Bernard Reder, Head of a Centaur, Bronze, 1955, 2/II
A centaur regards the world from some interior distance — Bernard Reder's bronze head, dated 1955, cast in the year he returned from Italy transformed.
ARTIST: Bernard Reder (Ukrainian-American, 1897–1963)
PERIOD: 1955
CATEGORY: Sculpture
MATERIALS: Bronze with dark patina
DIMENSIONS: 25 h × 15½ w × 14 d in.
INSCRIBED: Signed and dated "Reder 1955" on neck; numbered "2-II" on verso
PROVENANCE: The Boca Raton Museum of Art
CONTEXT: In 1961 the Whitney Museum gave Bernard Reder a solo retrospective — the first time in its history the museum devoted three of its floors to a single artist. Reder's work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museu d'Arte Moderna in São Paulo, among others. As his career progressed Reder moved from realism toward a rhythmic abstraction, as expressed in works including the Centaur's Head. This bronze, dated 1955, was made the year after Reder returned from Italy where he had studied the lost-wax casting technique that would define his late work — a period of extraordinary productivity that produced some of his most powerful mythological subjects. The head is cast in a very small edition, numbered 2-II, and carries the Boca Raton Museum of Art as its provenance. The surface is alive with the marks of Reder's direct modeling in wax — no distance between the hand and the metal. When the Nazis destroyed Reder's Paris studio, all his plaster works were lost with it. The bronzes he cast after arriving in America are the only surviving record of his mature sculptural vocabulary. This is one of them.