LOUISE NEVELSON, INNOVATOR

LOUISE NEVELSON, INNOVATOR

by Libby Clay

Dawn's Landscape XL

Memories of the artist Louise Nevelson (1900-1988) conjure up a woman with exotic eye make-up and scarf-wrapped head who created distinctive assemblages, painted black, white or gold. Dawn’s Landscape XL, an anonymous loan, is painted white, a treatment Nevelson associated with stillness, as at daybreak.  Each of the many pieces of wood in her “boxes” was chosen by her to relate to the piece next to it.  When composing a sculpture she worked at a feverish pace, lest she lose her instinctive relationship with the wood—scavenged from the streets, lumber yards and furniture factories.  She “knew” where each scrap should go, and eating and sleeping were put off until she had completed a work. 

At the age of four and a half, Louise Berliawsky emigrated from Russia to Rockland, Maine, with her mother, sister, and brother.  Her father had preceded them and had set up a lumber yard from which he built houses. She followed the process of his building their own house, learning from him about different woods and techniques.  Once the house was built, Louise’s favorite chore was rearranging furniture. Spatial relationships fascinated her.

She always knew she was an artist.  She drew constantly and was so good that her high school art teacher did not believe, at first, that her work was her own.  The teacher was so impressed by Louise’s talent that she gave her private lessons and encouraged her to attend an art school in a nearby town.

After graduation from high school Louise met Charles Nevelson, a young man from New York whose family had a shipping business in Rockland. Nevelson wooed and won the beautiful dark-eyed young girl and they married.  In New York, a city she loved more than anywhere else, Louise studied music, drama and dance.  She also began afternoon classes at the Art Students League.  Eventually a son, Myron, called “Mike,” was born. Although she was devoted to Mike, her marriage did not last.  Her artistic self always dominated her domestic self.

Her mother, herself unhappily married and unfulfilled, urged Louise to leave Mike with her in Maine and go to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann. This was 1931. Hofmann, Louise had been told, was the one person who could teach her to understand cubism and the works of Picasso and Matisse.  Indeed, her drawings at this time, stressing line, were very much like Matisse. Hofmann stressed the mysterious quality of creation itself, the intuitive aspect of art, and this was the relationship Louise would have with her sculptures.  Hofmann’s “push-pull” theory proposed that shadow was as valid as light, and this light/shadow relationship would be the reason she eventually painted her sculptures.

Back in New York in the mid-1930s, Nevelson was stimulated by the artistic community and continued to produce drawings and paintings, but not yet sculpture. She knew John Flannagan, with whose wife she studied dancing. The popular Diego Rivera was in New York, painting the Rockefeller murals. He and his wife Frieda Kahlo were charming hosts to many artists, and Rivera was a “soft touch” for money for poorer colleagues. An evening’s entertainment might be a group of these artists creating a painting on a restaurant tablecloth with wine, colored sugar, salt—whatever was available.                                                                                                                  

Nevelson soon began to turn to sculpture, which she considered a form of drawing.  At first she worked in clay, but that became more and more expensive.  After World War II, there was a great surge of renovation and remodeling, and New York streets were a repository for discarded bits of architectural material, furniture, and odd bits of wood.  She became an inveterate scavenger, hauling as much home as she could.  One day she found a number of liquor crates, and these became the genesis of her assemblages; she filled them with carefully selected, related pieces of wood.  Eventually she got the idea of dipping the pieces in matte black paint before placing them in the boxes. This way she could see their form. She called them “table-top landscapes.”                                                          

                                                          

The artist’s 30^th Street home, all four floors of it, was filled with pieces of neatly stacked wood, her raw materials, and completed works. Sometimes she would save a piece of wood for years, until the time when it would be “just right” for one of her sculptures. Eventually, to make room, she got rid of all her furniture save her bed, bedding and a red refrigerator.

She had this to say about her work: “When I pick up a piece to put in a piece, it’s living and waiting for that piece. You don’t just break a thing and put it in… That’s why I pick up old wood that had a life, that cars have gone over and the nails have been crushed…you’re taking a discarded, beat-up piece that was no use to anyone and you place it in a position where it goes to beautiful places…museums, libraries, universities, big private houses…those old pieces of wood have a history and drama.”

Louise Nevelson was unique.  She was an artist to the core. She saw, thought and felt as an artist. Even her dress declared that.  She wore no make-up save three pairs of false eyelashes glued together.  She felt naked without them. She wore beautiful scarves on her head and chose combinations of clothing that mixed both fabrics and time periods, but it worked for her. She was very feminine, yet it never occurred to her that she might not be accepted in the male-dominated art world of her time.

********

Just as the contents of Nevelson’s sculptures relate to each other, so does Dawn’s Landscape XL relate to other art in the gallery.  First, there is Hans Hofmann’s Ruby Gold as an example of an early influence that later translated into the shadow of her boxes.  Across from it are Ilya Bolotowsky’s Untitled (Relational Painting), David Smith’s Big Diamond and Alexander Calder’s Untitled Mobile.  These all contain shapes that relate to each other.  John Flannagan’s Fawn is an example of the use of another kind of found material, and O’Keeffe’s Jawbone and Fungus translates found objects into painting.  On the other side of the gallery is Lionel Feininger’s Zirchow VI, an example of cubism. There, too, is Joseph Cornell’s The Admiral’s Game. (See Joan Yanni’s article in the May 2002 Newsletter.)  Peto’s Articles Hung on a Door is an example of things that had former life, just as Nevelson’s wood had. Finally, as you stand in front of Dawn’s Landscape XL, look at the shadows the pieces create.  Look at the depth the shadows create. Would you have lit this piece differently?  At what height would you hang it in your home? Would you want to dust it?

Source: Dawns + Dusks, Louise Nevelson; taped conversations with Diana MacKown, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York 1976.