Agostini in Soho // by Scott Sherk

One day, sometime in the 70’s when I was attending Haverford College, I was invited by my teacher, Chris Cairns, to go to New York to do something with Peter Agostini.  Chris had organized a retrospective exhibition of Agostini’s sculpture at the college, and we were returning the work to Agostini’s Greene Street building.  I seem to recall that we had some difficulty locating Agostini—the buzzer at the building was either non-existent or broken.  There was waiting around.

Soho in those days was a very different place.  Large trucks were parked along the loading docks and the area looked rough.  The sidewalks were mostly empty with an occasional worker passing.  Trash was present.  Greene Street was barren— no boutiques, no bars, no cappuccino, no tourists.  I was left on the street to guard the van.  Sometime later I was sent out to find coffee, which I bought from a window somewhere, maybe on Broome Street.  There were no restaurants.  Sometime later, I helped load things into Agostini’s elevator and into the basement.  Upstairs his loft was raw, filled with stuff, and very dark.  He was still living in the East Village.  I vaguely remember a washing machine.

Eventually Chris, Agostini, and I walked over to West Broadway. Chris and Agostini were deep in conversation with me following a step behind when we were hailed from across the street, “Peter!  Pete! Great to see you!”  Agostini stopped in his tracks and turned to face a dapper young man who was rapidly crossing Spring Street.  The guy was really happy to see Agostini and gushed about him and his work.  This short conversation reached its climax when he said something like, “Let’s do something, Peter.   I really want to show your work.  Let’s do a show.”  Agostini looked alarmed and said, “Can’t you see I’m talking to my friend Chris?” and we walked away.  

“Jeez”, I thought, ”so this is how it works”.

Scott Sherk is an artist living in Pennsylvania with his wife, artist Pat Badt.  He is a professor of art at Muhlenberg College and his work is exhibited regularly at the Kim Foster Gallery in New York.  His work can be viewed at thethirdbarn.org.

Learn more about Peter Agostini on his profile.

Photos from WiredNY.com

Peter Agostini's 12th Street Studio, as Photographed by David Carrow

For most of the 1960’s, Peter Agostini had a studio on 12^th Street in Manhattan, between Avenues B and C.  In the early 70’s, he purchased a building on Greene Street in Soho, and the12th Street studio was left unused for several years.

David Carrow, who was a student of Agostini’s at the New York Studio School, and later, his graduate assistant at UNC Greensboro, remembers telling Agostini he wanted to photograph the old studio before it was cleared out.  “The place had become sort of a tomb," he told me recently.  "It was very quiet and dusty.  There was no activity in there, which was so interesting.  I remember just saying, I gotta get in here and take some pictures because this is just fantastic with the light coming in on all the plaster and just the kind of decay and deterioration that was there, because nobody had been moving things around for a while.”

The resulting photographs, 20 in number, show the studio as it stood sometime in the early 70’s.  Agostini worked mostly in plaster during his years on 12^th Street, making many of his famous swells, cast balloons, drapery and found objects, and these pieces can be seen as they sat on that day, abandoned and in disrepair, covered in dust, beautifully lit by a combination of natural light and fluorescents.

The studio space measured 125 by 25 feet, with concrete floors, a sink, one skylight and a four-burner stove, the only source of heat.  Eventually the building, across the street from Public School 61, was condemned and became a parking lot.  Where the pieces in the photos are today is unknown, as is the exact date these photographs were made.


See more of these photos on our Flickr page.

Click photos to enlarge.

Learn more about Peter Agostini on his profile.

Peter Agostini

(Peter Agostini, 151 Avenue B, 1960)

"That is the prime thing—to generate 'up'—leverage, elevation. The balloons rising, clothes on a line being picked up by the wind. The same with my horses. Whatever use they are, my horses are about flight, bursting out."
(Peter Agostini)

(Balloon Fountain, 1962, plaster)

Peter Agostini exploded on the New York art scene in 1959 with his first one-man show at the Galerie Grimaud. He was 45 years old. In 1960, he began showing at the Stephen Radich Gallery and, over the next few years, was celebrated by Time and Art News and participated in the 1964 World’s Fair exhibition, alongside Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Mallary.

