Sculptor Reuben Nakian is a short, bristling rock of a man with a pronounced stutter and an utter inability to feel anything mildly. As a rising artist back in the '30s, he nursed a great passion for contemporary heroes. He did powerful portrait busts of some of the men around F.D.R.—Henry Wallace, Rex Tugwell, General Hugh Johnson—and modeled Babe Ruth into an eight-foot giant with the air of an arrogant Hercules. Critics admired his work, but then something happened and Nakian all but disappeared.
The trouble was that Nakian felt he was crowding the "hairline between greatness and corniness." His work seemed...
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