Sandscapes: Curatorial Reflections

It is hard to imagine Costantino (Tino) Nivola’s sandcasts without also thinking about the artist’s move to Long Island in the latter half of the 1940s.(1) He had come to New York from Italy, with his Jewish wife Ruth Nivola after they were forced to flee Europe on account of the rise of fascism. The move from the city brought Nivola and his young family into the center of several neighboring hamlets that make up the Hamptons, coinciding with a new wave of artists, architects, and art critics who found their way there after the WWII, likely attracted by the open spaces and the light.(2) The Nivolas had summered in the area, since described as a “cultural melting pot,”(3) before purchasing the 18th century farmhouse together with chicken coop and barn along Old Stone Road (now Old Stone Highway).(4)

Together, the Nivolas re-shaped the house, transforming it into a “cohesive domestic and work environment,” the epitome of “frugal luxury.”(5) Tino opened out the interior, removing partitions and stuccoing the walls; while Ruth, who earned the reputation of having “golden hands,” worked on the textiles, patterns and colors—a talent that would be extended to sculptural adornments, only much later, in the 1970s.(6) Outside, Tino created a series of open rooms extending through the garden, complete with its own menagerie, including a white goat recalled by a whimsical detail in Untitled (1952–3) (pp. 98–99). In this way, the Nivolas created a place to gather, regularly entertaining their friends and family. In the postwar period, the Hamptons were increasingly marketed as a tourist destination, a trend fueled by features focusing on relaxed living and leisure,7 although Ruth Nivola remembered those early years as a “genuine and uncalculated lifestyle,” “a boheme in the best sense of the word.”(8) Elsewhere, she stressed that “for Tino, art was part of life...it was not a separate activity. It was life, an expression of how he would see life.”(9) That way of seeing the world was, as she later recalled, in comparison to their life in the city, “more playful” and “joyous,” in part thanks to their surroundings: “nature helped” she remembered, and “the artists had a real connection with the earth, with the beach, with the poetry of nature.”(10) The sandcasts were born out of this setting.

Peter Chermayeff and Costantino Nivola working on the Hartford Mutual commission. Courtesy of the Nivola Family.

The origin of these works is well documented, the result of time spent on the local beaches (Barnes Hole and Montauk) entertaining his children. Contemporary accounts emphasized the sense of play in the work.(11) Nivola refused any aggrandizement of his method, describing his approach as simple and low cost; pleasant, because it was made outdoors with results that could be achieved quickly, in 20 minutes (and this included a swim).(12) Readers of an early feature article describing the sandcasts were invited to make their own and the artist is photographed in a step-by-step guide.(13) This showed how compacted wet sand was carved with a range of tools (trowel, cutlery, and other household implements) before taking a direct cast in plaster. The gallerist Tibor de Nagy later commented on the artist’s earliest works produced on the beaches of Amagansett that:

He wasn't really in control of his medium then. So, by the time I got them in the station wagon, which I had because of the marionette company, we brought in those heavy sand sculptures. And it was a terrible thing. My station wagon was filled with sand. The new gallery was filled with sand; the sculptures were kind of falling apart. But they were very beautiful.(14)

Nivola’s confidence in his technique grew quickly and it was the same process, with only a few adjustments to account for the scale and the scope of work, that would underpin his practice thereafter. The panels always retained a gritty texture from the fine layer of sand that was locked on the surface of the relief; and bestows on the plaster, and later concrete, the impression of a more ancient surface.

The works soon acquired the epithet of “action sculpture” as a result of the artist’s spontaneous and improvisational way of working, for his ability to work with what was in front of him.(15) That description allies Nivola’s work to contemporaneous developments of modern art, and specifically to the New York School—an association that from the outset the artist rejected: he subsequently emphasized that the move to the Hamptons was not motivated by the desire to join the artistic community later associated with Abstract Expressionism.(16) His work from that time is a reminder that in the 1950s Abstract Expressionism was “not the only game in town” to borrow from Hilton Kramer.(17) Instead, Nivola’s visual language sits more easily among “the range of pictorial styles both figurative and abstract that were emerging on the New York scene, some in open revolt against Abstract Expressionism, some—especially painting influenced by Willem de Kooning—in a kind of amicable dialogue with it.”(18) On the other hand, as Kramer goes on, what did influence much of the alternative tradition both abstract and representational, was the sheer physical scale of Abstract Expressionism;(19) an ambition that was shared by Nivola, who aspired to make work monumental, to make his sandcasts as “tall as buildings.”(20)

Nivola’s career as an artist was launched in 1952, when he received the commission from the Olivetti company (for whom he had worked in Italy) for their new showroom on 5th Avenue; a project involving a big shift in scale and scope.(21) Black and white photographs taken later in the 1950s (p. 28), whilst the artist was working on a different project for the Hartford Mutual Insurance Building (97 Woodland Street, Hartford CT), offer a glimpse at the technique he adapted to a larger scale of production in which a part of the garden of his home studio was transformed into a giant sandpit. The piles of sand and tools suggest something resembling a construction site: bundles of rebar in the background to provide the structural support for his larger casts; the wooden formwork required to hold the plaster and concrete as it cured. Nivola later attributes his move to large scale architectural sculpture as a natural progression of his artisanal heritage (as the son of a “mastru e muru,” to use his native Sardinian dialect for a master mason).(22) His familiarity and sensitivity with the materials, sand, concrete, plaster, and developments in modern construction, such as the use of prefabricated elements, would give him the confidence and necessary skills to make work on a bigger scale.(23)

