Bronze, circa 1965. 220x241 mm; 8⅝x9½ inches. With the artist's signature and stamped 2/9, verso.
Provenance Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles. Purchased from the above by private collector, Beverly Hills, February 5, 1969. Thence by descent to current owner, Colorado.
Reuben Nakian often depicted classical mythology in his abstracted sculptures, and returned to themes such as Leda and the Swan and Europa and the Bull repeatedly. In writing for Nakian's 1966 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, poet Frank O'Hara wrote: "Nakian is unrepressed, un-neurotic, unabashed in his approach to sensuality, however tortuous his esthetic commitment, and whether his subject be death, bestiality, or Arcadian dalliance. This explicitness gives the Nymph and Satyr plaques a marvelous joy and ease, the Europa terra-cottas a voluptuous dignity, and the Leda and the Swan drawings an almost comic abandon. Unlike most sexually oriented images in modern art, from Auguste Rodin to Andy Warhol, one finds no guilt or masochism in a Nakian. It is outgoing and athletic even in its releases and defeats: the satyr, the bull, the swan, the goat are each circumvented or absorbed by the goddess of his choice in the most choice of circumstances, that of his own choosing, like the amorous 'dying' of the Elizabethans or the Metamorphoses of Ovid."
