Louise Nevelson

Art Career
1. At age thirty Nevelson began to study art at the Art Students League of New York. Two years later, she moved to Munich and studied under Hans Hofmann.
  1. After the Nazis closed her art school, she traveled around Europe before returning to New York and continuing to study under Hofmann at the Art Student League. In this time she also met Diego Rivera and assisted him on his mural Man at the Crossroads.
    1. Previously working as a stenographer, she experimented with lithography and etching, but ultimately placed her artistic focus on sculpture. Initially, her sculptures were made with plaster, clay, and tattistone.
      1. In 1935, she began to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in teaching and in the easel painting and sculpture divisions. As an artist during the Great Depression, she was impoverished.
        To get wood for her fireplace, Nevelson and her son would have to walk through the city streets gathering scrap wood. This experience would inform her future artistic focus on found objects.
        Nevelson’s work during the 30s did not exclusively focus on sculpture. She also worked in painting and drawing. Her early ink and pencil nudes appear Matisse-inspired and she also worked in oil painting.
2. In 1941, Nevelson began to gain more notoriety in the art world. She had her first solo exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery and gained media attention when she displayed a shoeshine box (a found object) at the Museum of Modern Art. She began to work extensively in stone, bronze, and wood making Cubist-figure studies in sculpture.
  1. One exhibition centered around the circus primarily containing found objects was received poorly by critics. This setback caused her to stop working with found objects for the next decade. During this time she cemented her style as a modernist sculpture, experimenting with Cubist and Surrealist sculpture.
    1. However, throughout this time, Nevelson was often excluded from major artist groups and was often disregarded for being a female artist.
      1. A critic is quoted as saying: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm...otherwise we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." She was often disregarded for not fitting the art world’s expectations of what an artist should be and look like.
3. A critic is quoted as saying: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm...otherwise we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." She was often disregarded for not fitting the art world’s expectations of what an artist should be and look like.
4. In the 1950s Nevelson’s work grew to monumental size. Nevelson was inspired by a visit to Latin America where she viewed the Mayan ruins and steles in Guatemala. Additionally, the street she lived on in New York City was targeted for redevelopment.
  1. This meant that there was a plethora of trash from construction and her evicted neighbors to pick from for her found object art. These scraps would inform her assemblage art during this period.
    1. Much of her work incorporated found objects inside wooden boxes. Wood was her most used medium in much of her sculpture. Her work Dawn’s Wedding Feast was exhibited at an art show at the Museum of Modern Art alongside works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
      1. Her work during this period, inspired by her travels to Latin America, focused on a spiritual closeness with nature and the relationship between art, the art’s environment, and the viewer. Another important theme in her work was her own complicated past, her contentious present, and her anticipated future.
        This theme was represented often with her repeating bride motif, as in her piece Bride of the Black Moon (1955). This motif represents Nevelson’s escape from being a simple housewife upon her divorce with her husband in the 1930s.
        In her later life, she began to also experiment with aluminum, plastic, metal (including newer metal mediums such as cor-ten steel), and plexiglas. Her later work had more generalized themes such as immigrant life in the US and urban life.
        In her 70s, she was commissioned by Princeton University to create a monumental outdoor sculpture. She made this sculpture out of cor-ten steel and entitled it Atmosphere and Environment X (pictured right). In this piece, she retained the box motif of her earlier sculptures, but in a different medium and without found objects.
        The piece consists instead of many boxes in a single wall which contain many different geometric forms. The work, inspired by Mayan and African art, forms a repetitive narrative structure and gives a sense of movement between each boxed section.
        The piece was originally unpainted, revealing the base cor-ten steel. However, the work allowed rainwater to seep in and suffered from major structural corrosion. Thus, the piece was painted black by conservators at Princeton University (with permission) to stop the corrosion, but it did not help.
5. Nevelson’s life paved the way for many female artists after her. Throughout her life, she challenged the preconceived idea of an artist as an old man. Her art in its monumental style even further challenged stereotypes of women in sculpture.
  1. Her dark, monumental, Mayan-inspired sculptures were perceived as masculine in form and uncharacteristic of a female artist for the time. Nevelson did not believe in this categorization of art as masculine or feminine and saw the art as simply reflecting the individual, no matter how it was perceived.
    1. Despite being a feminist inspiration for many female sculptors, she herself often disregarded sexism in the art world as a response to a lack of confidence and did not identify with being a female artist, instead wanting to be seen as simply an artist.
Art Style
1. Nevelson very frequently worked with boxes, especially wooden boxes. These wooden boxes would often frame found objects as part of a wall. This wall acted as a collection of windows through which one can view these objects singled out.
  1. She would describe these walls as “environments.” These wall sculptures were then painted a single color, often black or white to eschew the original use of the found objects. In her training under Hofmann, she was trained to work with a limited color palette to build discipline.
    1. This limited color palette is reflected in her characteristic monochromatic assemblages. An example of one of these characteristic wall sculptures is Black Wall.
      1. Black Wall is a wall-like assemblage of twenty-four boxes, each containing found objects from the streets around where she lived in New York City. Similar to Duchamp’s Fountain, Nevelson eschews the original purpose of the found objects.
        Black Wall is a wall-like assemblage of twenty-four boxes, each containing found objects from the streets around where she lived in New York City. Similar to Duchamp’s Fountain, Nevelson eschews the original purpose of the found objects.
2. Another characteristic wall assemblage by Nevelson is An American Tribute to the British People (pictured left). An American Tribute to the British People is another wall-like assemblage consisting of third-five wooden boxes. The boxes in this sculpture are much more shallow than in other similar assemblages giving it a relief-sculpture-like appearance.
  1. The boxes contain a variety of found objects, some identifiable, such as furniture legs or decorative trim for a house, and some completely unidentifiable and abstracted. It is likely this is not the only version of the sculpture that has existed. Nevelson would often use sculptural units in other sculptures and would frequently rearrange the boxes in her sculptures.
    1. The original invoice for this sculpture specifies forty boxes, so the sculpture likely used to be much larger. An American Tribute to the British People also steers away slightly from the black or white color schemes of Nevelson’s other wall sculptures, instead opting for a matte gold painted finish.
      1. She experimented with matte gold paint in the 1960s and used this color in her immersive collection of sculptures for her representation of the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1962. Nevelson describes the gold paint as both representing nature, as in sunlight, and prosperity.
3. Nevelson did not exclusively work in sculpture. Her piece Untitled (1967) was a lithograph created during her artist fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.
  1. She made twenty-six lithographs during her fellowship and experimented with many unconventional materials, such as cheese cloth, lace, and different textiles to make interesting textures on the pieces.
    1. Please note that most of the twenty-six lithographs were also titled Untitled and were also made in 1967. These pieces are very similar, but specific reference to one of these lithographs is very difficult without an image. Untitled was made with a slightly irregular placement to give it the offset positioning of some of the individual prints.
Basic Information
1. Louise Nevelson (born Leah Perliawsky) was born in the Russian Empire in 1899, but immigrated to Maine in the early twentieth century. Nevelson was Jewish and spoke Yiddish at home during her childhood, learning English at school.

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Louise Nevelson

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