Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Reuben Nakian's Juno, Part II

On the day I encountered the Juno by Reuben Nakian at my campus art museum, I wrote to the Nakian Atelier seeking further information that might help me understand the sculpture and its history.
Reuben Nakian, "Juno", outside the BYU Museum of Art;
photograph courtesy of Museum Director, Mark Magleby.

I received some days later an email from the artist's son, Paul S. Nakian, an attorney in Connecticut. The letter informs that Dr. Robert Metzger wrote the text of a catalogue of Reuben Nakian's works  and that, even if the Juno is not easily explicated, it is known. According to Metzger and P. Nakian, who reports the scholar's ideas, "Juno" was dedicated first at Norwalk, CT in the early 1980's and belongs to the artist's "Stonehenge Period".

I will have to dig into Metzger's book, which I now have ordered via Interlibrary Loan.
    Corcoran Gallery of Art and Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reuben Nakian: a centennial retrospective, 1897 - 1986 (Feb. 6 - April 4, 1999) (Reading, PA, 1998).

I will prefer looking at this book before I phone Robert Metzger, whose number was provided for me.

Surely there is some scholarly writing on the sculpture. But I haven't found it yet.

——— RTM


  

Monday, January 18, 2016

Abduction of Oreithyia by Boreas in Hitchcock's Vertigo

A large tapestry with a classical mythological theme plays an incidental role in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). There seems to me no likely interpretive connection between the film's Orphic theme and the tapestry's narrative. The tapestry depicts the abduction of Oreithyia by Boreas (Ov. Met. 6.683ff.) Just in case the allusion becomes apparently purposeful, I jot this quick note.

The setting is San Francisco's Palace of the Legion Honor, where Madeline Elster frequents the "Portrait of Carlotta Valdes". Directly opposite the Carlotta portrait the large colorful tapestry fills the wall. Scottie Ferguson lurks in the gallery tracking Madeline on his first day. Having ascertained that Madeline is mirroring Carlotta in posture and dress (minute 27), Scottie exits the gallery in search of a docent who can identify the portrait's subject. Hitchcock's visual shot has Scottie walk across the tapestry toward the camera. 
R-A Houasse (tapestry by P. Behagle Atelier; 1720) "Abduction of
Oriethyia by Boreas", Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

Rene-Antoine Houasse designed the silk and wool tapestry for execution in the French workshop of Phillipe Behagle ca. 1720. Designed as part of a series of tapestries with scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the piece represents conventional techniques and stylistic trends of early 18th Century neoclassicism. About 10 years before Hitchcock's film, the Legion of Honor (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) acquired the tapesty as a gift of Mrs. Bruce Kelham and Mrs. Peter Lewis. (art.famsf.org)

Vertigo(dir. A. Hitchcock, 1958); Scottie Ferguson exits the gallery in
the Palace of the Legion of Honor in front of the Houasse tapestry.
credit: 1000 Frames of Vertigo — frame 249 (click)
In the center of the tapestry (122 x 208 inches, overall) the winged Boreas, divinity of the North Wind, abducts the girl Oreithyia while the remaining seven earthbound daughters of the Athenian founding king Erechtheus, her sisters, manifest various expressions of distress. The story as told in Metamorphoses, an abduction that leads to the begetting of the Argonauts Zetes and Calais, can hardly now be counted among the most familiar of the narratives within that poem. It is slipped into the sequence of Athenian monarchy, right after the horrors of Procne and Philomela and right before Jason and Medea. Yet it contains many themes recurrent throughout the poem — abduction, divine coupling to produce prodigious offspring, and male imposition of power upon hapless girls.

Madeline's problematic identity notwithstanding, the mythological reference seems coincidental. Gavin Elster has hatched a plot together with a young woman whose name ultimately seems to be Judy Barton, "just a girl from Salina, Kansas" (1:35). The circumstances of Gavin's association with Judy/Madeline might be reflected in Boreas' abduction of Oreithyia. But the narrative never provides such information.

It would seem more logical to conclude that the tapestry is coincidentally hanging in the gallery where Hitchcock arranged for the Portait of Carlotta to be shown. That painting was commissioned and painted by John Ferren specially for the film. But the tapestry was displayed for several years as an actual part of the permanent collection. (It is no longer on display in January 2016.)

