9 1/2 x 6 in (105 x 24 x 15 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2002 Mixed technique 55 1/4 x 22 1/2 x 5 in (140,5 x 57 x 13 cm)

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LOUISE NEVELSON Biography

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On September 23, 1899, Leah Berliawsky, the future Louise Nevelson, was born in Pereyaslav, a town south-east of Kiev. She was the second child of Isaac and Zeisel Smolerank, known as Minna. They were turbulent years. The accession of Tsar Alexander III coincided with antiSemitic laws and violence, which caused the emigration of thousands of families. Her father’s four brothers and two sisters left Ukraine after 1881 for Canada, before continuing on to the United States, where some settled in Maine and the rest in Massachusetts. Isaac stayed to work in the lumber industry and married Minna in 1897. In 1898, their first child Nachmane was born, followed the next year by Leah, known by the diminutive Leike. In1902, after the death of his father, Isaac and his elderly mother joined his brother in Waterville, Maine, leaving his pregnant wife and two children in Schusneky, Minna’s village. This change was so traumatic for little Leike that she did not speak for a year. Minna receive money from her husband and, in early 1905, with her three children, Nachmane (aged six), Leah (five), and Chaya (two), she left for Boston, where she arrived on March 28. Minna’s name was turned into Annie, Nachmane’s into Nathan, Chaya’s into Anita, and Leah’s into Louise, who was known in the family as Lou. On January 13, 1906, Minna gave birth to a fourth child Lillian and began a period of convalescence that forced her to stay in bed for many months. Despite suffering from illness initially, Isaac worked as a junk dealer. For a long time, the family was living in a precarious economic condition. The situation improved in 1907, when Isaac succeeded in expanding his business into the lumber and construction industry and was offered credit by wealthier Jews. Finally, he was able to afford a decent rented house at 4, Linden Street, before building his own house in the same area in 1912, in which the family would live over the coming decades. These good times allowed him to send all his children to school with the conviction, forward-thinking at the time, that everyone, regardless of their sex, should be given the opportunity for cultural and social emancipation. Louise Berliawsky attended public school and, in the fall of 1914, was admitted to Rockland High School, where she was the only daughter of immigrant parents. She also took private piano and singing lessons on the instigation of her father, a music lover. On several occasions, she stated that her determination to be an artist dated back to her childhood. She remembered that at the age of seven, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she wanted to be an artist, or rather a sculptor because she didn’t want color to help her. Her precocious attitude is documented by drawings dating from 1905 and watercolors from shortly afterwards, which depict the rooms of her house in Linden Street, landscapes of the Maine forests, reproductions of Rubens and Dürer, and a reinterpretation of the Mona Lisa marked as a self-portrait. In high school, drawing professors introduced the restless adolescent to an open view of art and moderately unconventional thought. Louise Berliawsky was a girl with a strong physical constitution, 5 feet 6 inches in height, sensitive to the tragedies that played out in the harsh reality of the early 20th century, and determined not to marry so that she could devote herself entirely to art by attending the Pratt Institute in New York. During her final year of high school, at the age of seventeen, Louise Berliawsky met the thirty-seven-year-old Charles Nevelson, a man of Lithuanian origin who soon asked her to marry him. Despite her principled decision, and in order not to disappoint her mother, she decided to accept. Her new family was educated and well-off, and marriage would guarantee her a prosperous future. The engagement lasted for a year. On June 12, 1920, they married at Boston’s Copley Plaza and, after two honeymoons, one to New Orleans and the other to Cuba, where her husband’s company had ships, the couple moved to New York to live in an apartment on the twentieth floor of 790, Riverside Drive. The marriage took her into the heart of Manhattan’s most educated Jewish intelligentsia. On February 22, 1922, their first son Myron lrvin, known as Mike, was born following an unwanted pregnancy. This event led to a severe period of depression, the first of many that would punctuate her long life. A few months after giving birth, perhaps to reaffirm her

