Art: Sand Sculptor

To most artists sand sculpture rates about on a par with building a snow man. But Sardinian-born Costantino Nivola, 44, has found a way to turn his vacation-time doodlings on the beaches of Long Island into one of the liveliest and most pleasant new sculptured ideas of the decade. Last week Nivola’s growing reputation got another big boost. National Memorial Park, across the river from Washington in Falls Church, Va., which already boasts the late Carl Milles’ 38-figure Fountain of Faith (TIME COLOR PAGES, June 27), unveiled its second major sculpture grouping: Nivola’s $50,000 memorial fountain dedicated to the four World War II Army chaplains* who gave their life jackets to enlisted men and went down with the torpedoed troopship Dorchester in the North Atlantic on Feb. 3, 1943.

Out of the Sandpile. Sculptor Nivola’s method is simple enough to inspire a whole school of do-it-yourself followers. Trained during his boyhood as a mason and stucco decorator before he won a scholarship at Milan’s Art Institute, Nivola was struck one day by the fact that his sand doodles could be cast simply by reversing the patterns and filling them with plaster or concrete. When the first casts came up covered with fine-grained sand Nivola was delighted to discover that they combined the texture of sand with the permanence of stone.

Nivola’s first exhibit of his new sand castings failed to sell. But France’s famed Architect Le Corbusier, then in Manhattan working on the U.N. Secretariat, visited Nivola’s studio and became an enthusiastic admirer of Nivola’s work. Said Le Corbusier: “A clean-cut sculptural form. . . Only plastic ideas cleanly conceived can be written in unstable sand.” Other architects agreed, snapped up Nivola’s idea to decorate their buildings with sand murals. Among them: Italy’s Olivetti Co (typewriters and calculating machines), which commissioned a 15-ft.-by-70-ft. mural for its Manhattan offices, and Industrial Designer Raymond Loewy, who used a Nivola mural to decorate the entrance of a Fifth Avenue apartment building.

When Nivola was approached by Washington Architect Walter Marlowe to design the Four Chaplains Fountain he jumped at the chance. “Sardinians have a great and terrifying regard for the sea,” he says. “Most of them, including myself, have never learned to swim. ”

Above the Water. To depict the dramatic sinking of the Dorchester Nivola designed a huge 22-ft.-by-24-ft. hull of white, reinforced concrete, balanced it over a broad fountain basin which flows inward with a whirlpool motion to a small central oval. For the four 6-ft.-tall sandcast plaques, set just above the water to memorialize the four chaplains, Nivola also went back to an early inspiration, the semi-abstract holiday bread loaves made by Sardinian women. For his motifs Nivola picked four common aspirations: the clasped hands of prayer, conflict of good and evil, family unity and the outward-giving hands of charity. Asked why he did not do the obvious and portray the four chaplains, arms linked, on the Dorchester’s sloping decks, Nivola replied: I think TV or the movies can tell stones better. I wanted to give people something they could think about.”

* The four: the Rev. George L. Fox, Rabbi Alexander D. Goode, the Rev. Clark V. Poling, and Father John P. Washington.