In a previous book, The Spirit of Man: The Sculpture of Kaare Nygaard published in 1982, the well known sculpture and art critic, Dr. Nathan Cabot Hale, reviewed Nygaard's life and sculptural work in a meaningful depth.
Nygaars says that this present book might have turned out to be a personal confession, an analysis, at points a psychoanalysis of his work with its apparent dualism, but clearly without dichotomy. He caries out in his numerous vignettes, each one corresponding to the illustrated sculpture, an honest scrutiny of a human being who naturally and persistently throughout a long life tried to fill his existence with deep professional responsibility to the society in which it has been his privilege to operate in gratitude, and with some deep professional and artistic consequences to himself and maybe to others.
Kaare Nygaard, surgeon, scientist, sculptor and writer was born in Lillehammer, Norway.
He graduated from medical school in Oslo, in 1929 and four months later come to the United States for postgraduate surgical training, mainly at The Mayo Clinic. He has worked here for over fifty years. Six years ago he completed five decades of a very active surgical life. His sculptural activity, started when he was a teenager, is still pursued in a fortunate daily enterprise.
His bronzes have been shown in exhibits in New York, in Texas, in Minnesota and Australia.
Recognition for his sculpture has been accorded by The United Nations through the issuance of a commemorative stamp illustrating his well known creation Refugees, alias Hiroshima; the Mayo Clinic art collection in Rochester, Minnesota; the Percy Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia; the Crow Sculpture Garden in Dallas; and private acquisitions in the United States, in Canada and in Europe.
Many world-renowned personages became his patients and friends: Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Percy Grainger, etc. and many more of "the famous", and not so famous.