Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)

"First Personage"

"Mrs. N's Place"

"Ice Palace I"

"Sky Cathedral"

After reading "The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson," which contains a collection of essays by Arthur Danto, Brooke Rapaport, Harriet Senie and Michael Stanislawski, and "Louise Nevelson" by Nevelson's primary dealer, Arnold B. Glimcher, I got two very different impressions.  In "The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson," we get an image of the artist as being emotional, straight-forward, reasonable, and pretty nice.  The last adjective in that sentence might seem like a puzzling one to add, but I add it only because in the text by Glimcher, Louise comes off mostly as an arrogant, hot-headed, snobby brat.  It's not that the latter text portrays Nevelson committing some rude action, one after another, but rather, the few that are mentioned really stick out.  For example, Nevelson says that when she moved to Rockland, Maine emmagrating from Kiev, Ukraine (though she often refers to it as Kiev, Russia.  Stanislawski gets to the bottom of this in his essay, but I won't get into it here), she didn't connect with anyone in the area and didn't want to because she felt too big for Rockland... she was going to NYC.  This is understandable, but in Glimcher's book, we read about how Louise fondly remembers being referred to as "the artist" throughout her public education.  We read about how her upper-middle class mother dressed well and dressed her daughters in "expensive dresses [...] that evoked envy of her schoolmates" (pg 28).  Then only in Rapaport's two essays do we learn that, they were upper-middle class in Kiev, but when they came to the United States in the early 1900s (1905?), all that waited them around the corner was the Great Depression.  Not to mention the language barrier.  I just wanted to mention how the books differed in order to illustrate the occasional bipolar impression I got.  It is also important to note that Art Historians have had a hard time separating fact from fiction about Nevelson's life, mostly because Nevelson was the primary witness.

With that out of the way, I would like to address Louise Nevelson's sculptures.   The first image is a good example of her early work, "First Personage" was done in 1956, right about the same time she started doing pieces like "Sky Cathedral" (which she is most famous for).  She then tried white on them some time later, and then gold.  After that, she tries different materials like metal and plexiglass ("Ice Palace I"), but ultimately returns to her black boxes.  "Mrs. N's Place" was done 1964-77, so it spans over some time.  It should be immediately noted that (I think) "Mrs. N's Place" is the only enterable installation Louise Nevelson ever constructed.  It should dually be noted that the 1960s saw installation entering "the scene" (though Kurt Schwitters built "Merzbau" in the 1920s).  

Louise's black boxes are very strong pieces, but they unfortunately have very narrow possibilities.  I think in many ways leaving UBS has forced me to avoid an excess of repetition.  Granted, her earlier work was pretty different, but by the time the 1950s rolled around, her sculptures were fairly similar until the time of her death.  Earlier in her career she tried clay (seen above) and also marble, but Glimcher isn't so fond of the results, mentioning that the marble pieces have very surface level detail.  Glimcher reasons that marble is a very labor intensive material, and that Nevelson worked best with her intuition; she didn't have much patience... especially after smoothing out a chunk of marble.  Whereas found chunks of wood allowed her to work more sporatically.  Louise did move to metal and plexiglass later in her career, but Glimcher suggests Louise did so is that other people in "the scene" were pushing her to try something new.

Pardon the pun, but Nevelson ended up building a box around herself.  Her box pieces hit some sort of pinnacle that was problematic for her as an artist (even if she didn't recognize it or would disagree with me) because they felt so conclusive.  The black pieces really play well with the shadows it creates, and the box sculptures effectively battle with forcing a three dimensional space into a two dimensional space (not literally, mind you).  Formally, they are pretty brilliant.  Vaguely modular, but with varied composition in each box.  They created a very limited scope of depth.  They really play around with the cubist notions of space.  On a more poetic level, her boxes also speak to me about the bigger boxes, like architecture, the gallery, and our minds with their (arguably) impenetrable fourth wall.  The wall in our minds that don't allow us to see our behaviors and the consequences of our more subtle actions.