— RTM
OGCMA0277NOTBoreas_Houasse
______________
    For the Metropolitan Museum of Art's related holding, see Tapestry in the Baroque: threads of splendor (fig. 189, p. 415).
     Most information pertaining to this tapestry is taken from the FAMSF's website (consulted 18 Jan 2016): https://art.famsf.org/rene-antoine-houasse/abduction-orithyia-boreas-metamorphoses-ovid-series-19484

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Reuben Nakian's Juno ... OGCMA0515NOTHera_Nakian


Modern usages of classical mythology really interest me. Artists express various ideas by way of classical mythological allusions all the time. But, frankly, living in the western United States, I tend to bump into classical mythological usages a little less often than I do when I go visiting elsewhere. Still, sometimes, they're right under my nose!

On the north side of BYU’s Museum of Art a big abstract sculpture confronts nearly every visitor. Since I enter on the south side normally — coming from campus rather than from the parking lot — I experience that confrontation less often. Last week’s entrance changed that. Visiting the Norman Rockwell exhibition with my mother and her friend, I was asked “What is that sculpture?” I didn’t know.
A large abstract bronze sits atop a rectangular pedestal bloc. It abstraction — if I ever took time in the past to think about the sculpture — had made me liken the sculpture’s profile to the ridgeline of nearby Provo Peak and Cascade Mountain, and not so much to the outline of Mt. Timpanogos. Fortunately, in that moment of maternal interrogation I avoided professorial guff. I didn’t pretend to know what the sculpture was “doing”. It turns out, it has nothing to do with the mountain backdrop. The facts are on the bloc’s east face: “Reuben Nakian, American 1897 – 1986,  Juno, bronze”.

So. Um. It turns out the only thing I actually had right about the sculpture was its material — bronze.
Its creator is an American… I would have guessed European; maybe Scandinavian. Wrong. I’d never heard of Reuben Nakian. But the biggest baffler to me is that, even though I have professed to be interested in classical mythological usages, this looming bronze has been sitting in front of my museum of art for over 20 years and its one-word title gives it away as a usage of the myth of Juno, the Roman sky-goddess!

“I’ve got some work to do!” I confessed to my Mom.
That night I looked through the BYU-MOA on-line materials to find something scholarly about Nakian’s Juno, my new nemesis. I found very little, but in about 10 minutes of browsing, I was able to piece together some elements of apparent truth. So, I am resolved to learn more about this sculpture and work on it.
   What did Reuben Nakian have in mind when he named this mass of bronze after the Roman sky-goddess? Did he mean anything by it? Why call it anything at all? Is it a happenstance that this sculpture got so named? Did its acquisition at the BYU MOA happen because it’s called Juno?

Here’s what I presently know, listed not necessarily in the sequence I discovered the details:
The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 – 1990s does NOT list Nakian’s Juno, though it could have, since the sculpture was created over a decade before the OGCMA was published (1994).
      If it were listed in OGCMA, it would have been in the article on “Hera” on page 515.
                        OGCMA0515NOTHera_Nakian
       And its entry would look like this:
Reuben Nakian, “Juno,” abstract sculpture, 1980, Brigham Young University Museum of Art.

Nakian created many sculptures with titles drawn from classical mythology. Other titles include “Hecuba”, “Juno: from the Judgement of Paris”, “Minerva, from the Judgement of Paris”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Nymph and Seven Dolphins” and others.

“No other sculptor of the twentieth century has matched Nakian’s heroic grapplings with the grand themes of Western art, returning classical mythology to the foreground of human consciousness.” Robert Metzger, cited by Atelier Nakian http://www.nakian.org

When the “Juno” was placed at the north entrance to the Museum of Art in 1993, an article in the Deseret News included some information that might be considered authoritative. According to the article, “It represents an artistic style based in abstract expressionism, yet with a classical structure that was not embraced by abstract expressionists - according to Neil Hadlock.”
A summary accompanies it:
A sculpture by famed artist Reuben Nakian now graces the entrance to Brigham Young University's new Museum of Art. The work, an 8x8x8-foot, 4,900-pound bronze was lifted by crane July 29 onto a pedestal on the east side of the red granite museum.
Called ``Juno,'' the work was a National Endowment for the Arts commission Nakian received in 1981. It represents an artistic style based in abstract expressionism, yet with a classical structure that was not embraced by abstract expressionists - according to Neil Hadlock. Hadlock, a sculptor and member of the BYU art faculty, selected the work and oversaw the coloring of the piece at the Tallix Foundry in New York.”

The Nakian.org website has a plentiful bibliography page, with articles listed by decade. The Deseret News article is not listed.


The Nakian Atelier website lists approximately 100 scholarly works on the artist, Reuben Nakian, and his artistic production. My next step is to dig into the interesting items and see whether I can learn something about this work of art. Stay tuned to Mythmatters, if you care to see this story unfold.
Macfarlane's female relations and a friend pose on 30 Dec 2015 beside
Reuben Nakian's
Juno outside the BYU MOA.

—— RTM