Bruno Lucchesi - Modeling the Head in Clay

WATSON-GUPTILL PUBLICATIONS/NEW YORK

Edited by Connie Buckley
Designed by Bob Fillie, Graphiti Graphics

Copyright 1996 Bruno Lucchesi and Margit Malmstrom

First published in 1979 in The United States and Canada by Watson-Guptill Publications, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
www.watsonguptill.com
www.crownpublishing.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lucchesi, Bruno, 1926
Modeling the head in clay/Bruno Luchhesi and Margit MalmstromPb ed.
Includes index.
1. Head in art. 2. Modeling. 3. SculptureTechnique.
I. Malmstrom, Margit. II. Title.
NM1932.L8 1979 731.74 79-350

ISBN 0-8230-3099-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-78645-6

All rights reserved.

v3.1

This book is dedicated
by the artist to Carlo and Paul
and by the author to Sabu .

We would like to thank the Forum Gallery, New York, for making many of the photographs of the artists work reproduced beginning on available for publication. The photographers are: Marvin Bolotsky, Edith Kroll, Walter Rosenblum, and Stefano Sabella.

Thanks also to Marcella Schumann for her special and much appreciated help in developing the film for the demonstration sequences.

Bruno Lucchesi was born in 1926 in the village of Fibbiano, high in the mountains of Tuscany, in the province of Lucca, Italy. His family, like all the villagers, were farmers and shepherds; they raised the food they ate and made the clothes they wore, and as a boy Bruno took his turn on the steep mountainsides to tend the sheep. But young Lucchesis artistic gifts were early recognized and he went to study art in Lucca and later in nearby Florence. When not in school, Bruno prowled the streets and museums of Florence and learned by heart the lessons of the greatest masters of Renaissance art. He was especially drawn to the architecture of Brunelleschi and Alberti, the sculpture of Tino di Camaino and Donatello, and the work of the Mannerist painters Pontormo and Il Rosso.

In 1957 Lucchesi came to the United States, where his sculpture was a radical departure from what was being seen at the time. His work springs directly from the nourishing Tuscan soil and the long tradition of Italian Renaissance art. It is realistic, approachable, understandable, and executed with consummate skill. It is beautiful in its grace of line and expression. And, in addition, it has an intimacy and a sense of pathos and humor that are completely contemporary. The excellence of Lucchesis work was instantly recognized, and over the years his sculptures have been added to the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, The John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, and The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among others. His work is also well represented in many private collections, among them the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection and the Albert A. List Collection. He has received awards from the National Academy, which elected him Member in 1975, the National Arts Club, and the Architectural League, and he was a Guggenheim Fellow in 196263.

Lucchesi is perhaps best known for his smaller figures and his genre sculptures, but he also does many major commissioned pieces that are lifesize and larger. Among these are his heroic-size bust of the poet Walt Whitman, installed in 1971 in Arrow Park, Monroe, New York, andmost recentlya heroic-size statue of Sir Walter Raleigh commissioned by the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, installed in 1976.

Lucchesi lives in New York, where he takes time out from creating new work to teach packed classes at the New School.

The sculpture of Bruno Lucchesi may be seen on permanent display at the Forum Gallery in New York, which has been his exclusive dealer since 1960.

MOTHER AND CHILD.

Original clay relief, 66" 39" (167.6 99 cm) Photo Malmstrom

MOTHER AND CHILD.

Original clay, lifesize. Photo Kroll

WALT WHITMAN.

Bronze, 5 feet (1.45 m) high. Arrow Park, Monroe, New York. Photo Sabella, courtesy Forum Gallery, New York

SITTING PRETTY.

Terracotta, 12" (30.5 cm) high. Photo Kroll

LOOSE STRAP.

Terracotta, 12" (30.5 cm) high. Photo Kroll

TROJAN WOMEN.

Terracotta, 18" 27" (45.7 68.6 cm). Photo Malmstrom