Description

These four vases in our collection are the result of a collaboration between Reuben Nakian, the noted American sculptor, and James Jackson Burt, who was, at the beginning of their artistic partnership, a seventeen year-old aspiring artist.  Can you imagine ... a high school student is on a field trip to the studio of a celebrated sculptor who just happens to live in his hometown of Stamford CT.  His father is a potter and the student has been making classical-shaped vases.  He has an idea and on a whim asks the sculptor if he would draw scenes on his vases.  The famous sculptor agrees, joins him at the boy's family studio and they make their first pot together!  That is the story behind what would become a 14 year-long collaboration, mentorship and friendship between the two artists until Nakian's death in 1986.  We love this story as well as the mythological scenes that Nakian chose to etch into the wet glaze.  This vase depicts Leda and the Swan, the erotic story of Zeus who disguises himself as a swan in order to seduce Leda, a Greek princess and later Queen of Sparta.  We know, it's a stretch.  But artists from the renaissance (such as Leonard da Vinci and Michaelangelo) up until the modern period (such as Cezanne) love the story and have used its imagery in their paintings.  Nakian's take on it is a playful, almost joyful one, and we are sold.

This vase is especially large and is a most beautiful combination of functionality and art.  Why settle for just a vase when you can have a painting as well?

Details

• Reuben Nakian (American, 1897-1986) and James Burt (American, 1955-1998)
• Leda and the Swan (1982)
  
• Incised black glazed terracotta vase
  
• Signed on base and side
• 14" tall
• Excellent condition with a few scruffs to black glaze

About the Artists

In his obituary, The NY Times called Reuben Nakian “one of the most distinguished American sculptors of the 20th century.”  He was born to Armenian immigrants in Long Island in1897 and grew up in New York City and suburban New Jersey. At the age of 13, encouraged by his parents, he began to take drawing lessons and to model in clay. He studied briefly at the Art Students League and several other New York academies, but his primary early training came from an apprenticeship to the sculptor Paul Manship and his assistant, Gaston Lachaise. Manship was known for his classical, mythology based works (such as his large statue of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center) and may have sparked Nakian’s own sustained interest in mythological themes.  Other influences on Nakian were Cezanne and Brancusi and, in the 1930s,  fellow Armenain Achille Gorky, who introduced him to Willem de Kooning.  According to the NY Times, “Mr. Nakian's discussions with these artists led him to reconsider his own work. For a while he turned away from sculpture to develop new ideas in drawings, pushing toward a freer style that could incorporate the new expressionistic mode coming into American painting while at the same time preserving the heroic themes of past tradition.” In the 1940s he rubbed shoulders with Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp.  His bust of Marcel Duchamp, displaying Nakian’s newfound energy and emotional expressionism, is today considered one of his masterpieces.

After promising shows at the Whitney Studio Club (precursor to the Whitney Museum), MOMA, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in France and Italy, his career really began to take off in the 1950s.  At that time, working figuratively, The NY Times writes that “Mr. Nakian saw himself as a legatee of ancient Mediterranean tradition. His subject matter was heroic, largely drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, particularly the aspects that dealt with the erotic exploits of the gods”, such as the story of Leda and the Swan.  In 1951, a selection of 58 of his works represented the United States at the important Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil, and despite being somewhat out of step with the new Pop Art and Minimalist trends, he was chosen in 1968 to represent the United States in the 34th Venice Biennale. During that period he was also awarded a series of important commissions including his bronze ''Voyage to Crete,’' that stands in the foyer of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center; his only religious work, a 10-foot-high ''Descent From the Cross,'' bronze statue placed outside St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in New York City; and''Hiroshima,'' a nine-foot-high bronze owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).  Another major monumental piece, ''Garden of the Gods I,'' is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Major solo shows have included the 1966 MOMA retrospective of his work curated by noted poet Frank O’Hara and a retrospective organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1985.  Nakian was also the subject of a half-hour television documentary made by the Smithsonian Institution in 1984.  How work is in the collections of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, the Fogg Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Whitney, LACMA, MOMA, the Met, and the Guggenheim, among others.  He died in 1986 in Stamford, CT.

James Jackson Burt was born in 1955.  He was a Stamford, CT sculptor and painter whose art appeared in solo exhibitions at the Kalarson, Kerr & Humphrey Galleries in Manhattan, the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY, the Silvermine Guild in New Canaan, CT, Syracuse University and the Rich Forum Lobby in Stamford.  He struggled throughout his life with bipolar illness and died tragically at age 43 in 1998.

For more information visit https://www.nakian.org