| Born Leah Borliawsky in the Ukraine in 1899, Nevelson emigrated with her family from the Ukraine to a Rockland, Maine, at the age of six. On being the only Jewish immigrants in their Maine town, Nevelson once said, “They needed immigrants like I need ten holes in my head.” Her father worked in the lumber business and later owned a junk shop. Imagine the young Louise, scrounging around for scraps of wood or finding ways to play with them. Every artist’s work probably draws upon a few old reflexes honed in childhood by training, habit or serendipity—the reflexes of curiosity and play. |  |
Rough-Hewn and Silky Smooth – Elwyn Palmerton
Born Leah Borliawsky in the Ukraine in 1899, Nevelson emigrated with her family from the Ukraine to a Rockland, Maine, at the age of six. On being the only Jewish immigrants in their Maine town, Nevelson once said, “They needed immigrants like I need ten holes in my head.” Her father worked in the lumber business and later owned a junk shop. Imagine the young Louise, scrounging around for scraps of wood or finding ways to play with them. Every artist’s work probably draws upon a few old reflexes honed in childhood by training, habit or serendipity—the reflexes of curiosity and play. But her mother’s influence might have been equally important; she dressed the young Louise in clothing that would have been in high-style in the Ukraine and rouged Louise’s cheeks while the rest of their neighbors favored more traditionally American and utilitarian garb. This note of self-definition amidst the obviously attendant social or cultural isolation may have done as much to shape Nevelson’s sense of individualism as the influence of her father’s trade. No wonder then that, at the age of ten, she announced to a librarian, after seeing a bust of Joan of Arc in the library, that she would be a sculptor. This willful determination and avowed sense of destiny helped to shape Nevelson much later in life as well. After marrying and having a child, she left them in 1931 to go to Munich and study with Hans Hoffman before returning to the US for New York.
In 1959, Louise Nevelson made her big debut as part of a show of emerging artists at the MoMA, a show that included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. At the time, Nevelson was 60, while the others in the show were in their 20s or 30s. Of this fact Nevelson said, “My whole life has been late.” Although Cubism had a profound influence on her, she’s unified with this “generation” by her oppositional relationship to Abstract Expressionism—the dominant current in the art world at the time. Still, as with Rauschenberg and Johns, her relation to that movement may have been as much one of indebtedness and ambivalence as outright hostility. Her work is essentially abstract—and similar to some Modernist sculpture, like the work of David Smith, for example. Nevertheless, it’s also founded upon a distinctly anti-Modernist (or at least anti-Greenberg-ian) device. Her monochromatic sculptures—in black, white, shiny metal gold and bronze—are each composed of hundreds of scraps of found wood, large and small, each uniformly spray-painted before they are arranged into stacks of boxes or cubby-holes—a system that seems to run directly contrary to the Modernist axiom of “truth to materials.”
The alternation of saw-tooth triangles and graceful, sinuous curves in a Nevelson sculpture creates an indefinable mix of the angular and the lyrical, the rough-hewn and the silky smooth. These works evoke Pollack—not the famous drip paintings, but his earlier, rapaciously experimental drawings. This fact is notable, since both artists were deeply influenced by Picasso and Cubism. This mix of classicism and radicalism with mundane materials adds up to something fundamentally askew, definitely visionary and, given the familiarity of her source materials, paradoxically alien. Nevelson’s sculptures call to mind John Cage’s description of Robert Rauschenberg’s monochromatic white paintings, which he called “landing strips for shadows”—except that Nevelson’s works are more like labyrinths, jungle gyms or jagged, convoluted traps of light and shade than clear, safe strips. I wondered, while admiring these lusciously intangible surfaces, if this is how the blind map the world spatially, as textured, sculptural monochromes emerging from a void of pitch black and carved from the dark velvet of our mind’s eye—a set of spatial relations. We don’t see a Nevelson work so much as we palpitate it with our eyes.
The individual elements in her work are sensitively balanced between sculptural form and their previous functional or decorative lives—a trick accomplished by the application of monochromatic paint as well as compositionally by assimilating individual elements into a larger whole. These devices, as well as her pioneering of the territory of installation art before the term existed, make her an important precursor to artists such as Sarah Sze, Jessica Stockholder, Petah Coyne and Rachael Harrison—artists who work big, use paint (or in the case of Coyne, wax) to coat or transform objects, employ shifts of scale to similar effect and balance materials between art and life by manipulating them as form.
Nevelson’s work also taps into a deep and surprisingly loaded vein of memory by evoking our abstracted spatial sense of boxes and cupboards; how we naturally seek the most elegant or compact means of arranging objects in such spaces, and how our knack for organizing and cleaning—far from being systematic, particularly rational or exclusively utilitarian—dovetails in startling ways with our sense of aesthetics and emotional keel. For example, the work taps into how cleaning, arranging and organizing things—especially in times of stress or dismay—is a possibly universal (and probably not, despite stereotypes to this effect, primarily female) urge or psychic balm.
There is, however, something a little static about Nevelson’s work. The artist’s works never entirely escape from the claustrophobia of their grids and boxes, even as their internal relationships remain intuitive and fluid. There is a greater emphasis on parts than on the whole to some degree, especially in some of the large works. The gold and bronze pieces sacrifice shadow for light in a way that I find disappointing, and her draftsmanship is a little generic and too indebted to Cubism; her touch, it would seem, is essentially sculptural. The later work, including some experiments with screwed-together Plexiglass and metal, these with a Minimalist sense of polish, seems disconnected from her earlier practice and feels more like ill-considered trend following than development.
Nevertheless, the black and white installation pieces alone constitute a major sculptural accomplishment, one that ought to hold her equal to the canonical males of her generation. Why isn’t there a Nevelson in the MoMA? (They own one but it’s not typically on display.) Given that institution’s sterility, dearth of important female artists’ works, inclusion of a few too many second-tier male artists (R. B. Kitaj or Jim Dine, anyone?) and the increasing irrelevance, as well as distorted historicity, of its largely defunct master narrative, maybe it’s time for them to shake things up a little bit. Better late than never.
