A mainstay of the sculpture park on the Northeastern University Boston campus is ‘Reclining Man’ by Blake Edwards, the director of the “Pink Panther” movies and longtime husband of Julie Andrews.
Title: “Reclining Figure” (1997)
Artist: Blake Edwards (1922-2010)
Materials: Bronze (sculpture); black granite (base)
Size: 2 ft. X 1 ft. X 6 ft.
Location: Boston campus, Curry Student Center, next to the Koi pond.
About: Blake Edwards is best known as a movie director, with credits including “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Victor/Victoria” and the “Pink Panther” movies starring Peter Sellars. But he was also a prolific abstract painter and sculptor. In 2009, the year before his death, he told the Los Angeles Times that the first public showing of his work came in the early 1980s, during filming of the movie “The Man Who Loved Women,” starring Burt Reynolds. Reynolds played a sculptor in the movie, and Edwards wanted to use real, original sculptures in the film. Colleagues eventually convinced him to use his own.
“Reclining Figure,” an abstract rendering of a man lying on his back with his legs crossed, is one of Edwards’ larger bronze works. It arrived on Northeastern’s campus in 1997 as part of an effort to bring artwork to campus spearheaded by Stanley Young, a Northeastern graduate and standout football player for the university in the 1940s. Later a successful financier, Young led fundraising and leveraged his relationships with various artists to bring the first crop of sculptures and paintings to the Boston campus in the mid-1990s.
The human subject matter of “Reclining Figure” is a bit of a rarity in Edwards’ oeuvre; according to the LA Times, a recurring motif in his sculptural work is a sitting duck — “a pun-ish reference to his day job as a director of comedies.”