home>learning resources>work of the month

SEARCH THE COLLECTION

EXHIBITIONS THE COLLECTION EDUCATION CALENDAR OF EVENTS PLANNING A VISIT GETTING INVOLVED PRIVATE EVENTS NEWS & INFORMATION MUSEUM SHOP

work of the month

---

My total conscious search in life has been for a new seeing, a new image, a new insight. This search not only includes the object, but the in-between place. The dawns and the dusks. The objective world, the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and sea…

Whatever creation man invents, the image can be found in nature. We cannot see anything that we are not already aware of. The inner, the outer equal one.

—Louise Nevelson

Environments & Essences

Original installation of Dawn’s Wedding, Whitney Museum of American Art

At the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) came to prominence with an approach to art that has been described as a new “sculptural genre.” Works from that period such as Sky Cathedral (1958) and Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959) shown at the Grand Central Moderns and MOMA, respectively, were hailed by critics as “environments” or intricate metaphors unlike other variants of modern sculpture. By the 1960s, John Canaday, who called Nevelson a “sculptural collagist,” said of Sky Cathedral:

… [it] is a typical example, and still one of the best, of her black walls composed of (in its case) some 50 or 60 crates or rectangular [crate-like] enclosures each containing its own composition of assembled objects, everything from broken moldings, balusters, corbels, and other architectural fragments to bits of furniture, splintered slats and pieces of wood in shapes that look familiar but are unidentifiable. Their original identity, however, is beside the point: it vanishes within the sculpture’s new identity as an elaborately complicated whole, mysteriously shadowed, and beyond explanation.

Time Magazine’s art critic, Robert Hughes, echoed this vein of thought in the 1960s by identifying Nevelson’s “… encompassing ambition… to make a continuous surface so full, so engrossing and so minutely articulated with variety of detail that it can work as an abstract metaphor of nature itself.”

Why do you think Nevelson was seen as such an original in the context of the 1950s and 1960s? What clues do you see in Dawn’s Presence?

In 1959, with the showing of Dawn’s Wedding Feast, Nevelson made a dramatic move from her monochromatic black painted sculptures to a completely white sculpture. The visual effect was startling to those who had known her work for 25 years prior to it coming to public prominence. Where the black sculptures had the visual impact of

… looking… at a dark reef of nuances: form laid beside and over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention… [in the white works such as Dawn’s Wedding Feast] Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white not black. The chalky surface now produced an effect of mummification, not atmospheric distance; the calcined forms, visually explicit, retreated from the eye in a startling way… (Robert Hughes)

In either case – black or white – one of Nevelson’s great innovations, according to Hilton Kramer, is her departure from modernism’s “open-form” sculpture. He notes:

She did something… that was both new and audacious in the 50s… She transformed the reigning genre of open-form sculpture into an art of closed-form sculptures. Open-form sculpture, sometimes described as drawing in space, was, as this term suggests, airy and linear, and by literally enclosing its forms in box-like structures, she restored a sense of depth and interiority to abstract sculpture at the same time that she expanded its range to the dimensions of a visionary architecture. This altered the very character and scope of constructed sculpture. No longer did it address us as a discrete object in space; it became instead a container and shaper of space. Thus its interior was visually enlarged, and endowed with a new capacity for mystery and metaphor, even as its external reach was radically extended into the real space that we, as spectators, shared with it.

Though Dawn’s Presence only represents a portion (column) of the environment Nevelson created for her overall installation, one may see both the innovation and metaphor brought to this new mode of sculpture.

Why do you think Nevelson made an all-white sculpture in the 1950s?

“You know, black is for me the shadow of the universe, white its reflection. Gold, now, represents the sun, the moon, and the stars. So, I identify closely with the elements that are so important in nature. And black, white, and gold are really not colors, but elements.” —Louise Nevelson, 1979

Many have speculated about this artist’s move to white, then gold sculpture; still later, to other media such as Plexiglas and steel. Nevelson’s uncomplicated answer was affordability. Early in her career the bits, boxes, and scraps of found wood could be collected ceaselessly and brought home to contemplate. As her fame grew so did her commissions; all media was then affordable and thus engaged. The color of Nevelson’s wood sculptures and her initial change from black to white in 1959, however, remain intriguing. Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy C. Miller, who was an early ardent supporter of this artist, claims that the flamboyant Nevelson – who loved theatre, dance, and textiles – saw her unveiling of Dawn’s Wedding at that museum in 1959 as her public marriage to fame and lifelong recognition as a great artist. Since the 1930s, Nevelson had worked, exhibited, and received tepid recognition. With her two seminal New York exhibitions during the 1950s, she was on the threshold of becoming a canonical modern artist. Thus, the move to white from black in her signature wood sculptures might be seen as a way to celebrate and welcome her now respected status in the world of art.

Though Nevelson was an unquestioned sculptural innovator, every artist has influences that are embraced and considered, if not transcended. In the exercise below, consider how some of these art movements may have brought insight to Nevelson’s work:

SURREALISM

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

CUBISM

COLLAGE

COLOR-FIELD PAINTING

If, as has often been said, all the arts aspire to the nature of music, i.e. the immediate communication of thought and emotion through form alone, without reference to a specific verbal meaning or to everyday visual reality, then Louise Nevelson’s art must be counted among the most original musical/sculptural coalescences of our time. Like Mozart or Bach, the artist has devised tireless and untiring variations, improvisations, fugues, canons, and cadenzas, within a rigorously organized framework. The boxed compartments of her walls, like musical compositions, contain ‘movements’ of great gravity and thoughtfulness, ‘phrases’ that sparkle with wit and playfulness, and bursts of pure ornamental fioritura. . . (John Baur)

—Dr. John S. Welch

Sources

Baur, John. Nature in Abstraction. New York: MOMA, 1958.

Canaday, John. “Louise Nevelson and the Rule Book.” New York Times, 6 April 1969.

Hughes, Robert. “Tsarina of Total Immersion.” Time Magazine, 16 June 1980.

—. “Nature’s Queen Bee.” Time Magazine, 12 January 1981.

Kramer, Hilton. “Nevelson’s Dazzling Feats.” New York Times, 11 May 1980.

Louise Nevelson, ex. cat. Rockland, Maine: William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, 1979.

 

Reproduction, including downloading of Nevelson works, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.