Words Paul Laster Archival Images Courtesy of Fondazione Nivola

Originally published in No 12

Nivola: Sandscapes opens May 8, ’21, to January 10, ’22, at Magazzino.art Cold Spring, NY.

TINO, Nivola in America, a book by Marco Anelli in collaboration with Magazzino, is being released in March ‘22.

One of first artists to settle on the East End of Long Island, the Italian painter and sculptor Costantino Nivola was a key figure in the development of the Hamptons’ vibrant art scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism — yet his name is hardly recognizable today. 

Purchasing a farmhouse, in 1948, on thirty-five acres of overgrown property in the Springs — just down the road from friends Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, who had moved there in 1945 — Nivola and his German-Jewish wife, Ruth Guggenheim, who was known for her jewelry and textiles, designed a dynamic garden realm, where artists, architects and other creative spirits regularly congregated. 

Born in 1911, in the small town of Orani on the island of Sardinia, Nivola worked after school with his father, who was a master mason. At 15, he left home to become an apprentice to a painter commissioned to paint a fresco at a local university. Five years later, he moved to Monza, near Milan, to study painting and decoration, and later graphic design, at a Bauhaus-style industrial school, where his teachers included artist Marino Marini and architect Giuseppe Pagano. 

After graduating, he was hired as a graphic designer by the Italian typewriter manufacturer Olivetti, where he soon became an artistic director in the publicity office, and also assisted Pagano on the Italian Pavilion for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. The following year, he married Ruth and took up residence in the French capital, but fearing arrest for his anti-Fascist activities back in Italy, they emigrated to New York in 1939.

Initially, things were difficult but Nivola soon landed a job as art director for Interiors magazine, which brought him into contact with creative expats, including Josef Albers, Walter Gropius and Josep Lluis Sert. And by 1944, Austrian architect Bernard Rudofsky was commissioning him to create plaster statues for the exhibition Are Clothes Modern? at the Museum of Modern Art.

When WWII ended Nivola considered returning to Italy but, after seeing the devastation to Milan, he was drawn to the Hamptons. Acquiring the 18th-century farmhouse, which oddly consisted of a labyrinth-like series of small rooms with 35 doors, he gutted the interior — tearing down the walls that weren’t load-bearing and removing the doors, molding and ornament. 

Nivola designed the furniture and his friend Le Corbusier, with whom he shared a Manhattan studio, painted a pair of murals on adjoining walls as a house-warming gift. The Swiss-French architect and artist, who was a mentor to the younger Italian, was frequently in New York at the time when designing the UN headquarters.

Collaborating with Rudofsky again in 1950, Nivola designed an outdoor garden that extended the entertainment space of the house. An intersection between art, design and daily life, it had freestanding walls that functioned like abstract sculptures and planes for paintings; a shade-producing pergola covered with cascading wisteria; a solarium for outdoor sunbathing in any season; a fountain fashioned from suspended strips of copper, and a fireplace oven and grill. 

Rudofsky had previously experimented with this style of residential garden, but Nivola made it his own with colorful Cubist murals on the solarium and grafitto scratched into the stucco walls. Besides Pollock and Krasner, other regular guests included artists James Brooks, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne; photographer Dorothy Norman; architects Peter Blake and Frederick Kiesler; art collector and developer Paul Tishman, and scores more.

It was within this creative context that Nivola made his greatest artistic discovery. Playing on the beach with his children, he poured plaster over a sand sculpture and, after studying it, he reversed the process by carving into the wet sand and filling it with plaster, to make a relief, which he found more compelling. Transforming the pioneering process from play to work, he cast a series of totemic figures, based on prehistoric Sardinian icons, that he exhibited in a solo show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

Sandcasting became a game-changer for Nivola. Encouraged by Le Corbusier, who told him to add something new to his art and design oeuvre, Nivola began experimenting in earnest, making larger works in rectangular frames of sand, such as the 1953 relief, Deus, a 5.5 by 3-foot piece now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The innovative artwork appeared right around the time that Olivetti was planning a high-profile showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue. After selecting the Italian architectural firm BBPR to design the space, Olivetti’s former artistic director, who had established a reputation in New York, seemed like a perfect fit for the art.

Commissioned to design a 15 by 75-foot mural for the north wall, Nivola created an outdoor studio with a giant, horizontal sandcasting field, divided into vertical components by boards. Working on the ground — like his pal Pollock, who also occasionally painted outdoors — Nivola walked across the boards to work on each defined section, which he carved into wet sand and then filled with plaster to complete the parts of the bigger picture. Although his work didn’t look anything like his expressive, action painter neighbors, art critic Harold Rosenberg dubbed him an “action sculptor” for his improvisational approach.

Once opened, the Olivetti showroom — like an Apple store in its time — was the talk of the town. Even though it featured surreal marble pedestals rising from the floor to display typewriters and calculators and Venini-designed lighting, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called Nivola’s mural “the most successful and significant element of the design,” and other rave reviews followed. It was Nivola’s big break, which set the stage for the forms and symbols that he would refine throughout his career.

While he often made smaller works that could be exhibited in galleries, he never sought the public persona coveted by his peers. The son of a mason, he relished the collaborations with architects, working with some of the best of his time, including Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen. He also taught at Harvard and Columbia, in the States, and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in The Hague, which was a proud achievement for an immigrant.

Nearly forgotten after his moment passed — apart from a celebratory museum featuring an assortment of his work that opened in Orani, in 1995, and a survey at the Parrish Art Museum, in 2003 — Nivola’s humanist pursuit of a synthesis of the arts and innovative, DIY casting technique are ripe for resurrection now. Two revitalizing exhibitions, Nivola in New York I Figure in Field, which highlighted his public projects in the city, at the Cooper Union in 2020, and Nivola: Sandscapes, on view at Magazzino Italian Art, this year, have the shared goal of bringing his fascinating work back into the limelight.

Whereas the Cooper Union show presented an overview of his city projects and a field guide to find them, the Magazzino exhibition explores his unique process of sand-cast sculpting through reliefs, sculptures and rarely seen maquettes — lent by the artist’s estate — from his most important architectural commissions. Inspired by nature and continuously working within it, Nivola made meaningful contributions to modern urban architecture and design, yet his impact is only beginning to be fully understood.

Nivola: Sandscapes, curated by Teresa Kittler, Magazzino's 2020–21 Scholar-in-Residence, is on view May 8, ’21, to January 10, ’22, at Magazzino.art.

Paul Laster is an art journalist and independent curator. He’s New York Desk Editor at ArtAsiaPacific and a frequent contributor to Time Out New York; Art & Object; and Galerie Magazine.