Louise Nevelson life and biography

Louise Nevelson , also known as: Leah Berliawsky, Louise Berliawsky Nevelson born September 23, 1900 in Kiev, Russia - died April 17, 1988 in New York, New York, United States was an American artist and author for young adults.


After a long struggle to get her sculpture noticed by the art world, Louise Nevelson finally won recognition for her work in 1959, at the age of 60, when she was invited to participate in a group exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "By the time she died in 1988 at the age of 89," Carol Diehl wrote in Art in America, "her public sculptures dotted the American landscape, and, honored by presidents and universities, she was hailed as a national treasure." Cassandra Langer, writing in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, explained that Nevelson "was considered a towering figure in postwar American art. Her monumental installations and innovative sculptures made from found objects and wood greatly influenced the creation of many celebrated works of art and public site pieces."

Once she had won the art world's attention, Nevelson relished publicity and behaved the way the public wants an artist to behave--with style and vivacity. "Nevelson made old age the stage for a fashion revolution," Leslie Camhi wrote in the New York Times. "Gradually, her full-blown style emerged, an immense collage whose elements were subject to miraculous transformations--the head scarves and multiple pairs of false eyelashes, the ethnographic jewels and enormous furs, the couture garments layered under and over peasant clothing." "With her Tiparillo cigars, false eyelashes, crazy hats and the unconventional fashions she ... designed for herself," Roberta Brandes Gratz elaborated in the New York Post, "Louise Nevelson ... clearly established that she [was] one of those marvelous, off-beat characters who know they are characters, enjoy the image and never fail to live up to it."

The traditional problem with maintaining a dramatic persona, Robert Hughes noted in Time, is that it often leaves little time for work. Yet this was not true for Nevelson, the critic asserted--in her early eighties, the artist continued to produce prodigious amounts of work, inventing new modes of expression. Nevelson completed a total of forty or fifty pieces a year. "She [was] so entirely involved in doing that she [didn't] pause long enough to let us see her as monumental," said Ms. contributor Ruth Adams Bronz. Nevelson's creations have met with high praise, but the sculptor's obsession for work characterized her entire artistic life, including many years of little public recognition and not a single sale.

"It's a miracle that I survived and rose above it," Nevelson told Leslie Bennetts of the New York Times about those lean years. "It's like a horse that has these blinders on. I didn't know that I could do anything else; I felt art and I were one. No sacrifice was too much; it was just more important than whether or not I was sleeping on the floor or getting a good meal." After two decades of enduring success, little bitterness remained from that time; Nevelson told Ray Bongartz of the New York Times that one of her happiest moments came late in life, when she gave work valued at 350,000 dollars to the Whitney Museum. "I was high ... and joyous, because I had never given anything of this size. I thought, a millionaire can give only one little piece, but I, as an artist, can give much more, and it was very satisfying. I hope I live long enough to make that look small."

Nevelson and her Russian-Jewish family immigrated to Rockland, Maine, in 1905. Although her father would later become a successful lumber merchant, he began as a scavenger who searched through the town dump for useable objects to resell. "It's interesting to note," wrote Diehl, "that his means of survival ultimately became a component of his daughter's as well." Louise was ambitious and headstrong even as a child, feeling her artistic calling early. "I had a blueprint all my life from childhood and I knew exactly what I demanded of this world," Nevelson explained in her memoir Dawns and Dusks: Taped Conversations with Diana MacKown. "Now, some people may not demand of life as much as I did. But I wanted one thing that I thought belonged to me. I wanted the whole show. To me, that is living." The sculptor often told the story of how, as a small girl visiting the library, she was asked by the librarian what she wanted to be when she grew up. "An artist," she replied immediately. "No--a sculptor; I don't want color to help me." And then Louise ran home frightened and crying, overwhelmed by what she had just said.

Nevelson's tenacious pursuit of artistic realization prompted her to leave her provincial home town as soon as she could, marrying Charles Nevelson, a New York shipping broker, in 1920. Once in New York City, Louise plunged into dance, voice, and art studies, enjoying the freedom and cultural activities that the city had to offer. In 1922 the couple had a son, Myron. "When the marriage ended in divorce and Mrs. Nevelson began to pursue her artistic career in New York and Europe in the early 1930s," Andrew L. Yarrow wrote in the New York Times, "the son was reared by various family members in her home state of Maine. Until the last few decades of her life, contact between the two was relatively limited and their relationship was often strained."

In 1931 Nevelson traveled to Germany to study art with Hans Hofmann for a year; on her return she became an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Nevelson showed her first sculpture in 1933 at the Brooklyn Museum, and she continued to work non-stop for the next twenty-five years without commercial success, sometimes burning whole collections of sculptures because she had no room for them in her studio, sometimes scavenging from finished works parts for new ones.

