LOUISE NEVELSON (1899-1988)
by Annette Baldwin

In December 1959, when opening night guests to Sixteen Americans at New York’s Museum of Modern Art entered the room filled with Louise Nevelson’s sculpture environment, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, they were stunned to find themselves engulfed in a world of white:  huge, white wall reliefs backed to the room’s stark white walls, and white, tall, heavily appliquéd columns standing poised on white bases or hanging from the white ceiling. 

Previous to this exhibition, Nevelson had been staggering viewers by the sheer size and complexity of her massive, abstract, black assemblages of shallow boxes filled with a vast array of wood shapes and found objects. Her powerful, energetic, startling collages, grounded in cubism, defied what history, critics and the public ordained as sculpture. It was also difficult to ignore the artist’s physical presence – a spectacular collage of fabric and pattern topped by bold jewelry. At Sixteen Americans, 60-year-old Nevelson was sharing the limelight with artists a generation younger than she. Eight more years passed before Nevelson received a retrospective for her astonishing career and was celebrated as sculpture’s Queen Bee. 

She described herself as a latecomer, but Nevelson had been studying and working at painting and sculpture for nearly 30 years, and it had been half a century since nine-year-old Louise declared to the librarian in Rockland, Maine that she was going to be a sculptor. It was a long and arduous journey to achieving the artistic recognition and acceptance she deeply desired.  The ride was often fraught with self-imposed detours and snubs from the art community. “Life isn’t one straight line,” she reasoned.

Nevelson impressed friends and colleagues with the fervor, boldness and totality with which she approached her work. She could also confuse, horrify, and offend them by alternating charm, warmth and friendship with rejection or rancor. The sculptor’s dramatic and spontaneous personality resonated in her art. “I don’t measure anything,” she declared. She worked intuitively and rapidly, and with her sculpture, paintings, drawings, cast paper reliefs, and prints combined, her output could challenge any prolific artist half her age. The enormous size and authority of her black, white, and gold painted “walls” and giant steel sculptures validate that Louise Nevelson, working in a white male-dominated art world, would never conform to the notion that the gender of the creator predetermines the productivity or the style and size of the art.  

She hated the word compromise, excusing herself for being self-centered, because she saw it as “a healthy thing.” She rejected marriage, finding it a form of “bondage,” and set aside responsibilities as a parent, albeit with agonizing guilt, to claim what she professed was “my true heritage.” She was driven by her uncompromising belief that her roots were in art and creation.   “Nothing – friendship, love, anything – will come to such a harmony or unity as you come to in your work.  The work and you are one.”  

RECOMMENDED READING

Lisle, Laurie. Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life. New York: Summit Books, 1990.

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

Rapaport, Brooke Kamin, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend, with essays by Arthur C. Danto, Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Harriet F. Senie, Michael            Stanislawski. The Jewish Museum, New York. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007.

ANNETTE BALDWIN

Annette Baldwin’s portrayals of unconventional women have been performed in nearly 200 cities across the U.S. An independent researcher in women’s history, Ms. Baldwin has appeared at libraries, colleges and universities, professional associations, community organizations, national and state conventions, and historical museums and societies, including the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Her performances as fashion designer Coco Chanel, Civil War spy Elizabeth Van Lew, humanitarian Jane Addams, journalist Dorothy Thompson, and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony have been on the  Chautauqua stages of Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Colorado. The 2010 High Plains Chautauqua marks her seventh Colorado performance.

LOUISE NEVELSON

QUOTES

“Isn’t it terribly conventional to be in a mold?  Well, I broke that.”

“We create our lives. I’m not going to accept words like luck and break…”

“All great innovations are built on rejections.”

TIMELINE