IVAN NARB: ABSTRACT SCULPTOR OF THE COSMIC
His esoteric aesthetique explained so that even you can understand it
By Gwendolyn Orloff
That the recent exhibition of abstract sculpture by Ivan Narb proved the big aesthetic event of 1926 is far from surprising—given the overwhelming originality of the sculptor’s conceptions and the bewildering variety of the media employed (tin cans, sealing wax, hay wire, candlegrease, birchbark, bottle glass, gingerbread, chewing gum, etc.) as well as the quite preposterous mastery of his materials which Narb displays at every turn.
The surprising thing is that, although no foreigner has ever been more ecstatically taken to the exclusive hearts of New York’s socially elect—no aesthetic more frantically welcomed by the esoteric salons of America’s intelligentsia, no celebrity more frantically discussed, no divinity more inordinately worshipped—the immutable personality of Ivan Narb remains just as simple and sincere, just as straight-forward and unaffected, as when he was hoeing his father’s potatoes on the solitary outskirts of the tiny hamlet of Blurb, in Latvia, and dreaming of the day when each animate or inanimate thing—a rose, a button, a cloud, an eyebrow, a mountain, a particular time of day, nay, even a potato—would flower forth in new and cosmic forms.
No one realizes better than Mrs. Harry Payne Vanderbilt how unspoiled and naif this ultramodern Michelangelo has remained, despite all the honours showered upon him during the past few months. Mrs. Vanderbilt (who numbers among her protégés practically every really well-known artist in America) arrived from Paris to find all tongues wagging with praise of Ivan Narb, whom she had never met nor, until that moment, heard of. Naturally she decided to give a little dinner for this social lion and invite everyone of intellectual prominence, from Otto Kahn to Irving Berlin. The dinner hour drew near and so did the guests, both invited and uninvited—but not Ivan Narb.
As time passed Mrs. Vanderbilt was on the verge of relinquishing all hope. But, suddenly, a tumult soared above the din of cerebral conversation and Ivan Narb himself, pursued by a round dozen of hysterical domestics, burst into view, wearing (to the disappointment of many present, including Mrs. Cornelius Astor and more especially Mr. William Wrigley, Jr.) a pair of B.V.D.s, and brandishing in one hand a red apple which he immediately presented to Dr. Frank Crane, murmuring, “Poo-ur twaw!” (for thee alone). This little incident is only one out of a thousand which we might quote to prove how lightly Ivan Narb takes pomp and circumstance.
BADLY BENT PIN. Here the Lettish sculptor has, in a strange medium, captured the hypnotic je ne sais quoi of sex—and captured it for eternity. |
HATLESSNESS. In this arresting sculpture, Narb has successfully battled with the problems of a fatally plastic ambiguity. |
But to return to sculpture. By “new and cosmic forms” we are, of course, hinting at something indescribable since mere words cannot possibly do justice to the intrinsically spiritual elasticity and the fundamentally plastic wistfulness of these perpetually astonishing creations. Glance, for example, at the two miracles of modelling exclusively reproduced on this page by kind permission of the artist and then allow the eye to dwell on their titles. To be sure, “Hatlessness,” “A Badly Bent Pin,” not to mention his other sculptures, “Coughing Birds,” “Y Minus Z,” “Portrait of Mlle. Enciente,” and “The Geranium’s Dream,” are arresting phrases. But they scarcely begin to suggest the rhythmically, almost fatally, throbbing ambiguity of Ivan Narb’s cosmically concocted abstractions. Language has no terms sufficiently subtle to ensnare that elusive and mystical quid pro quo which constitutes the hypnotic je ne sais quoi of this grand maître’s unique achievement. The very best critics can only throw up their hands and exclaim, as Mr. Henry MacBride of the Dial did, after viewing for the first time that chef d’oeuvre in pink sealing wax called “Twin Beds at Play”: “Honour to Ivan Narb! Thanks to his intuitive Lettish intellect, sculpture has at last torn asunder the bonds of naturalism and rushed forth barefooted and breathless into the starry domain of cerebral purity!”
We are willing to wager that, confronted by “X Minus Y,” Mr. MacBride would break down and weep for twenty-five minutes, as Babe Ruth did when the school children of Greater New York put their hard-earned pennies together and purchased for their hard-hitting idol a colossal, abstract composition modelled from life by Ivan Narb and entitled (by no less an authority on sporting matters than Mr. Gilbert Seldes) “Swat Triumphant!”
