Untitled [Maquette for William E. Grady Vocational High School, Brooklyn, NY]

Nivola was invited to contribute a work to the William E. Grady Vocational High School, following widespread acclaim for his monumental bas-relief for the Olivetti Showroom, NY. Plans for the modernization and construction of schools across the city were approved in 1954 and a four-story building was commissioned by the architect studio Katz, Weisman, Blumenkranz, Stein & Weber for a high school in Brooklyn. Nivola was invited to create a large-scale sandcast measuring ten meters in height. The artist designed a cartouche or carved tablet, based on an abstracted figure. Smaller sections within the tablet depict educational themes, the humanities and the industrial arts that could be studied at the school. A tribute to the history of proportion is included by the artist through a simplified version after Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490) and Le Corbusier’s Modulor, designed in the 1940s to bridge the metric and imperial systems of measure. The iconic graphic representation of the Modulor, which consists of a stylised figure with an outstretched arm, is instantly recognizable in Nivola’s sandcast and a nod to his mentor, Le Corbusier, whom Nivola had first met in the mid-1940s. Nivola made both positive and negative casts of his work: the former helped him understand the overall composition; but he would work from the negative cast when he was carving. The sculpture’s placement on the south wall of the building emphasizes the shadows cast by the natural light, animating the bas relief.