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

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 seminary in Milan and studied painting. He also unfolded an interest in architecture. Although Tino not ever designed buildings, he worked in shut collaboration with such architects as Josep Lluis Sert and Eero Saarinen, and maintained a friendship with Le Corbusier. As a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of 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, compassion Guggenheim, in Mussolini's Italy, Nivola brought her to America. He had been art director at Olivetti in Milan just after leaving art institute so he was well equipped to work as a graphic designer. In novel York, he became art director of Interiors and then of Pencil Points (which later became Progressive Architecture). During the '40 he was involved in the novel York art scene; among his friends were de Kooning, Kline, James small streams Pollock, Esteban Vicente and other leading figures. In 1945 he made the decision to set apart himself to art on a full-time basis.

In 1948 the Nivolas bought a residence in Springs, N.Y., a village near East Hampton. Here, upon the beach, Tino started to bring into view sand-cast relief sculpture. He would divide [i]or[/i] sever a negative into wet sand and pour plaster into the sand mold above time he refined his technique, rejecting beach sand because the sea salt corroded the statuary and using concrete rather than plaster for greater strength

The sand-cast pieces were the earliest works in the Parrish Art Museum's new exhibition, "Costantino Nivola in Springs," a small on the contrary representative show containing about 50 plastic arts and collages. It was the first review of his work in the U The absent central piece was a 75-foot-long wall relief, made for the Olivetti showroom upon Fifth Avenue, which opened to great acclaim in 1954 (When the showroom clos in 1970 Nivola's relief panels went to Harvard's Science Center where they have been upon 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 cast that were in the Parrish present to view is a 1952 maquette that is 113 inches wide; it consists of a horizontal array of abstracted figures, somewhat pictographic in nature, more [i]or[/i] less male and others explicitly female. Earth red ochers and pinks reinforce the archaic Mediterranean aura. The primitivist impact is melted by generic late Cubist stylization.

quite through the '50s, Tino worked upon many architectural commissions. He collaborated upon the design of several gymnasium playgrounds with the architect Richard Stein; Nivola's bright-colored, semi-abstract murals with relief simple bodys show the influence of Le Corbusier's paintings. Imposing examples of his architectural work that incorporate wall reliefs, freestanding statuarys and lighting elements can be seen at sum of two units residential colleges at Yale, one as well as the other designed by Eero Saarinen.

After a time, Tino escaped the elegant order of his public commissions by the agency of turning to small terra-cotta statuarys First there were the beds, made over the '60s and '70s, ranging from 6 to 12 inches in their longest dimension. These are intensely personal works, intimate in scale on the other hand universal in their theme of braces in bed. In Little Bed (1962) the two is only hinted at through slightly raised forms under the sheets. by the agency of 1971 the clay is a down-reaching red and the figuration far more expressive and three-dimensional; in single piece Tino sculpts a vigorously intertwined couple; elsewhere, he depicts the post-coital exhaustion of another pair. Other small-scale terra-cottas are delicately originaled beach and seascapes in the form of small relief plaques. Here he captures the events of sea, sand and heavens in flux, often with tiny figures to give a faculty of perception of scale. Always the terra-cotta insists upon 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 1980 (Nivola died in 1988) many are made in marble or tin 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 advise the power of African tribal art as well as the Mediterranean elegance of Cycladic figures. Tino referr to these female figures as "Sardinian widows." He felt that all Sardinian women were widows because of the unbridgeable large bay between men and women in their agriculture He understood his roots in Orani profoundly one time in the early '60s Tino and I met at a cafe in the Piazza del Popolo in Rome He said, "I've just approach from my hometown. It's the solitary 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 les than 5 feet tall) in a carbonized iron chair. The piece is 12 inches high. Kiesler's clothing is put in mind ofed by roughly kneaded and slashed clay. The gesticulation of the whole figure has a precision that supports the sensitively patterned head.