determination, she began taking expensive private singing lessons with Estelle Liebling, a famous opera singer and teacher at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. A collection of drawings dating from 1922–23 attested to her uninterrupted artistic activity. But in 1924, following the financial problems experienced by the Nevelson Brothers Company and the Polish American Navigation Company, the couple, with little Mike and Louise’s younger sister Anita, moved to Mount Vernon, about sixteen miles from Manhattan, to a neighborhood inhabited by the Jewish middle class. The first signs of cracks in the couple’s relationship began to appear. They needed a break from their marriage. “I was never married in the true soul sense. “I had no freedom and all of this made me terribly nervous.” In the same year, she enrolled in Saturday afternoon courses at the Arts Students League, where she met Theresa Bernstein and her husband William Meyerowitz, who encouraged and stimulated her, so much so that she would later describe them as her first teachers. In 1926, Charles left his brothers’ shipping company and started his own business without much success. After a vacation in Maine in October, Louise Nevelson began taking lessons at the International Theater Art Institute in Brooklyn, founded by Princess Norina Matchabelli and Frederick Kiesler. Spending time around these two powerful personalities introduced her to metaphysical studies and spiritualism, which opened up a new dimension of thought, showing her the potential to go beyond reality and see things differently from how they may appear. Interested in Eastern religions and philosophies, she read texts by Meher Baba and attended a lecture by Jiddu Krishnamurti, an experience she described as “the strangest I have ever had.” Kiesler, in turn, introduced her to the simultaneity of the vision of the Cubist avant-garde. The discovery of the “fourth dimension,” of spirit and vision, was extremely important and consolidated an awareness of a non-rational approach to the world in Nevelson. In 1928, the couple moved to 108 East 91st Street, Manhattan. The disagreements continued, as did Nevelson’s depression, demonstrated by a number of desolate landscapes and selfportraits, but it resolved after a visit to a Japanese art exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in the winter between 1928 and 1929. The mysterious and refined beauty of the fabrics of the No kimonos and gold on gold ornamentation thrilled her and gave her strength for “a whole new life.” The following fall, despite the skepticism of her husband, she enrolled in full-time courses at the Art Students League. She expanded her knowledge of painting techniques with Kenneth H. Miller, and, in accordance with the teachings of Kimon Nicolaides, consolidated volumes, modelling, and gestuality. Her drawings of female nudes, oils, and small terracotta sculptures were “exaggerated, but all the joints and glands are there,” as Maude Riley would observe years later. The school was awash with innovative ideas about art—in particular those of Hans Hofmann—and Nevelson began to become convinced that she should go to Germany to study under him. In the meantime, through Kiesler, she took private lessons with Baroness Hilla Rebay, who showed her works by Kandinsky and Klee and explained the difference between non-objective art, which follows intuition, and abstract art, derived from natural forms. The baroness was the first to buy one of her works and encouraged her to go to Germany. At the end of October 1929, the decade of America’s Great Depression was ushered in by the Wall Street crash. Charles’s family was hit hard and for the artist it marked the start of a very difficult period during which she had to rely on her own strength and only in part on that of the Berliawsky family, who would nevertheless always help support her economically. In fall 1931, after leaving Mike with his grandparents with much regret, she went to Munich, thanks to assistance from her family Hofmann’s lectures reaffirmed some of the artistic thinking she was already familiar with, but also disappointed her a little. After three months, she moved to Vienna and then to Berlin to work in a film. She returned to the Bavarian capital, where she attended school for another month, before leaving for Salzburg and then for Italy, where she saw the works of Giotto. She finally traveled to Paris, with Hofmann’s wife. She visited major galleries and the Musée de l’Homme, which had just opened to the public new collections of African art that

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particularly struck her and renewed her interest in Primitivism. She had the opportunity to meet Picasso, but declined, feeling that she was not good enough to meet such an important person, but discovered a number of paintings from the Cubist period, which were a revelation to her. In June 1932, she returned to Charles in New York. She visited her son in Rockland, but then left again immediately for Paris, where she stayed for almost six weeks. While there she visited Versailles and Chartres, as well as museums and galleries where she saw more Cubist paintings: “Cubism was like what I had found in metaphysics and it gave me a law.” In the fall, she returned to America and resumed attending the Arts Students League and visiting New York’s galleries. She was interested in the cultural environment taking shape in the classes of Hans Hofmann and George Grosz, where she met and became friends with Marjorie Eaton. In March 1933, the pair rented a studio in Greenwich Village in the same building in which Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo lived. The Mexican artist asked the two young artists to be part of his working group for the murals at the New Workers’ School. A friendship developed between them, confirming Nevelson’s ability to relate to the leading artistic figures of the time. She was described by the famous composer Ernest Bloch, father of her friend Lucienne, as an intelligent and very beautiful woman, but one who was also fickle and non-conformist when it came to fashion, so much so that she “does not take anything seriously; attractive for her magnetic gaze and the energy and unfathomable mystery that emanates from her.” Meanwhile, Nevelson continued to have financial problems. Her subsistence depended perhaps on a cheque from her husband or funds provided by her family. Rivera’s studio and house were a meeting place and site of colorful cultural activity, as were the small restaurants and bars where Nevelson met artists including Boris Margo, Arshile Gorky, and Ben Shahn, and intellectuals such as Will Durant. The freedom of her life, her first and shortlived romantic liaisons, and the encouragement of her teachers and artist friends distanced her even further from her husband. The faith that she would be able to dedicate herself entirely to her art was accompanied by concerns about the future for herself and her son Mike. After music, singing and the theater, she decided to enroll in dance classes given by Ellen Kearns, whom she had met at Rivera’s house: “I felt a body discipline was essential to harmonious creation.” Eurythmic and expressive dance, metaphysical and anthroposophical studies, listening to rhythmic and ethnic music, in which Kearns’s lessons abounded, introduced her to a new “fourth dimension” of the body. “Dance made me realize that air is a solid through which I pass, not a void in which I exist.” Financially, Nevelson oscillated between spells of modest survival and others of semi-poverty. “The Thirties were very difficult, but I kept going,” she said much later. Despite this, she never gave up on her work, which gave her the strength to continue. The couple did not divorce until 1941, when it was her husband who asked to be free to remarry. Meanwhile, in 1933, Nevelson had fallen in love with the work of the painter, poet, and musician Louis Eilshemius. She also met the young sculptor Chaim Gross, whose lessons in Yiddish she attended at the Educational Alliance; Gross was struck by her talent and spontaneity as an artist. During this period, her sculptures were created from terracotta, plaster, wood, and stone, taking on semi-abstract, human and animal organic forms. Gross visited her new studio on West 10th Street and noted in her paintings shapes made with touches of paint applied with a palette knife that reminded him of Grosz, Modigliani, and Soutine and, in particular, her confident drawing style. Nevelson tirelessly practiced drawing on a daily basis: “I never abandoned the two dimensions,” she said in 1976. “[...] If you look carefully at my works, you will always find drawing.” In March 1935, she succeeded in entering the WPA43 program, teaching mural painting for five months, perhaps due to her experience with Rivera, at the Flatbush Boys Club in Brooklyn. This provided her with a monthly income, as well as new experiences. Her art was now mature enough to be exhibited. The first appearances of some of her works date from this period in a summer exhibition held by the WPA teachers at the Federal Art Gallery and at small

