Voyage to Crete

Sculptor Reuben Nakian is a short, bristling rock of a man with a pronounced stutter and an utter inability to feel anything mildly. As a rising artist back in the '30s, he nursed a great passion for contemporary heroes. He did powerful portrait busts of some of the men around F.D.R.--Henry Wallace, Rex Tugwell, General Hugh Johnson--and modeled Babe Ruth into an eight-foot giant with the air of an arrogant Hercules. Critics admired his work, but then something happened and Nakian all but disappeared.

The trouble was that Nakian felt he was crowding the "hairline between greatness and corniness." His work seemed too glib, too academic--and commercial. Nakian settled back to study his favorite masters--Titian, Rubens, Van Gogh, Cezanne--and read avidly through the Greek classics. The classics, he felt, had everything a sculptor could want, especially the story of how Jupiter disguised himself as a bull and carried the fair Europa off to Crete. Nakian spent five years pummeling and twisting the clay for a huge terra-cotta abstract of the Rape of Europa. "It was a tremendous, wild figure, more bizarre than Picasso or Henry Moore," but it lacked "greatness." Nakian destroyed it with blows of his sledge.

Last week, now 54 and getting grey, Reuben Nakian was in a Manhattan gallery with an exhibit he was certain was worth saving. Working at Newark's School of Fine and Industrial Art, the center of a group of noisy, eager students, he has turned out 15 large and small statues in two years. All are of Europa and the bull done in natural clay washed over with red, black and pastel glazes. The work looks rough and half-finished, is built of abstract masses of streaming, fluted clay with little or no regard for anatomy. The angry figures of Europa and Jupiter are frequently lost in swirls and whorls, the dolphins and nymphs cavorting at their feet are jagged points and blobs. But the statues have much of the grace and power Nakian has worked to achieve.

Nakian calls his exhibit "The Voyage to Crete." It is a voyage, he says, that he has been on ever since he first started daubing in clay 40 years ago.

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