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Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
REUBEN NAKIAN Satyr and Nymph.
Terra cotta sculpture, circa 1975. 220x220x105 mm; 8 3/4x8 3/4x4 1/4 inches. With the artist's signature incised on the verso.
Nakian (1897-1986) often depicted classical mythology in his abstracted sculptures, and returned to themes such as Leda and the Swan and Europa and the Bull repeatedly. He met and befriended painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in the 1930s and Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s. The famous poet, Frank O'Hara was the curator of a major Nakian retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1966 (where the artist was also exhibited in 1930). In the exhibition catalogue, O'Hara noted: "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."