independent galleries in Greenwich Village. Her sculptures reproduced female figures moving or dancing in space, as well as self-portraits in semi-abstract forms reminiscent of Cubist sculpture and the primary forms of African or pre-Columbian sculpture. Her first important public test was provided by the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, organized by the Rockefeller Centre, in which Nevelson participated despite the boycott of a group of more politicized artists protesting against the destruction of Rivera’s murals. Nevelson was opposed to political involvement, arguing that the very search for a new way of seeing was revolutionary in itself. The second important opportunity to exhibit was offered by the group show “Sculpture: A Group Exhibition by Young Sculptors” at the Brooklyn Museum in May 1935, with works by nineteen artists. In the catalog she was described as self-taught and five years younger. She exhibited the small sculpture Two Figures (1933). In spring 1936, on the suggestion of her friend Abram Schlemowitz, she took part in the selection for a solo show organized by the American Arts Gallery, sponsored by the American Artists Congress, to promote young artists, with about twenty drawings and five small sculptures of animals, dancers, and human figures, painted in watercolor. She was the only artist to make it to the final round both in painting, with The Clown, and in sculpture, with Sculpture Group, a reclining figure in the Aztec style. She received a special mention from the jury that included Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Concetta Scaravaglione, and Max Weber, and was included in a group exhibition in September. Critics also appeared to notice her presence. In the fall, an article by the young critic Emily Genauer, who would go on to become a close friend, appeared in the New York World Telegram in which she noted the unusual use of color in Nevelson’s sculptures. After recalling how ancient Greek sculpture was also colored, Genauer said: “But Miss Nevelson uses color as it has never been used before. She applies it in an abstract way, so to speak, even as though she were working on canvas instead of in the round. She uses it plastically and structurally, to emphasize some planes and deemphasize others, to increase the volume of a certain section as it stands in relationship to another.” In 1936, she moved to Bleecker Street. She also frequently changed studio. Mike, by then fourteen, attended public school and had a part-time job. In 1940, at the age of eighteen, he graduated high school. In Mike’s memories, their life was decidedly bohemian, full of highs and lows and his mother’s romantic relationships. In the years preceding World War II, Nevelson became friends with the Greenwich Village artists who were part of The Artists’ Union, headed by Stuart Davis, The Ten, and the American Abstract Artists. But she was always excluded from their exhibitions. “I would have been very happy to join them. I knew a lot of them, but I think they thought I wasn’t good enough for them,” she often said. Undoubtedly, her intuitive approach and inability to support her work with aesthetic thought, made her fragile and kept her on the fringes of a number of groups. “I hate the word ‘intellect’ or the word ‘logic’—logic is against nature [...] and ‘analysis,’ another vulgar word,” she explained to Diana MacKown in 1976. Her status as a divorced woman, gossip about her romantic relationships, her non-conformism, social ambitions and, extravagant dress, as well as her beauty, contributed to the many negative judgments of her and her work. Faced with the sexist prejudices of the time, her feminine approach to art was often highlighted. Nevelson herself said: “I feel something absolutely feminine in my work [...] The dips and cracks and detail fascinate me. My work is delicate; it may look strong, but it is delicate. [...] My whole life is in it, and my whole life is feminine.” In the early 1940s, New York was an increasingly dynamic city and it became a refuge for a great many European artists at the outbreak of war. The work of Nevelson, who was given the opportunity to meet Mondrian, had yet to receive the success she craved. The economic situation was certainly no better than it had been in previous years. In August 1941, she consequently decided to modify her attitude towards the art world. She went to the prestigious Karl Nierendorf Gallery to suggest a solo exhibition. On seeing her work and understanding its