When Nivola began developing his sandcasting technique, he explored the use of color and the incorporation of both abstract and figurative elements in various sculptural forms, notably in a work such as Untitled [Totem] (1953) (pp. 84–85). Much of his production in the 1950s is characterized by works which combine color and form to emphasize texture; to animate his iconography and to create his idiosyncratic worlds: many of these straddle the divide between painting and sculpture. He was recognized early by the art world, for example at the Tibor de Nagy exhibition, a show picked by de Nagy’s artist friends, even though the shift in scale of his practice in later years made it difficult for his work to fit comfortably within a gallery setting.

After the Olivetti commission, Nivola quickly gained renown, and was credited for his ability to integrate art and architecture, to enliven rather than simply ornament a surface. This was a rare feat for an artist in the eyes of contemporary critics including Gillo Dorfles who praises Nivola as “an artist receptive to the possibilities of the message delivered by modern cement and glass architecture for those with the talent to combine it with relief, graffiti, and carving.”(24) This facility in bringing together sculpture and architecture marked out Nivola among artists, and inspired architects including Eero Saarinen to collaborate with him on architectural projects.(25) As a consequence, Nivola came to be described as an “architect’s sculptor”(26) rather than an artist.

Nivola produced numerous maquettes as he developed his designs for large-scale commissions, which allowed him to explore material, process and scale, and to develop the ideas for the characteristic detail introduced into the final works. Exhibiting his maquettes and models was rare during Nivola’s lifetime.(27) In recent years, it has become more commonplace to bring attention to studio work and test pieces through exhibitions.(28) Nivola: Sandscapes builds upon this current practice, showing several maquettes for some of his most well-known architectural commissions. They can be seen as works in their own right; at the same time, they are depictions and models that refer to other works. Bringing maquettes and studies together emphasizes the significance of process in the development of the full-scale work and may help to loosen the grip of the label of “architect’s sculptor.” However, their role within the production of the work has meant that some are now missing. Where possible, panels have been reunited (for example, Untitled [Maquette for the Janesville Gazette Building, Janesville, WI] (c. 1968–70) (pp. 112–113), bringing together work from the Estate of the Artist and from the Fondazione Sardegna). Where these are now lost, the overall structure of the composition has been recreated (for example with Untitled [Maquette for Bridgeport Post Newspaper Building, Bridgeport, CT] (1966) (pp. 106–107) to indicate the distinctive tapered façade for which that sandcast was designed).

Both negative and positive reliefs were important stages of the process of making work but the distinction between these is at times hard to read. Where the relief is more exaggerated, the negative impression is clearer, for example in Untitled [Maquette for William E. Grady Vocational High School, Brooklyn, NY] (1958) (pp. 80–81); where shallower, it is harder to interpret (as, for example, Untitled [Maquette for the Legislative Office Building, Albany, NY] (1972) (pp. 104–105)). The two small studies for the project for Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale (Untitled [Maquette for Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Yale University, New Haven, CT] (1960) (pp. 108–109), are shown side by side to indicate the positive and negative, and to highlight the spatial awareness and the mental agility required to work in this way.

The sandcasts exhibited here are delicate and incomplete: many of the maquettes were not conceived to be displayed on walls, but by the time of his death in 1988 Nivola was well-enough known that a good selection of them has been treasured and preserved. The first retrospective of Nivola’s work took place at the Cooper Union (Figure in Field) in 2020, and this exhibition continues that momentum. Some of the works in this show have never been exhibited before (e.g. Untitled [Maquette for the Olivetti Showroom, New York City, NY] (1953), Addison Gallery of American Art (pp. 96–97)).(29) The display loosely follows a chronological order, and spans two decades of production from the early experimental totem figures of the early 1950s to the designs for architectural façades (e.g. The Bridgeport Post Building (Hartford, CT); the façade of the Janesville Gazette (Janesville, WI) and building interiors (The Continental Building, Philadelphia (PA), the Legislative Building, Albany (NY)). The sandcasts are complemented here with a selection of carved-concrete sculptural figures (including Untitled (c. 1958) (pp. 130-131)): carving directly into concrete was a method which the artist adopted alongside his sandcasts; these sculptural figures are those that also populate his sandscapes.

Sandcasting was only one aspect of Nivola’s long and diverse career, marked by work across media—including in terracotta, bronze, and marble.(30) It is a characteristic which seems modern and resonates with the multifarious production of many artists working today. The exhibition shows the varied projects to which Nivola’s technique of sandcasting was applied and highlights his diverse treatments of the wall. He drew on and was able to incorporate a wide range of sources and references into his work including Sardinian motifs, archetypal figures, and hieroglyphs. Nivola: Sandscapes brings attention to these as well as to his different processes of making and how his understanding of the material shifted over time.