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)

George Spaventa

George...was a man of eloquent silences. His work breathes with the eloquence of his muteness. (Elaine de Kooning, 1978)

                                                             Torso, 1968, 21"h, bronze 
George Spaventa was a thoughtful, somewhat reclusive artist who claimed that the ideas for his sculpture came to him in dreams. He was born in New York City in 1918, where he studied as a teenager at the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School. After serving in the military during World War II, Spaventa studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill. There, he worked with Ossip Zadkine, visited Brancusi in his studio, and had the good fortune of meeting Giacometti, one of his great influences.

Spaventa's work was small, intimate, molded by hand in clay or wax and later cast in bronze. Besides Giacometti, his influences included Medardo Rosso and David Smith. In a 1964 Art News review of Spaventa's first and only New York solo show during his lifetime, his good friend, the poet Frank O'Hara, described his work:

In Spaventa, the emphasis is on the hand, and handling. With the single exception of Nakian, it is difficult to think of an American sculptor who has insisted more upon the imprint of his finger, thumb, wrist and arm. Sensitivity to the material is there, but first and foremost the material itself is required to be capable of sensitivity to Spaventa.

                                                             Head, 1955, 17"h, bronze
He was a methodical worker, not particularly prolific, and it wasn't until he was in his mid-forties that he had his first solo show, the first of just two. His work was exhibited in a number of group shows, however, in the 50s and 60s, including the Annual Exhibition 1962 at the Whitney Museum, and an exhibition entitled, Four American Sculptors, which also included Peter Agostini.

Spaventa was especially well liked and admired by many sculptors and painters of his time. He was particularly associated with a group of artists who worked on Tenth Street in New York City, and developed what came to be identified as the "Tenth Street Style." They included, among others, Milton Resnick, Earl Kerkam, Franz Kline, Peter Agostini, and Willem de Kooning, with whom Spaventa was sometimes compared, and who once said about him, "When I look at George's sculptures, I wish I had made them myself."

Spaventa was one of the founding faculty members of the New York Studio School, where he taught until he died. Students remember him perpetually encircled by a cloud of smoke, ashes dropping from the lit cigarette in his mouth onto the clay as he rearranged their pieces with crushing movements and inarticulate grunts.

Spaventa found verbal expression difficult and would demonstrate with his hands and whole body in making a point. During the late 70s he would often comment on the work of Matisse, Michelangelo, and Brancusi using the words "oneness...plasticity..." over and over. He spoke about visiting Brancusi on Sundays when all the artists opened their studios. He once asked Brancusi about The Endless Column. Brancusi answered only by breathing deeply. George interpreted this to suggest that the column was about breath. He would often refer to a picture in the Matisse Sculpture book of Jaguar Devouring a Hare after Barye. He would demonstrate how Matisse simplified the thrust of the jaguar by drawing his finger (with dry clay on it) along the form on the page. I am sure that that streak of clay is still on the book in the Studio School Library. (Scott Sherk, 2006)

Despite the public nature of his teaching life, Spaventa spent much of his time alone, in a life dedicated to art. He died of a heart attack in his studio in 1978. His work has been shown just twice since his death.

                                                          Figure #1, 1963, 13"h, bronze
I originally wrote this essay for the 2006 catalog for Five Sculptors, an exhibition of work by Peter Agostini, Christopher Cairns, Bruce Gagnier, Jonathan Silver, and George Spaventa.

Photos of sculpture courtesy of  Christopher Cairns and Vita Litvak
Photo of Spaventa from 1979 Gruenebaum Gallery catalogue.

Sources:

O'Hara, Frank. "Introducing the Sculpture of George Spaventa." Art News, April 1964, p. 15.


Kramer, Hilton. "Uptown: Intimate Sculptures Grace Tribute to George Spaventa." The New York Times, 11 January 1980.


Exhibition Catalogue:  A Tribute to George Spaventa, New York: Gruenebaum Gallery, Ltd., 1979.