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energy, spontaneity, and quality, the gallery owner sensed the potential for launching a new and exclusive artist. An exhibition was set for September 22, 1941. The event was received favorably: “Miss Nevelson injects, about equally, wit and a feeling of the primitive in her work which is stylized almost to the end of pure abstraction—but not quite,” wrote Carlyle Burroughs in the Herald Tribune. Meanwhile, in order to contribute to the family budget, Mike joined the merchant navy, but, in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, was drafted into the military. In October 1942, Nevelson opened another exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery, where she showed works described as “masks,” drawings, and some small monochrome, white or dark sculptures in plaster and “tattistone.” The public were able to freely interact with them by changing their state and point of view. This marked an early attempt to create an environment in which the public could become emotionally involved through playfulness, not unlike the Surrealist matrix. By her own admission, Nevelson shared an interest in the objet trouvé [found object] and the mysterious randomness of events with Surrealism. “I found wood, I took it home and started working with it.” Her works began to be the result of assemblages that anticipated the art of her later years, in which black appeared increasingly as the monochrome element. “But it isn’t a carving process. It really is an additive. You add and add and add.” The exhibition was a modest success. Art Digest magazine described the artist is one of the most authentic personalities of the time, but she did not manage to sell any work. In the meantime, she moved into a large space at 92 East 10th Street. Her small sculpture Mother and Child and the painting Kneeling Woman appeared alongside the leading artists of the first half of the century, in an exhibition celebrating twenty years of the Nierendorf Gallery. In January 1943, she was invited to take part in the “31 Women” exhibition at Art of This Century, the gallery designed by Kiesler, opened in October 1942 and directed by Peggy Guggenheim, to whom Marcel Duchamp had suggested mounting an all-woman exhibition. Max Ernst, André Breton, the historian James Johnson Sweeney, and the curator James Thrall Soby formed a committee and chose the work Column, a wooden sculpture by Nevelson. This exhibition was also modestly successful despite being ignored entirely by the critics. In March 1943, her mother Annie died. Nevelson spent little time caring for her during her illness and attended her funeral hurriedly. The artist knew she could not afford to be distracted during this extremely delicate phase of her work and had to give it her all so her works would turn out as she wanted. Despite this, the fruit of her efforts did seem to reflect her state of mind and pain through representations of weeping figures and the use of materials painted black and gold. In March 1943, Eleanor Lust, the daughter of one of her colleagues at the League, and her partner Jimmy, son of Max Ernst, invited her to take part in the inaugural exhibition at their Norlyst Gallery at West 56th Street, where she showed Napoleon, a wooden sculpture. Lust was enthusiastic about the circus figures, assemblages of various objects painted in bright colors, which were reminiscent of Calder and Cornell and decided to mount a solo show in which Nevelson’s work, supplemented by another thirty specially created pieces, was combined with her collection of Barnum & Bailey Circus posters, among others. The exhibition, which opened on April 19, 1943, was described by Jimmy Ernst as “decidedly a happening.” The floor was covered with sand and marble dust and a band played non-stop. The artworks were exhibited singularly or grouped together. Some had lights, others were noisy and visitors were invited to move them around. The title “The Clown is the Center of His World” was reminiscent of the 1939 Martha Graham ballet “Every Soul is a Circus.” Critics received the exhibition with amusement, although recognized Nevelson’s ability to show through her “jokes” something “[...] fresh, very sincere, often humorous, and basically good,” even if some could not describe it as art and others linked the works to the “Art in the Therapy” exhibition in which she had participated in a few months earlier at MoMA. To counterbalance the whimsy of the Norlyst Gallery show, Nierendorf

organized a solo drawings show a few days earlier on April 7, 1943. After the exhibition, Nevelson, perhaps as a reaction to her mother’s death and the absolute lack of sales, decided, with the help of Mike, who was on leave, to destroy two hundred earlier paintings and sculptures with which she no longer felt satisfied. After this event, described as “a psychic operation,” she began a search for greater stability in her life and her relationship with her son improved. With financial assistance from Nierendorf, her brother, and sister Anita, she purchased a house on East 30th Street and for five years had a stable romantic relationship with sculptor Ralph Rosenborg, a friend of David Smith. In 1944, Nierendorf staged another solo exhibition of her sculptures. Mixing with other sculptors, the presence of Rosenborg, and greater emotional stability saw a new awareness emerge in Nevelson’s work. The use of scrap wood was well matched with the intuition, speed of execution, and immediacy of the result she wanted to obtain: “As far as I know, no one had ever used old wood. [ ... I turned instinctively to wood because I wanted a medium that was immediate. Wood was the thing I could communicate with almost spontaneously and get what I was looking for.” Nevelson claimed that “art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind” and found objects could transcend the third dimension through artistic transformation, thus becoming works of art. The negative criticism continued, with the exception of the work Young Bird, included in the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in February 1946, and the bronze Position, later exhibited in the solo show at the Nierendorf Gallery, which was sold. On October 10, 1946, her father died and Mike decided to move into the Rockland house. In October 1947, a month after returning from Europe, Nierendorf also died suddenly. This triggered a deep depression in Nevelson, although a journey to Europe with her sister Anita saw her desire to paint return. This resulted in the Moving-Static-Moving Figures series, produced with a rapid technique, increasingly monochrome colors, and forms resulting from the relationships of volumes and intersecting planes. From 1947, Nevelson studied new printing processes at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. She developed unconventional and highly personal methodologies in terms of procedure, speed, and compositional experimentation. After a long break due to the delicate surgery she had to undergo in 1948 and a long convalescence when she was only able to draw, she returned to Atelier 17 in 1953. With Peter Grippe and Leo Katz, she completed the series of thirty engravings she had begun earlier, inserting material elements such as off-cuts, lace, and translucent elements during the rapid printing phase. With the end of the war, many foreign artists returned to Europe and American art attempted to assert a greater autonomy, in part through the promotion of strong personalities and a critical production to showcase them. Nevelson frequently spent time with her Abstract Expressionist colleagues, including Rothko, but was still excluded, like most of her female colleagues, from the “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America” exhibition staged at MoMA in 1951. She realized she was the victim of discrimination, not so much by the artists, with whom she maintained good relations, but by the art system. Her work was often read superficially and always coupled with the names of male predecessors in a way that failed to recognize her authenticity. In spring 1950, she left with Anita for Mexico, where she met with Rivera, while Frida Kahlo was in hospital, and visited the main archaeological sites of Oaxaca and the Yucatan, which made a powerful impression on her. “This was a world of forces that at once I felt was mine.” Before the end of the year she set off again with Anita for Guatemala, where she visited forest ruins. Her gaze focused on the forms and suggestions of their art that seemed distant from the romantic charm of the sites. Her sculpture became more evocative and shadow began to acquire a presence as a volumetric entity. “Shadow is as important as the object itself. [...] Shadow is fleeting [...] I used it as if it were made out of stone and gave it form. [...] I began calling myself an ‘architect of shadow.’”

