Costantino Nivola: public and private: a selection of Nivola's sculptures, soon to leave the U.S. for a permanent home in a museum devoted to the artist in Sardinia, provided a rare overview of his work at the Parrish Museum

Art in America, May, 2004 by Paul Brach

Costantino Nivola's father was a stonecutter, and Tino learned the trade while still a youth in the town of Orani in Sardinia, where he was born in 1911. Later he went to art school in Milan and studied painting. He also developed an interest in architecture. Although Tino never designed buildings, he worked in close collaboration with such architects as Josep Lluis Sert and Eero Saarinen, and maintained a friendship with Le Corbusier. As much as any artist I have known, Tino was sensitive to the symbiosis between architecture and sculpture.

In 1939, fearing for the safety of his Jewish wife, Ruth Guggenheim, in Mussolini's Italy, Nivola brought her to America. He had been art director at Olivetti in Milan just after leaving art school, so he was well equipped to work as a graphic designer. In New York, he became art director of Interiors and then of Pencil Points (which later became Progressive Architecture). During the '40s, he was involved in the New York art scene; among his friends were de Kooning, Kline, James Brooks, Pollock, Esteban Vicente and other leading figures. In 1945 he made the decision to devote himself to art on a full-time basis.

In 1948 the Nivolas bought a home in Springs, N.Y., a village near East Hampton. Here, on the beach, Tino started to produce sand-cast relief sculpture. He would cut a negative into wet sand and pour plaster into the sand mold. Over time he refined his technique, rejecting beach sand because the sea salt corroded the sculpture, and using concrete rather than plaster for greater strength.

The sand-cast pieces were the earliest works in the Parrish Art Museum's recent exhibition, "Costantino Nivola in Springs," a small but representative show containing about 50 sculptures and collages. It was the first survey of his work in the U.S. The absent central piece was a 75-foot-long wall relief, made for the Olivetti showroom on Fifth Avenue, which opened to great acclaim in 1954. (When the showroom closed in 1970, Nivola's relief panels went to Harvard's Science Center, where they have been on view since 1973.) The Olivetti piece, a low-relief frieze, combines formal elegance with iconic, stylized figuration. The largest of several studies for the Olivetti project that were in the Parrish show is a 1952 maquette that is 113 inches wide; it consists of a horizontal array of abstracted figures, somewhat pictographic in nature, some male and others explicitly female. Earth reds, ochers and pinks reinforce the archaic Mediterranean aura. The primitivist impact is softened by generic late Cubist stylization.

Throughout the '50s, Tino worked on many architectural commissions. He collaborated on the design of several school playgrounds with the architect Richard Stein; Nivola's bright-colored, semi-abstract murals with relief elements show the influence of Le Corbusier's paintings. Imposing examples of his architectural work that incorporate wall reliefs, freestanding sculptures and lighting elements can be seen at two residential colleges at Yale, both designed by Eero Saarinen.

After a time, Tino escaped the elegant order of his public commissions by turning to small terra-cotta sculptures. First there were the beds, made throughout the '60s and '70s, ranging from 6 to 12 inches in their longest dimension. These are intensely personal works, intimate in scale but universal in their theme of couples in bed. In Little Bed (1962), the couple is only hinted at by slightly raised forms under the sheets. By 1971 the clay is a deep red and the figuration far more expressive and three-dimensional; in one piece Tino sculpts a vigorously intertwined couple; elsewhere, he depicts the post-coital exhaustion of another pair. Other small-scale terra-cottas are delicately modeled beach and seascapes in the form of small relief plaques. Here he captures the effects of sea, sand and sky in flux, often with tiny figures to give a sense of scale. Always the terra-cotta insists on its own physicality, the forms bearing traces of their making.

Among the later works are the stylized, flattened female figures in the "Mother" and "Widow" series. Dating from the 1980s (Nivola died in 1988), many are made in marble or bronze. Here Tino appears as a successor to Brancusi. Each figure is pared down to essentials. Tiny birdlike heads and flattened bodies with faint hints of breasts and bellies suggest the power of African tribal art as well as the Mediterranean elegance of Cycladic figures. Tino referred to these female figures as "Sardinian widows." He felt that all Sardinian women were widows because of the unbridgeable gulf between men and women in their culture. He understood his roots in Orani profoundly. Once in the early '60s Tino and I met at a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome. He said, "I've just come from my hometown. It's the only place where I know what's going on."

Nivola's portrait of Frederick Kiesler (ca. 1961), also in terra-cotta, places the diminutive architect (he was less than 5 feet tall) in a steel chair. The piece is 12 inches high. Kiesler's clothing is suggested by roughly kneaded and slashed clay. The gesture of the whole figure has a precision that supports the sensitively modeled head.