By the mid-1950s, Nevelson had emerged as a significant force in American sculpture. She was constructing freestanding, wall-sized assemblages consisting of boxes, shelves, found wood scraps and furniture parts, all painted black. Douglas C. Mcgill in the New York Times described these works as "the walls of black wood collage that, when first shown to the world, did not look like sculpture at all, but something like environments or stage sets or grandly cluttered closets or tool sheds." An essayist for Contemporary Women Artists described Nevelson's work of the time: "Large low relief panels in boxwood, some more than eight feet tall, offered their black presences with mystery and an aura of religious solemnity not denied by the evidence of their source materials--cheap boxes with fitted ingredients of newel posts, chair legs and bevelled shelf edgings and, now and then, a rude hunk of unplaned wood. This compartmentalization of the relief wall emphasized the multiplicity of the contained detail so that on each shelf appeared what seemed the miniature furnishings of a chapel in an overcrowded baroque cathedral." Diehl described Nevelson's wall-sized assemblage works in this way: "When many elements are packed together, the impact of each is diminished, and we're left with an 'overall' composition, so that the eye is rapidly drawn from one thing to the next, so that it's almost impossible to take everything in at once. The three-dimensionality of Nevelson's work, plus her use of familiar, everyday objects, further increases the effect. What catches one person's eye is not necessarily what will catch another's, nor is the pattern that seems so evident today going to be the same one you see tomorrow, with the result that the sculpture never devolves into a unitary 'thing' to be completely grasped."

It was not until 1959 that Nevelson's first official recognition came in a Museum of Modern Art show. Ironically, after creating so many black sculptures, she was chosen to exhibit her gleaming white sculpture series "Dawn's Wedding Feast." The scale of this exhibition seemed to foreshadow her large single wall reliefs "Homage to 6,000,000 I" (1964) and "Homage to the World" (1966). Her works began selling consistently, and her reputation grew steadily thereafter. "One can think of no other ... sculptor who seems within reach of her eminence in the field," observed Art International's James R. Mellow.

Assemblage Technique

The artist created environments by "assemblage," arranging bits of wood in boxes and stacking these shapes into wall-like ensembles meant to be seen frontally. Through subtle organization, Nevelson created varied relationships among the components, frequently executing a series of sculptures with similar themes that interact both with space and with one another. Because her compositions and their components can be moved and rearranged at will, the sculptor's art has been called "environmental," an art concept she helped pioneer.

Hughes described Nevelson's sculpture: "There is no apparent limit to the richness of her patterning. The objects are disciplined by a vertical-horizontal grid, or held like parts of a collage in shallow framing boxes; those formal devices, along with the shapes themselves ... allude to cubism." Bongartz reiterated that the cubism of the early 1920s did influence Nevelson's art strongly, and that she never abandoned the cube as the basic form of her work, even in her painting, drawing, and printmaking. Nevelson said in the New York Times, "I was born with that objective form in me, and I never wanted to try to improve it"; and again, in Newsweek: "Metaphysicians say that while all thinking is circular, wisdom is squaring off your corners."

Produces Monumental Works

Nevelson used "found objects" in her sculptures--discarded bits of furniture, pieces of architectural ornamentation, old wheels, driftwood--infusing the common and the cast-off with new life. "I like it that life twisted those old nails and wood," Nevelson told Stevens. "I also like it that in back of them you see a human hand." Although the artist exhibited a similarity to the Dadaists, pop artists, and junk artists in her use of discarded objects, she insisted: "One reason for my use of 'found' materials is that I never could afford much else. But now that I'm economically free--my God! There's nothing I can't use. Plastic, plexiglas, metal." During the 1960s Nevelson did turn to other materials and simpler, more open forms to produce architectural works of monumental scale. She subsequently enjoyed numerous public and private commissions. The most impressive of these is New York's Louise Nevelson Plaza, a huge outdoor environment of her black sculptures, located on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan. Another highly visible example of her work was in the lobby of the World Trade Center, which featured one of her massive black wall sculptures.

The artist frequently painted her groups of sculptures a uniform color: gold, white--most often--black. This has prompted several critics to call Nevelson's art "black magic," suggesting silence, mysteriousness, and dreams. According to John Russell in the New York Times, Nevelson "brought mystery back into sculpture.... Her black walls lived in shadow and drew sustenance from it, and a large public found in her work a satisfaction that it found nowhere else in modern art." Nevelson claimed that shadow and space are the most important elements of her work, that she was a sculptor of shadow and light. Bongartz summarized the evocative presence of her work: "Nevelson's great, labyrinthine walls of mystery boxes represent her spirit marvelously: the restless experimenting in shape, size and positioning of the infinite varieties of parts, and the eerie sense that the collected whole is somehow always alive and growing combine to trouble a viewer deeply, as well as surround him with a deep peacefulness at the same time."