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Her strategy changed and she resolved to exhibit as much as possible. She attended public events, openings, and conferences, paying great attention to her often extravagant make-up, increasingly refined and elegant dress, accessories and jewelry. In 1952, she was accepted as a member of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and of the Sculptors Guild, which invited her, as president, to the annual exhibition in May 1953 with Figure from the Distant Land. She was now known to everyone as Lady Lou and did not refuse to participate in any exhibitions, in which she exhibited drawings or small terracotta and bronze sculptures. The photographer Lotte Jacobi provided her with a studio for an exhibition of prints and small sculptures that was visited by the entire New York art scene. For the first time, she began to receive public recognition and, in 1952, was elected to the National Association of Women Artists. The Four O’Clock Forum held meetings in her home. Nevelson began to collect as much African and Native American art as possible, as well as ethnic fabrics and rare and unusual books and objects. A market for her work began to be established, even if much was purchased initially by her brother Nathan and Ben Mildwoff, husband of her sister Lillian, who supported her financially, as did her son, who would sometimes send checks. In 1954, thanks to Weber, she began to teach at the Great Neck public school in Long Island as part of the adult education program, where she would continue for four years. In December 1952, Colette Roberts, director of the Grand Central Moderns gallery on 56th Street, invited her to take part in a group show, at which she exhibited Mountain Woman and River Woman, and subsequently asked to represent her in exchange for four annual exhibitions. She thought at length about the offer before finally accepting. January 8, 1955 saw the opening of “Ancient Games and Ancient Places”; February18, 1956 “The Royal Voyage (of the King and Queen on the Sea)”; January 1957 “The Forest,” in the new premises on Madison Avenue’; and January 4, 1958 “Moon Garden Plus One.” Nevelson forced herself to make a huge effort to meet deadlines and produce exhibitions, followed by periods of exhaustion and rest. She referred to herself on several occasions as the “grandmother of environmental installations.” The fourth exhibition was mounted in situ and some of the exhibitions almost completely covered the walls, while others created horizontal circular planes in the middle of the otherwise completely vacant gallery space and were lit by blue spotlights: “It was the first time we had no intrusions from anything else.” The critics received the exhibitions positively. Fairfield Porter reviewed the first for ARTnews. Hilton Kramer wrote a meaty and positive article in Arts, pointing out the monochrome presence of black. In 1958, Life dedicated an extensive photo spread to her. The artist once said of the color black: “I think it chose me for saying something It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors.” Sky Cathedral, part of the fourth exhibition was acquired by MoMA in 1959 thanks to a donation from Lilian and her husband Ben Mildwoff. During this period, other works entered the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Alabama’s Birmingham Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. Jean Arp saw the piece at MoMA and dedicated a poem to Louise. Her studio-home was frequented by numerous artists, including those passing through, such as Georges Mathieu, who was one of the first Europeans to buy her work in 1957. In 1958, Nevelson, with the help of her brother and brother-in-law, bought a house at 29, Spring Street, Little Italy, that would become her final home and studio. By 1959, when her ex-husband Charles died, she was the head of the Artists Equity in New York and in 1963, the first woman to be elected its president. Her work began to command high prices; in 1962, the Whitney Museum acquired Young Shadows for $11,000. Dorothy Miller, the curator at MoMA, asked her to take part in the major “Sixteen Americans” exhibition in 1959, giving her the largest room. The installation Dawn’s Wedding Feast consisted of large works that filled the walls and vertical columns in the center to symbolize the sun and moon. The exhibition was completely white and made the relationship between light and shadow clear, so much so that the artist began to describe herself as an “architect of light.” Its success was remarkable and critics described it as a great event.

In 1956, Nevelson met Martha Jackson, who, after “Moon Garden Plus One” offered to become her gallerist and, in an arrangement unprecedented in America at that time, was prepared to pay her a regular monthly fee. The result was a long-lasting business relationship and friendship that would have its ups and downs. On October 28, 1959, Nevelson opened the exhibition “Sky Columns Presence” at the Martha Jackson Gallery, in which she installed large black works covering the walls from floor-to-ceiling and five-foot-high totem poles, with clear abstractions of astral emblems and references to pre-Columbian cultures. Martha Jackson introduced her work to Europe, primarily at the Daniel Cordier Gallery in Paris, where Nevelson staged her first solo show in October 1960. The success of the Paris exhibition—which was even visited by Picasso—and the European tour that included Flanders, London, and Italy, where she was present at the Rome-New York Foundation, gave her confidence in the future and attested to her success, even if, as she often said, it had come too late. Over the next two years, Nevelson astounded the art world with large monochrome black, white, and gold sculptures in the “Royal Tide” exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, at Daniel Cordier in Paris, at the Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden in Germany, at the “The Art of Assemblage” exhibition at MoMA, and the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1962. The artist attributed her interest in gold to the Russian immigrant saying that described American streets as being paved with gold, as well as to the alchemy and luxury of ancient art, so much so that the critics described this as her “baroque period”: “Gold is a metal that reflects the big sun. [...] Therefore, I think gold came to me after black and white, in a totally natural way. In fact, for me it was a return to the elements: shadow, light, sun, moon.” In 1962, she was invited to the 31st Venice Biennale, where she created three installations for the American pavilion: gold in the entrance and black and white in the two adjacent rooms. These works were lit solely by natural light, filtered through veils on the ceiling to create a particular atmosphere that both amazed and excited the critics. These were matched by the favorable opinion of Giacometti, who received the Gran Premio for sculpture that year. Meanwhile, her relationship with Martha Jackson became strained due to financial issues and the artist turned to mediators who put her in touch with new galleries. Some of these new relationships, in which her son Mike was also implicated, resulted in her being forced to resolve legal disputes in court. This difficult period came to an end thanks to a work opportunity: June Wayne, director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, asked her to be the studio’s guest artist Funded by the Ford Foundation, she left for Los Angeles in 1963 and stayed throughout the summer, producing a series of twenty-six prints with techniques and results that built on her earlier experience at Atelier 17. On her return, she decided to embark on a new exhibition venture with the gallery owner Arnold Glimcher, signing a contract with him that would last until the end of her life. Her first solo show, “Silent Music,” at the new Pace Gallery in New York in 1964, was extremely successful, in particular for the new works that incorporated industrial materials, metals, and reflective surfaces. The gallery had links with London’s Hanover Gallery, where she also went on to show, before Glimcher arranged exhibitions for her in Zürich, Byrne, Paris, Otterlo and at the Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, where she aroused the interest of Italian critics. In 1964, the first monograph about her work was published by Colette Roberts. In 1964 and 1968, she was invited to take part in two editions of documenta in Kassel, received major public recognition, and her pieces entered the collections of modern art museums all over the world, such as the large Atmospheres and Environments I at MoMA and Atmospheres and Environments II at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum. Some were related to the Holocaust, such as Homage to 6,000,000 (1964) and The White Flame of the Six Million (1970). In 1967, the Whitney Museum dedicated a major retrospective to her in the form of a theatrical installation in several parts, illuminated by blue spotlights, which included over a hundred works, from the 1930s to her most recent pieces in aluminum. In the subsequent solo exhibition at the Pace Gallery in 1968, her works were made from polymethylmethacrylates such as Plexiglass and Lucite. Critics greeted this new production as “the final transformation of the romantic architecture of the 1950s, with its Expressionist chiaroscuro, into a stunning Constructivist clarity.”

