Out of His Own Pocket

A calm, small, square-cut sculptor named Costantino Nivola has finished what may be the biggest single bas-relief in modern history. Darius the Mede and Nebuchadnezzar ordered bigger ones, but the ancient rulers never saw anything remotely like Nivola's.

Made of reinforced concrete, in 132 numbered panels weighing 110 tons, the bas-relief lay face down last week in back of Nivola's summer home at East Hampton, N.Y. Seven huge platform trucks will soon transport it to Hartford, Conn., where it will be fitted to the steel frame of Mutual Insurance Co. of Hartford's new office building. In place, the bas-relief will serve as a 110-ft.-long wall over the building's main entrance. It is an abstraction with overtones of cubism --an endless procession of angular, cloudy, faceless figures that seem to shift, melt and glide.

Preference for Form. Nivola's art lacks drama, which bothers him not a jot: "You know, many artists have been concerned to show the fury in the eyes of a man, but not me. I have a preference for form." That preference arises from many years of handling and cutting solid shapes. Nivola was born 46 years ago in a Sardinian village, and early apprenticed as a mason. He graduated from masonry to ornamental stucco work, and eventually won a scholarship to Milan's Art Institute. But he says he learned more as a skilled workman than as an art student.

The grinding days of Nivola's apprenticeship are now far past. The forms he likes to make are in great demand; recently they have come to adorn such varied projects as the Manhattan showroom for Olivetti typewriters, a war memorial at Falls Church, Va. (TIME, Oct. 10, 1955). "Because of the privileges of history," Nivola says with quiet satisfaction, "we have arrived at the point where we do not have to please the king. On the other hand, we do not work to please the public. The artist must give not something that is demanded, but what he finds in his own pocket."

Solid Sand Castles. What makes the contents of Nivola's pocket economically feasible is a technique of his own invention. While amusing his children building sand castles on the beach at East Hampton, he conceived the idea of sculpting in damp sand and casting directly in concrete. A certain amount of sand sticks to Nivola's concrete casts, providing color and texture plus an odd feeling that the bas-relief, once erected, may slide away like sand at any moment.

To avoid "the invasions of the birds," Nivola keeps his bas-reliefs fairly flat, but the play of sunlight and shadow over their pocked, planed, humped and dovetailed surfaces gives an illusion of depth, elaborate richness and almost of motion. Their apparent coolness is partly compensated by an underlying Sardinian warmth. Sculptor Nivola's most abstract conceptions are based on careful sketches of his wife, his children and their dog; they hint, vaguely but happily, at life in the flesh.

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