Prior to his debut, Agostini worked as a mold and mannequin maker, skills he learned during the Depression as part of the WPA. He made sculpture in his kitchen, which doubled as a studio. In this tiny space he made horses, burlesque queens, and heads in clay and wax.

"One person who really motivated my mind was Michelangelo. Raphael was another. And Botticelli. What about their works? I have no idea . . . the essence—the life force—that they imbued into their pieces. They made what was, real. I’m not talking about realism. I’m talking about creating a reality." (Peter Agostini)

(Marina head, 1945, bronze)

(figure, 1957, bronze)

Peter Agostini was born in Hell’s Kitchen, a then-tough neighborhood on New York’s West Side, in 1913. His mother died when he was three, and he spent some time at a school for orphans before his early education in a Catholic school, which ceased after the eighth grade. Agostini was a self-taught artist whose only art training was one year at the Leonardo Da Vinci School in midtown, a school run by the sculptor Onario Ruotolo and sponsored by Benito Mussolini. Ambitious from the start, he made a 40” plaster figure, The Swimmer, while in attendance. At Leonardo Da Vinci, Agostini met artists George Spaventa and Nicolas Carone, with whom he had life-long friendships.

In the late 1950’s, Agostini moved into his first studio on 10th Street. His work of that time was impulsive, and to accommodate its spontaneity, he began fashioning sculpture directly in plaster, working it in its fluid state. In the 60’s, his plaster work was distinctive for its extreme immediacy. Anticipating Pop Art imagery, he cast and assembled with incredible assuredness newspapers, balloons, egg cartons, clotheslines, pillows, corrugated cardboard, truck inner tubes, bottles – all sorts of disparate objects – “frozen from life.” He made “instant sculpture” whose characteristics were speed, luminosity, and explosiveness that ran the gamut from figurative to abstract. He had a great gift for enlivening inert matter, and a fluid control of the unyielding materials he used.

"His forms totally are seductively inviting. They are nerve-wrackingly intense, made now, for now . . . live now, die later." (Art News, Dec. 1960)

(Squeeze, 1963, bronze)

(Saracen, 1960, bronze)

In 1960, Agostini was hired by Andre Racz at Columbia to teach sculpture and drawing. He had had no previous teaching experience and had to invent his own way. His approach was to direct the student’s observation through demonstration, without giving any verbal instruction. This hands-off teaching style appealed to many young students, including Christopher Cairns, Bruce Gagnier and Jonathan Silver. As a teacher Agostini combined an intense charismatic charm with a certain detachment, always putting emphasis on personal expression. His approach had no artifice and his presence was electric. He consequently had many devoted students. In 1969 he joined Spaventa on the faculty of the New York Studio School where he often worked from the model alongside his students. Agostini also taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and was a Distinguished Visitor at Haverford College.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, Agostini returned to figuration, producing a series of old men, female heads and large horses. For Agostini, there was no difference between representation and abstraction. In their commitment to mass and form and in the masterful modeling technique employed, these works were as related to his “swells” and “squeezes” of the 1960’s, as they were influenced by Michelangelo and Leonardo. Grounded in his lifelong habit of drawing from the figure, and reflecting his personal experience of aging, these works demonstrate consummate observation and distillation of form, and marriage of subject to that form.

"Meaning is always a big problem. Like in art, you don’t really know how to get it. But when it happens, it’s already enough. The power of meaning is a very, very difficult thing to approach." (Peter Agostini)

(Apollo, 1975, bronze)

Agostini showed regularly at the Radich Gallery until 1969, when the gallery closed. He subsequently showed at the Zabriskie and Bernice Steinbaum Galleries, among others. By the end of his life, Agostini’s work would appear in more than 25 one-man shows and more than 100 group shows world-wide. His work can be found in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Walker Art Center.

(Winter Wall, 1962, plaster)

(Burlesque Queen, 1965, plaster)

(The Hurricane, 1962, plaster)

Peter Agostini died in 1993 at the age of 80 at his home in Manhattan.

Text adapted with permission from an essay in the exhibition catalog for the 2006 show Five Sculptors.

Additional photos of Peter Agostini’s work can be viewed on our Flickr page.

The 2nd, 8th, 9th and 10th photos (from top) were taken by Don Cook.

See also:

Peter Agostini's 12th Street Studio, as Photographed by David Carrow

Agostini in Soho (a guest post by Scott Sherk)