From every point of view, the influence which Ivan Narb has exerted on his contemporaries is well-nigh unbelievable. All over these United States, sculptors who formerly found marble and bronze sufficient for their needs are now turning to less inhibitory substances such as cement, rubber and glue, in order adequately to express their newly aroused cosmic yearnings; while vast multitudes of men, women and children, who never before realized their aesthetic endowment, are now eagerly rushing into the radiant realm of abstract sculpture. In a few years, at this rate, we may expect to see the tasteless and wasteful statuary of our public parks supplanted by vital and nearly costless forms, executed in the manner of Ivan Narb and portraying, not such outworn clichés as Victory, Grief, Admiral Farragut, etc., but the irrepressible and unrecognizable élan vital of modern civilization.
Already it is bruited abroad that the waterproof summit of a new Detroit superskyscraper is to be embellished with non-representational motifs, carved direct in the hard rubber by Ivan Narb and so gigantic that their least details will be visible to the naked eye of a nearsighted spectator situated a quarter of a mile below. This makes us wonder how the illustrious adorner of the Sistine ceiling would feel, could he behold his much touted achievement paling to complete insignificance before the heaven-flouting rubber raptures of Ivan Narb.
Incidentally, Ivan Narb’s triumphs are not confined to sculpture alone. As a writer, he has astonished his most ardent admirers. We refer to the only-just-published 969-page monograph (copiously illustrated with remarkable photographs by Edward Stieglitz of Ivan Narb’s sculpture, including every possible phase of the latter’s portentous personality) entitled: America’s Future Is Which? wherein, apparently, a multitude of new aesthetic principles are vividly formulated and impetuously developed to their startling, if logical, conclusion. What these principles or this conclusion may be, it is of course impossible to say; for Ivan Narb’s writing, like his sculpture, escapes all the vulgar limitations of ordinary meaning. But there can be no reasonable doubt that the writer visualizes America as poised upon the brink of an esoteric epoch, the inhabitants of which will consider our own era more ridiculously obsolete than we of today consider the stone age of our primeval ancestors.
At least, some such idea would seem to underlie the following dicta, which we snatch from a characteristically mystical chapter called: Pooh!
“What is to come? What? Who? Which? Cosmic Ascendancy? Scrapersky? Spirit of Looking? Spirit of Yes? Spirit of men and women? Manthing? Girlthing? You say Thingthing. They say Girlthing. Maybe yes. Knows nobody all. Knows nobody Future. Future? Pooh. Pooh is everything. Everything is pooh. Me, you; all is pooh. But also everything are we, you, they, me and Future. How come? H’m, dunt esk. Maybe Future equal to Lillian Russell hat on Javanese bellydancer.”
However we may care to interpret this significant passage, one thing remains indisputable—Ivan Narb’s prose style has brought to literature a new idiom; which fact strikes us as all the more extraordinary when we remember that he has just acquired a knowledge of English.
So much for Ivan Narb’s achievement. Now, in closing, the present writer begs to apologize for the incompleteness of this little essay. Her only hope is that she has at least avoided the pitfall of analysis into which many would-be critics of this new, unrecognizable sculpture have humiliatingly tumbled. As previously stated, the very essence of Ivan Narb’s art is its perfect unanalysability. Once analysis is applied, all is lost. Either you instinctively feel the beauty inherent in these occult forms, wrought by the mysterious hand of genius from lowly materials, from humble substances which have never before been called upon to bear the lofty message of aesthetic emotion, or—to put it bluntly—you do not. In the former case, you participate in a kind of religious experience, a new world opens its iridescent portals to your enraptured senses and your soul basks in the eternal sunshine of cosmic existence; whereas, in the latter case, you are a doomed spirit, forever suffering the trivial torments of ordinary humdrum, common or garden life.
For example: to the privileged man or woman or child who perceives the secret locked in Ivan Narb’s sculpture, a certain vaguely ellipsoidal form of which I am now clearly thinking, is a source of irrevocable bliss, of ceaseless revelation, of unending joy. To someone whose eyes are sealed by materialistic considerations, this same form is merely a potato.
Here, as elsewhere, it is our duty and our privilege to choose.
From Vanity Fair, March 1927.