And this is what I think happened to Nevelson.  She trapped herself in her own box, she hit that fourth wall and just couldn't go much further.  I think that it is odd that she chose to change the colors of her pieces so late in the game.  Of all the things to vary, it is the easiest.  She was included in Sixteen Americans at the MoMA, which was also her first museum show, and she thought she would switch things by having an all white show.  I think this is a sign in and of itself that she's trapped.  Glimcher says that her black box pieces were widely accepted by curators and collectors, and so that for her first museum show, this was a ballsy move.  I hate to be so blunt, to be so "uncreative" and "unartistic," but then all she has to do is get some of her old work, and slop white paint on top of it.  I'm not saying it isn't an interesting variation or that the piece at Sixteen Americans was even bad--in fact, on the contrary, I think the idea of exaggerating the light by using white is smart.  It's a good variation.  But that's just what it is.  It is a small formal difference, ultimately.  Next, she tried gold, then returned to black, in part because she felt like she didn't totally explore all its possibilities (which I would agree with.  It's pretty great and really satisfying).  What I keep asking is: why did it take so long to try a new color?  I feel as though there is a weird threshold.  If she were to change colors rapidly instead of steadfastly sticking to one, I would see that she is really taking colors into account and carefully seeing which colors achieve what affect.  If she only used black her entire life, then I would see that she was really dedicated to black (though that's why she returned to it, right?).  Her switching it three times, unfortunately, makes me think of one thing: money.  

Before I continue, this it totally and entirely conjecture.  There is NO fact in the following paragraph whatsoever.  The black ones sold... but then they stopped selling, so let's change to white.  That grabbed peoples' attention, but it's fading already, so let's give gold a try.

Someone once joked, "so what's next year's color going to be?"  Unfortunately, I feel that this is more serious than humorous.  

I would like to change direction now and talk about the two key forces in Nevelson's work, or at least what the authors made it out to be.  There is some discrepency between and within the texts about what was important to the formation of these pieces for Louise.  Was it her life or her concerns with form and composition?  My argument is that the latter was of much greater importance for her.  Earlier I mentioned that Louise's father owned a lumberyard, a reason perhaps why she uses wood.  But I also mentioned that wood suited her impulsive process.  Well, which is it?  A simple answer is both, regardless, the lumberyard story was brought up in both texts and in both texts, it was not further explored.  Like, for example, how does the meaning of her works reflect her feelings for her father?  What does the wood represent (to sound a little corny)?  My feeling is that the wood doesn't represent anything.

But it isn't just wood, at least according to Louise.  I forget whether or not it was an interview, but a student from a school newspaper (I also forget the college) asked something to the extent of, "So you make black, wood, sculptures?"  Louise's response was that if that is what the student saw, then he missed the point completely.  Yes, that is was the sculptures were composed of, but those are just the mechanics.  

In one of Rapaport's essays, Brooke Rapaport applies similar reasoning to Louise's choice of black.  People ask what it represents, but Brooke argues that it doesn't represent anything.  As an example to her argument, she mentions a story in which a chinese artist paints while a passerby stops and watches.  The passerby notes that the chinese artist decided to paint a stick of bamboo red.  The passerby then asks, where have you seen red bamboo?  The artist counters with, where have you seen a stick of black bamboo?  Here again, Louise sides with a formal choice instead of an autobiographical one.  

In short, Louise is a strong formalist who hit a wall, who got trapped in her own box, and seemed to nestle in the corner.  She was born 12 years earlier than Louise Bourgeois, and so maybe she had to face more hardships than Louise, but for one reason or another, when it comes to Nevelson's work, I'm not so sympathetic.  Bourgeois showed us a great range of  variation within a specific framework with her "Personnages," but Nevelson's pieces unfortunately start to feel generic despite each one having great strength and a brilliant sense of form.

I want to end this by saying something very simple: every artist has their own process.