Reuben Nakian

Sculptor, born in Long Island, New York, USA. He studied at the Art Students League (1912), was an apprentice to Paul Manship (1916), shared a studio with Gaston Lachaise (1920–3), then moved to Stamford, CT (1944). He specialized in animal and heroic subjects, and later, expressionistic sculptures, such as ‘The Dance of Death’ (1967).

Reuben Nakian was an American sculptor, illustrator, and teacher.

Nakian's recurring themes are from Greek and Roman mythology.

Nakian met and befriended painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in the 1930s and Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s.

Poet Frank O'Hara was the curator of a Nakian exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. In the exhibition's catalog, O'Hara notes,

Nakian is unrepressed, un-neurotic, unabashed in his approach to sensuality, however tortuous his esthetic commitment, and whether his subject be death, bestiality, or Arcadian dalliance. Unlike most sexually oriented images in modern art, from Rodin to Andy Warhol, one finds no guilt or masochism in a Nakian. It is outgoing and athletic even in its releases and defeats: the satyr, the bull, the swan, the goat are each circumvented or absorbed by the goddess of his choice in the most choice of circumstances, that of his own choosing, like the amorous "dying" of the Elizabethans or the Metamorphoses of Ovid.

Nakian taught at Newark's Fine Arts and Industrial Arts College and at Pratt Institute in New York City. Among Nakian's students from his days teaching at the Newark School of Fine Arts is sculptor Larry McCabe and painter and sculptor Anthony Triano.