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In the late 1960s, she returned to large wooden installations. But spurred on by Glimcher, she began to produce a series of welded metal works and later, at the Lippincott foundry, managed to find the immediacy she was looking for by working on the Cor-ten steel directly with the laborers. The first work produced was the large Atmospheres and Environments X made for Princeton University in 1970. This was followed by the sizeable Night Presence IV, donated to the city of New York in 1972, Atmospheres and Environments XIII: Windows to the West to Scottsdale in Arizona, Sky Covenant for the exterior of the Temple Israel in Boston in 1973 and Transparent Horizon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1975, counterbalancing the work by Calder from a distance. Back in New York, in 1978, seven large metal sculptures, Shadows and Flags, created a dialogue with the urban landscape in a square that would subsequently be renamed Louise Nevelson Square. In the Seventies, Nevelson was more active than ever. The layout of her studio—extended thanks to the purchase of neighboring spaces—and the presence of many assistants, allowed her to work much longer each day, to return to graphic mediums, and to meet requests from Glimcher and a now international market. The monograph dedicated to her by Glimcher in 1972 and the travelling retrospective at the Walker Center in Minneapolis in 1973 both dated from this period. She also had a presence abroad with solo exhibitions at private galleries and in modern art museums in Stockholm, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Tokyo. In Italy, after the 1970 exhibition at the Iolas-Galatea gallery in Rome, in 1973, she personally opened an exhibition of eighty works, from 1955 to 1972, at the Studio Marconi in Milan. In 1976, she once again took part in the Venice Biennale, dedicated to environmental art. This was followed by the series End of Day, Zag, Dream House, and Tropical Tree. In 1977, at the Pace Gallery, she presented Mrs N’s Palace, a cell whose interior and exterior walls formed a single large black artwork. In the same year, she created a complex of white works for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd in Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. International critics hailed her as the greatest living sculptor, increasingly referring to her as the “Grande Dame” of sculpture and dedicating a number of television shows and short films to her. The Whitney Museum, to which the artist had donated a great many works, organized a second retrospective, “Atmospheres and Environments,” in honor of her eightieth birthday. Some of her installations dating from between 1955 and 1961 were exhibited in four large rooms. On the occasion of the bicentenary of the founding of the United States, the James A. Byrne Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia commissioned her to create Bicentennial Dawn, an enormous wooden sculpture. Young female artists saw her as a role model and celebrated at the New York Feminist Art Institute in 1979. In the same year, Rockland honored her with a solo exhibition and a banquet for four hundred people, to which Nevelson arrived in an enormous limousine, almost as if to symbolically and lavishly emphasize this return to the city of her childhood. As has already been mentioned, she paid great attention to her image, almost as if she were her own artistic creation. The media increasingly followed her appearances in the company of celebrities, on the occasion of charitable donations to the world’s major museums and her many public recognitions. In her final years, marred by the death of her beloved brother Nathan in 1980, Nevelson continued to be prolific and active in relationships with leading figures such as Edward Albee, William Katz, Jasper Johns, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. Her closest friends remained Dorothy Miller, Dorothy Dehner, Emily Genauer, Arnold Glimcher, and, of course, Diana MacKown, who most loyally organized her work and provide a filter with the outside world, especially in Louise’s last years, when she fell ill and was diagnosed with lung cancer. Throughout her life, Nevelson often claimed not to be afraid of dying. Once, when asked who she would like to be if she could be reincarnated, without hesitation she answered, laughing: “Louise Nevelson.” Despite a strong constitution, the disease weakened her more and more. In February 1988, she stopped speaking and on April 17 she died in her New York home. The art world paid the highest tribute to her in an unprecedented way for a female artist.

