REUBEN
NAKIAN
Centennial Retrospective
October
10, 1998 through
January 10, 1999
The
powerful legacy of Reuben Nakian has earned
him a coveted place in the history of American
art. No other sculptor of the twentieth
century has matched Nakian's heroic grapplings
with the grand themes of Western art, returning
classical mythology to the foreground of
human consciousness. His instinctual, inventive,
distortions are ennobling, yet explosive
with maximum emotional intensification.
The dynamic sensuousness and voluptuous
elegance which characterizes his work marks
a high point in the long tradition of sculpture
from the ancient Greeks to the present.
His nobly erotic mythological figures exude
a joyous energy of gesture and movement
which place them among the seminal sculptural
achievements of the past one hundred years.
This exhibition celebrates the one-hundredth
anniversary of Nakian's birth. He was still
working when he died at the age of 89 in
1986. In his latter years he broke new and
fertile ground and greatly extended the
range of his life's work. Few artists have
been as spectacularly successful in creating
climatically significant work at the end
of their careers. In old age his work witnessed
a profound expressionism and heightened
grandiosity. There is in these works a definitive
and transcendental summation of the very
essence of life.
Robert P. Metzger, Ph.D.
Director, CEO, Chief Curator Reading Public
Museum
EXHIBIT SPONSORS:
This exhibition is supported in part by
a grant from
Lucent Technologies, the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on
the Arts and the Pennsylvania
Historical and Museum Commision.
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Exhibition
poster features
two of Nakian's scultpures:
Marcel Duchamp, 1943,
(bronze) in front of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
1934, (bronze)
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