Experts have likened a Nevelson sculpture to a musical composition, for both take form from the accumulation of their parts. One critic wrote of her works: "There is something medieval in their somber fortitude and absolute straightforwardness. If they were instruments they would play Bach." A second critic called one work "a beautiful piece of nightmusic." And still another assessed that the disorder in Nevelson's creations "suddenly acquires genuine meaning, like some wild music."

Publishes Memoirs

In 1976's Dawns and Dusks Nevelson related her memoirs to Diana MacKown, her assistant and companion for twelve years. It is a book about an artist-celebrity and, according to Hilton Kramer in the New York Times Book Review, it shares both the interest and the limitations of that genre. He noted: "[It] is a book very much in the operatic mode, with the artist herself cast in the role of a triumphant heroine who overcomes all obstacles to achieve artistic success and worldly fame.... It is at its best, as such books usually are, in dealing with the artist's early years--the years before fame and the company of name-dropping, ceremonial events, and 'philosophical reflection.'"

Bronz commented that the artist's unedited recollections seemed so rambling and discursive at first that the book was almost irritating to read. "Gradually, though, I realized that Louise Nevelson is always in control of her monologues.... It is entirely commanding, and mostly charming, and it is an impertinence to have wanted to change it." And Kramer agreed, acknowledging some difficulty with Nevelson's "high-spirited... somewhat shapeless account," but concluding that "Dawns and Dusks is a vivacious book, and everyone interested in the art of Nevelson will want to read it.... It is a fascinating story."

Nevelson passed away in 1988 at the age of 87. Following her death, her son Myron and her long-time companion Diana MacKown had a legal disagreement over her estate. Although MacKown had not been mentioned in Nevelson's will, she claimed that some valuable sculptures had been given to her. She also lived in an apartment in a building owned by Nevelson. When Myron Nevelson wanted to sell the property, she refused to leave. The matter was taken to the courts for settlement.

"Nothing has been able to shake me," Nevelson once said about the course of her life. "I don't think anyone could have stopped me from doing my art." She continued: "I really don't regret too much. I've been too busy. It's been constructive so how can I regret anything? I give myself a 100-plus for the way I've lived my life, the choices I've made, what has come out of it. Every day I've lived I wanted to flower more and more."

In 2005, the Louise Nevelson Foundation was founded in Philadelphia by Maria Nevelson, Louise's granddaughter. The organization seeks to educate the American public about the life and career of Louise Nevelson. They have recorded and archived oral interviews with those people who knew and worked with Nevelson, including her friends and family members, and sponsor lectures and workshops.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born September 23, 1900 (some sources cite 1899), in Kiev, Russia; immigrated to the United States, 1905; died April 17, 1988, in New York, NY; daughter of Isaac (a real estate entrepreneur, contractor, and lumber merchant) and Minna Sadie Berliawsky; married Charles S. Nevelson (a shipping broker) in 1920 (divorced); children: Myron.

WORKS

* WRITINGS

* Nevelson, Pace Gallery (New York, NY), 1964.
* Louise Nevelson, Galerie Daniel Gervis (Paris, France), 1967.
* Nevelson: Wood Sculptures, Dutton (New York, NY), 1973.
* (And author of text) Louise Nevelson: Centre national d'art contemporain, preface by Frances Beatty and Gilbert Brownstone, Weber (Paris, France), 1974.
* Louise Nevelson: Graphica, Napoli, Villa Pignatelli, introduction by Raffaello Causa and Gene Baro, Societa Editrice Napoletana, 1976.
* Louise Nevelson: A Loan Exhibition, text by Jan Ernst Adlmann, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum (Rockland, ME), 1979.
* Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension, Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), 1980.
* Louise Nevelson: Atmospheres and Environments, introduction by Edward Albee, C.N. Potter (New York, NY), 1980.
* Louise Nevelson: Silent Music, Galerie Gmurzynska (Koln, Germany), 1995.
* Louise Nevelson: Sculpture, 1957-1987, Pace Wildenstein (New York, NY), 1997.
* Louise Nevelson: Sculpture & Collage: October 1-October 30, 1999, Locks Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), 1999.
* Louise Nevelson: Sculpture of the '50s and '60s: March 18-April 27, 2002, Pace Wildenstein (New York, NY), 2002.

* OTHER

* Louise Nevelson: Prints and Drawings, 1953-1966 (monograph), text by Una E. Johnson, Brooklyn Museum, 1967.
* Nevelson: The Prints, introduction and commentary by Gene Baro, Pace Editions, 1974.
* (With Diana MacKown) Dawns and Dusks: Taped Conversations with Diana MacKown, Scribner (New York, NY), 1976.

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