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Louise Nevelson in her studio Photo Ugo Mulas, ÂŠ Ugo Mulas Heirs

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Biography

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Pablo Atchugarry was born in Montevideo in the second half of the mild Uruguayan winter, more precisely on August 23, 1954. The small Latin American country was somewhat agitated in view of the impending elections scheduled for November 28, which would ultimately lead to the umpteenth victory of the Partido Colorado. Marilyn Monroe, the lead actress in River of no Return by Otto Preminger, graced the nation’s silver screens, while La Cumparsita, the tango composed by Gerardo Matos Rodríguez, continually lured new dance couples onto the floor. Little Pablo grew up in the bosom of a loving family, who encouraged him to hone his drawing skills from an early age. Under the caring eye of his mother, María Cristina Bonomi, and spurred on by the enthusiasm of his father Pedro (an art lover who frequented the maestro Joaquín Torres García), Pablo, endowed with a keen interest, quickly showed that he was headed in the right direction. It is no coincidence that in 1965, at the tender age of 11, he took part in an exhibition organized by the National Museum of Visual Arts of Montevideo, where he exhibited two paintings for the first time ever. Driven by his passion, he began to experiment with different materials, such as clay, cement, iron and wood. This vocation prompted him to create, in 1971, his first sculpture in cement, Caballo [Horse], which was followed by several pieces executed in iron and cement in 1974: Escritura simbólica [Symbolic writing], Estructura cósmica [Cosmic structure], Metamorfosis prehistórica [Prehistoric metamorphosis], Maternidad [Maternity] and Metamorfosis femenina [Female metamorphosis]. Parallel to all this, he also presented his first exhibition of drawings and paintings at the SUBTE Exhibition Center of Montevideo (1972), and also staged exhibitions in the Galleria Lirolay of Buenos Aires and at the 15th International Paris-South Salon (1974), and in Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Brasilia and Río de Janeiro (1976). Despite the events that shook Latin America and the rest of the world at that time, his talent quickly made him a multifaceted artist who subscribed to the principle of “...living art as a message capable of building beauty and harmony”. A feeling which, as of 1977, would begin to accompany him in his sojourns across Europe. From Belgium to Denmark, from France to Germany via Holland and Spain, taking in Switzerland and Italy in a passionate itinerary choc-a-bloc with meetings and incentives that stimulated his insatiable curiosity. His first exhibitions in Lombardy date from this era. In 1978, he staged an individual exhibition of his paintings in the Galleria Visconti in Lecco; these same works also went on show later in the Galleria Nuova Sfera of Milan. He also exhibited at the Galleria La Colonna in Como, where he presented a series of drawings in ink and watercolor. In 1979 it was the turn of the Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris, and it was not long before his work was being admired in the small Swiss city of Chur and in Stockholm. These events undoubtedly made his parents, who had always been convinced that Pablo had an innate talent, very proud. They were even willing to support him when he resolved to leave Montevideo to travel first to Paris and then to Carrara. In the French capital, Atchugarry produced the preparatory drawing of La Lumière [The light] his first sculpture in marble, for which purpose he traveled to Carrara and Brescia. This heralded the beginning of a new adventure in which he would play the undisputed leading role. From thrilling strolls through stone quarries in search of that block of marble that would suit his purposes, until the moment when his deft hands actually crafted the work. His next step in the domain of sculpture was in 1982, when he was commissioned to produce his first monumental project in Carrara marble. This work was Pietà [Mercy], a large sculpture made with a 12-ton block of marble. The artist took a year to complete the work, which was subsequently exhibited in the museum of Villa Manzoni and in the Basilica of San Nicolò of Lecco, as well as in the Basilica of San Simpliciano in Milan. This project prompted Atchugarry to settle permanently in Lecco on the shores of “...that branch of the lake” described by Alessandro Manzoni, where he quickly set up his studio and became a fully-fledged member of the Italian cultural and artistic scene. A decision that placed him in a migratory circle which, like an elastic bend, characterizes his constant comings and goings between his home

