Louise Nevelson, Transparent Sculpture IV, 1968, Plastic, 8 x 12 x 11 in. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; New York State Award/1968, 1968.8. © Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Louise Nevelson, Mrs. N’s Palace, 1964-77, Painted wood, mirror, 140 x 239 x 180", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, 1985 (1985.41), © Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 1987 MMA, photo by Lynton Gardiner.
Louise Nevelson, Dream House XXXII, 1972, Painted wood with metal hinges, 75-1/8 x 24-5/8 x 16-7/8", Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981, © Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
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de Young
Golden Gate Park
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco
415-863-3330
Herbst Exhibition Galleries
The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson:
Constructing a Legend
October 27, 2007-January 13, 2008
The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend is the first major retrospective in America in more than two decades to examine the work of one of the towering figures of postwar American art. Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was known for her monumental sculptures and her practice of constructing them from found wood. Her autobiographical works symbolically address issues of marriage, motherhood, death, Jewish culture, memory and (although she resisted the label) feminism.
Nevelson was born in the Ukraine and immigrated to the United States with her family six years later. Her life encompassed most of the 20th century, giving her exposure to Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and installation art. Although linked to all of these movements, Nevelson formed a unique visual language that earned her recognition as one of America’s most distinguished artists. Her work continues to inform contemporary sculpture nearly 20 years after her death.
The exhibition, organized by The Jewish Museum, New York, looks at the entire span of Nevelson’s career with more than 70 works of sculpture and drawings. Included in the exhibition are sculptures that were pioneering in the fact that they created discrete environments. Mrs. N’s Palace is a room-sized installation that envelops viewers; Homage to 6,000,000 I speaks to the seemingly unfathomable number of Jews who died in the Holocaust with a massive, curved wall; and Dawn’s Wedding Feast replicates a metaphorical wedding party, including the bride, groom and guests.
Her groundbreaking technique involved assembling cast-off wood pieces and transforming them with coats of monochromatic black, white, and (more rarely) gold spray paint. Nevelson’s work started with tabletop scale objects, but quickly grew into human-scale and room-sized works. Her later, monumental public works stood their ground with the buildings that surrounded them.
Despite the size and drama of Nevelson’s sculptures, they were at times overwhelmed by her larger-than-life public persona. She was known for wearing eye-catching assemblages of couture, ethnographic clothing, outsize jewelry and hats. A trademark look involved donning multiple layers of false eyelashes. “With the passage of time, Nevelson’s larger-than-life persona may be viewed in historical perspective, thus allowing viewers to focus on her extraordinary artistic legacy,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, Ednah Root Curator-in-Charge of the American Art Department.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Czarist Russia-d. April 17, 1988, New York, New York) was born in Ukrainia and is best-known for her abstract expressionist “boxes” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high: ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."
Born in 1899 to a Jewish timber merchant in the Ukraine, Leah (as she was originally known) migrated to the U.S. around 1905 after her father's business brought him to Rockland, Maine. Reports suggest the young girl played with timber almost from the time she arrived in Maine, and set her sights on becoming a sculptor by age ten.
In 1929 Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. In the early 1930s she worked with renowned Mexican painter and political activist Diego Rivera at the New Workers School, New York. During this period she worked as an art teacher with the New Deal's WPA. During the 1940s she showed five major exhibitions revealing the influences of surrealism and collage. The Circus, the Clown Is the Center of the World (1943) was the major exhibit of this period. She was prodigiously productive during the next fifteen years, as she evolved the sophisticated collage made of wood scraps that became her speciality. In her 1958 show, Moon Garden + One, walls of wood collages surrounded the viewer in darkened rooms. This helped secure her reputation as a pioneering American environmental artist and gave her a prominence she had never achieved before.
During the following two decades, Nevelson, known for her forceful public personality, a flamboyant style of dress, and her trademark false eyelashes, exhibited widely throughout the major art centers of the world and received many public commissions. To commemorate her work, the Louise Nevelson Plaza in Lower Manhattan, an entire outdoor garden of her metal collages, was established in 1978 and dedicated in 1979.
Nevelson died in her home in 1988, aged 88, but has retained her reputation as one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. She has been commemorated on a number of postage stamps since her death. Her son Mike Nevelson is also a sculptor, and two of his daughters, Neith Nevelson, from his first marriage to Susan Nevelson, and Maria Nevelson, are artists as well.
The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press have co-published a catalogue accompanying the exhibition. It is hailed as the most extensive study of Nevelson published in 25 years and includes essays by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the curator of the exhibition, and by Arthur C. Danto, Harriet F. Senie, and Michael Stanislawski. |
