At Yale

The decoration of the Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges at Yale University is perhaps Nivola’s most successful example of the dialogue between sculpture and built environment.

In 1959 Eero Saarinen – at that time the most celebrated architect of his generation in America – writes to the artist asking him to work on the project for the colleges. Saarinen, who was inspired by San Gimignano and the Medieval towns of Italy, does not ask Nivola for an individual sculpture or simple wall decoration, but rather a “whole atmosphere created by sculpture and relief in relation to the architecture”. Nivola accepts the challenge and produces 43 works: three-dimensional sculptures, reliefs and fountains carved from blocks of semi-solid concrete (his technique of cement-carving).

The work is completed in 1962, one year after the death of the architect. Appearing at various heights throughout the campus the sculptures, some large and solemn, other small and subtle, form a visual itinerary full of surprises and unexpected perspectives. Made of concrete like the buildings, the art work blends in harmoniously and accompanies the visitor without imposing its presence on his attention. Nivola comes close here to realizing his dream of a full integration between art and architecture.

Painting / Sculpture

Microcosm / Macrocosm

At the beginning of the Sixties Nivola starts to use clay for small-format pieces, enjoyed as completely free forms of expression, an alternative to the rigors of public works subjected to the whims of clients and the requirements of architecture.

The Beds, inspired by Etruscan sarcophagi, embrace by extension the totality of human existence: conjugal life in all its variants, moments of solitude, happiness and despair. Nivola places them on white bases, imbedding them in sprouting grain, a symbol of rebirth traditionally used in Sardinia during the rites of the Holy Week. From the microcosm of the Beds, Nivola moves with the Beaches to the macrocosm of nature. He delineates swiftly marine landscapes in which small figures rest on a beach or swim towards the horizon. In the series Gods and Humans, clouds take the shape of pagan deities that watch over unaware mortals below.

In the Seventies, Nivola, disillusioned and critical of contemporary society, produces new beds and beaches, humorous and sarcastic, often explicitly sexual, and creates the series Swimming Pools, sites of urban amusement in which bodies amass and every relationship with nature is negated or distorted.

After the Second World War, the monument as artistic form is regarded with suspicion because of its associations with totalitarian regimes. The statue of the leader in the middle of the city square is rejected as rhetorical and false. The proposals of artists and intellectuals such as the Spanish architect Josep Lluís Sert – linked to Nivola by friendship and by a professional relationship – rethink monuments as possible fulcrums of new city centers, designed on an environmental scale, employing architecture and sculpture to create experiences of visual wonder for a better daily use of city spaces. Public art is for Nivola primarily a matter of civic responsibility, a simple and concrete way of improving people’s lives. He writes: “If artists and architects fail to meet the challenge of making cities more beautiful, others, less equipped with imagination, and groups lacking civic responsibility will continue to perpetuate the architectural evils of our cities.” In the years of maturity, however, the sculptor begins to favor the utopian and visionary dimension of the monument. Some of his projects will never come to life because of external circumstances, others, born as works of imagination, remain valid regardless of their chances of being realized.
“With time,” says the artist, ”I learned to appreciate the utopian quality of imagination, almost preferring it to actual realization, which always involves some inevitable disillusion”.

At the end of 1963, Nivola is asked to design a square in Nuoro, dedicated to the early-twentieth century poet Sebastiano Satta. This will be the first public artwork by Nivola in Sardinia (another would be his commission for the seat of the Sardinian Regional Council in Cagliari twenty years later). The artist does not just design a traditional monument; with his friend, the architect Richard Stein, he reworks elements of the entire space, including its park benches, the white walls and blue skirting board of the surrounding houses, and the type of pavement. Instead of a central monument, Nivola situates large boulders in various parts of the square. He places small bronzes in niches. These show the poet in his daily activities. Nivola envisioned Piazza Satta as a communal living space in which to walk and pass time, as well as a memorial wherein to reflect.

In 1968 Nivola starts working on a monument to Antonio Gramsci to be built in Ales, Sardinia, home village of this famous political theorist. Nivola regarded Gramsci as the “greatest of the Sardinians”: one who overcame humble origins and acute physical disabilities to become an intellectual of historic importance.
The monument, designed with Richard Stein, evokes the Fascist jail where Gramsci was imprisoned, and also the room where, in his childhood, his mother would suspend him in the air in a misguided attempt to correct his disability. The door, only 1.55 cm tall, encourages the visitor to lower his or her head in a gesture of respect. The absence of a roof represents the ability of Gramsci’s thought to reach far and wide, in contrast to the sense of restriction conveyed by the two bronze portraits of Gramsci as a child and as a prisoner. According to Nivola, who felt spiritually close to Gramsci, the monument is not a simple commemoration but an occasion to meditate on the thought and life of the philosopher of Ales.

In 1960, in occasion of the competition for a memorial dedicated to Roosevelt in Washington D.C., Nivola reflects on the form and meaning of the American flag, at that time a recurring element in the works of New Dada and Pop artists. Translated in three-dimensional forms and in monumental scale, it would have become a livable space similar to the one envisioned for the monument to the “Sassari” Brigade. The stripes are curving walls, as if  moved by the wind, creating corridors through which visitors would walk, flowing as if in a “land of opportunity”, toward a cluster of tall columns—the stars of the fifty states. Towering columns, in a geometric vertical group, form an interesting juxtaposition with the waving horizontal alleys (the stripes).

In the Eighties, inspired by the period he had spent in Washington as a juror in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition, Nivola returns to the FDR project, now imagining it built in marble, and widening the scope of its content with a collection of small statutes of various other illustrious figures in American history interspersed between the pillars of stars. The anarchic spirit of Nivola and his awareness of the contradictions of consumerist society do not prevent the artist from picturing himself as one of the many migrants who had lived the “American dream”. Beginning circa 1974, Nivola returns to making a series of paintings that revisit American cityscapes, especially of New York. (His earlier versions had been in the 1940s.) They capture at once the magical vitality but also the edgy, chaotic qualities of the city. “I am determined – he writes – to put everything I know about the subject, the art of painting and the discipline of seeing in a series of paintings. It will be hard work, not a joyous task but a somber, objective and truthful approach to a realistic and merciless city”. Vehicles, pedestrians, the old bricks buildings, the imposing skyscrapers of glass and steel – all this and more is fused in an urban scene that is at once recognizable and abstract.