country and his country of adoption, not only because 40% of the Uruguayan population is of Italian extraction, but also on account of the deep historical, cultural, political – and, as could hardly be otherwise, football bonds – which still help to forge a dynamic relationship between both countries. Just as Garibaldi, after defending Montevideo and returning to Italy in order to spearhead the country’s unification, was dubbed “the hero of both worlds”, so too does Atchugarry (like the great Italian-Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana, born in Rosario and who ultimately settled in Lombardy) like to call himself “the artist of both worlds”. Pablo Atchugarry ran up one success after another, as his agenda attests, since it which was becoming increasingly crammed with international engagements. In 1987, he exhibited his work in the Crypt of Bramantino and in the complex of the Basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo of Milan, presented by the critic Raffaele de Grada. The following year, he began to feel the urgent need to work with monumental dimensions, as suggested by the image of those “clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs” stemming from the brilliant pen of García Márquez. Thus, in 1996 he created Semilla de la esperanza [Seed of hope] for the sculpture park of the Government House in Montevideo, and, in 1997 the pieces that he would exhibit in Caracas –where he met Jesús-Rafael Soto – and those that could be seen in the sculpture exhibition organized in 1998 by the Veranneman foundation of Belgium, with a critical study by Professor Willem Elias. His industrious and untiring penchant for investigation, coupled with a burning desire to tackle new challenges, led him to a major achievement on September 25, 1999, when the Pablo Atchugarry Museum was opened in Lecco. A prestigious recognition that he chose not to look upon as a goal, but rather spurred him on to keep going and to hone his skills even further. Knowing that part of his work – which represents his entire artistic career, from his early paintings through to his most recent sculptures – was permanently on show alongside his own archive, was not sufficient for him, as he was intent on pursuing other dreams. In fact, the new millennium saw him heading several important events in Europe and America, such as the retrospective exhibition Le infinite evoluzioni del marmo [The infinite evolution of marble] staged in the Palazzo Isimbardi of Milan in 2001. From his victory in a national contest which translated into the commission to produce the Monumento alla Civiltà e Cultura del Lavoro Lecchese [Monument to the Civilization and Culture of the Work of Lecco], a sculpture executed in a single block of Carrara, 6-m high and weighing in at 33 tons, through to the Michelangelo award in Carrara. From the Ideales [Ideals] structure that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the coronation of Prince Rainier of Monaco to his participation in the 2003 Venice biennial with the work Sognando la Pace [Dreaming of peace]. From his return to his homeland in 2004 on account of the first individual exhibition of his sculptures in Punta del Este, organized by the Tejería Loppacher gallery 25 years after his first exhibition in Uruguay, to the important individual exhibition staged the following year in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires. An impressive body of work and commitments approached with bravery, sensitivity, force, delicacy and a disarming smile. A volcano of ideas, ever-accompanied by his wife Silvana, very discreet and equally determined to support his artistic needs. A family concern in which their son Piero, owner of a gallery in Miami, was also involved. Thanks to all of them, the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation was created in the Uruguayan town of Manantiales, in the Maldonado Department, with a view to creating a meeting point for artists of all disciplines. A marvelous venue where nature and art go hand in hand, capable of fostering exchanges among leading creative souls from all over the world and of building bridges between the different European and American forms of expression. The following year brought the major traveling retrospective exhibition organized in Brazil under the title O espaço plástico da luz [The plastic space of the light] with the participation of the Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil in Brasilia, the MUBE of São Paulo and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum of Curitiba.

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In 2011, after seven long years of work, he completed Abbraccio cosmico [Cosmic Embrace], a sculpture executed in an 8.6-meter-high block weighing in at 56 tons. That same year, he staged his first individual exhibition in the Hollis Taggart Galleries of New York, with a critical text penned by Jonathan Goodman. Subsequently, in 2012, the Times Square Alliance chose his Dreaming New York work to be exhibited in the famous square of the same name in The City That Never Sleeps. A few months later, as part of the City of Sculpture program curated by the Westminster City Council, he exhibited two stainless steel sculptures in the St. James Square Gardens in London. The list of cities that have hosted exhibitions by Pablo Atchugarry is endless. And this list simply had to include Rome, where in 2015, the Museo dei Fori Imperiali – Mercati di Traiano put on an important retrospective exhibition including 40 works, entitled Pablo Atchugarry. Città Eterna, eterni marmi [Pablo Atchugarry. Eternal city, eternal marbles] Other outstanding solo exhibitions include the ones held in 2019 in the Galleria Contini of Venice, in the city of Pietrasanta (where a set of sculptures and works in polychromed bronze were exhibited in the Duomo Square, in the church and the cloister of Sant’Agostino and on the Tonfano quay), and the Alla conquista della luce [To conquer the light] exhibition staged in the Great Council Chamber of the Doge’s Palace of Genoa. However, to glean a better understanding of how this great artist, who ever since he was a child has lived in perfect symbiosis with different forms of expression, became one of the most interesting and dynamic leading lights in art and sculpture the world over, we should also see him working outside his studio. A fascinated Tiziana Leopizzi, alluding to the artist’s first individual exhibition staged in Genoa in 1995, on the occasion of the cycle dedicated to him by the Ellequadro Association, thus narrates: [the exhibition] “…caused a sensation on account of the beauty of the ‘wind’ sculptures, and one work in particular, whose dimensions rendered merely getting it to the exhibition venue a veritable challenge. Conveyed on a mobile crane to the Piazza de Ferrari, the city’s traffic epicentre, the scenario was suddenly transformed into a surrealistic space. As if paralyzed by an enchantment, buses, cars, cyclists, pedestrians, to a man, came to an utter standstill, gazing at that huge mass of white marble that “flew” through the air until it landed gently on the ground and continued to move forward on rollers, centimeter by centimeter, under Pablo’s watchful eye, and with incredible dexterity and deftness, until it reached the site chosen for it to shine in all its magnificence”. A veritable giant which now, on its return to Manantiales, we are delighted to imagine, standing erect facing the Atlantic Ocean, gazing intently towards the future.

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Pablo Atchugarry in his studio

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Vita marina, 2000 Statuary Carrara marble 111 x 41 1/4 x 31 1/2 in (282 x 105 x 80 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Destino, 1999 Statuary Carrara marble 111 3/4 x 23 1/2 x 7 3/4 in (284 x 60 x 20 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Luce delle Apuane, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 150 x 22 3/4 x 25 1/2 in (381 x 58 x 65)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY La Serenissima, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 175 1/4 x 43 1/4 x 29 1/2 in (445 x 110 x 75 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY La danza de la vida, 2019 Olive wood 91 x 90 1/4 x 86 1/4 in (231 x 229 x 219 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Figlio della montagna, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 126 x 31 1/2 x 29 1/2 in (320 x 80 x 75 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Untitled, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 71 1/4 x 15 1/4 x 12 1/2 in (181 x 39 x 32 cm)

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PABLO ATCHUGARRY Symphonie dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;automne, 2019 Statuary Carrara marble 70 3/4 x 22 x 13 1/2 in (180 x 56 x 34 cm)

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Pablo Atchugarry in Carrara

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