Art Beat – The Legendary Louise Nevelson

– By Mary Brennan Gerster –

As with romance, art needs mystery. We are drawn to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks for more than his skill with paint and brush. We wonder about the stories squirreled between those strokes. The portraits of John Singer Sargent allow us to settle into the drawing rooms of those he portrays. Winslow Homer's seascapes allow us to feel the salt spray of the rugged Maine coast as we stand in a museum in New York. Jackson Pollock's frenetic swirls create a galaxy of emotion deep within the canvas. We bring our own history into our interpretation of each work of art and thus our responses will reflect our differences.

It is that mystery that is the greatest power of the assemblages created by artist Louise Nevelson. Each time I see them, I stand captivated by the visual narrative that weaves between her conjoined boxes. Each box stands on its own as a work of art but together they are more powerful. The Jewish Museum has mounted an exhibition of her work, including lithographs, early sculptures, the lesser known gold pieces and plexiglass works. Dawn's Wedding Feast, created for an exhibition at MoMA, is reassembled here from 12 collections.

Nevelson began studying art with Hans Hoffman in Munich, abandoning her husband and son to do so. She followed Hoffman to the Art Students League in New York City. Cubism was her initial love, but she soon created her own unique working style collecting wooden scraps and debris from wherever they might be discarded. Her early attempts were boxes covered in black velvet, which she sealed up, containing a story within them. She moved onto boxes filled with “banister fragments, baseball bat shards, chair backs, racquet heads, lumberyard detritus and sections of crates.”

By spray-painting these worlds black, she unified all the objects within. She saw black as containing all color. She said that black was not meant to contribute meaning to her work as most of us would read into it — night, death — “but to induce a sort of alchemical transformation in work and viewer, together with monochromatic black used only as a means.” Nevelson did say that black created a sense of quiet and serenity and was aristocratic. Later, when she uses white, it has its own connotations of purity, cleanliness, and, to me, an otherworldly sense.

Louise Nevelson was made for media interest. “She herself was an artistic creation — wearing lustrous multi-textured, colored and layered couture ethnographic costumes, fanciful headgear and massive neckwear with eyes defined by black kohl and numerous layers of false eyelashes.” Her look was as unique as her art, but should in no way diminish her impact as an artist and as a woman artist. She was a woman painting in an essential male art world. Georgia O'Keefe, Elaine deKooning, Frida Kahlo and Sonia Delauney had a rough road with few role models.

In 1959, MoMA asked her to be part of an exhibition, “Sixteen Americans,” for which she created Dawn's Wedding Feast, an installation all in white. The 16 artists included Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, all in their 20s and 30s, while Nevelson was 60. Dawn's Wedding Feast consists of four wedding chapels, a wedding cake, wedding chest a mirror and pillow, attendants and a bride and groom. All are assemblages of found wood objects. As a whole, there is a Victorian wedding cake feel to it, but as with all her work each individual section demands your scrutiny.

She initially worked only in wood as she found the metal used by her peers too reminiscent of wartime materials. Later, as she was commissioned to create outdoor sculpture, she began using metal. A wood model of Night Presence IV (1955) is in the show. In 1972, she donated a large outdoor version of this piece to New York City, a city she loved deeply. It stands at Park Avenue and 92nd Street. In the version here, you see the perfect balance of elements and the rippling rhythm created by the adjacent forms.

Sky Cathedral Presence (1951-64), another favorite of mine, is a huge, architectural world within the boxes. There are shadows as important as the shapes, just as in great painting the spaces between forms carry as much weight as the forms themselves. We do not venture beyond the edges of the world created here and become absorbed by the stories woven here.

Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky in 1889, in the Ukraine. Her family immigrated to Rockford, Maine, an odd choice for a Jewish family at the time. Leah stood out among her classmates' LL Bean style (pre-LL Bean but the look was there) and wanted more than anything to leave and go to Manhattan. She says that at age 9, when asked by a librarian what she wanted to be, she was clear as a bell that an artist was what she wanted to be, specifically a sculptor.

She married Charles Nevelson, a member of a wealthy Rockport shipping family, and moved to Riverside, New York. In 1922, she gave birth to her only child, a son Mylo. Her unhappiness as a wife and mother led her to abandon both and head to Europe to study art.

Though never deeply religious nor interested in upper middle class Jewish life, she later created some magnificent works in tribute to the six million who perished at the hands of the Nazis. One of those pieces is on loan here from Japan.

She had a wonderful commentary on life with her husband and his family: “My husband's family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid you were Beethoven. You were not allowed to be a creator; you were just supposed to be an audience.”

Thankfully for us she refused to be only an audience.

“The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson” is at the Jewish Museum through Sept. 16. The Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, is closed Friday and free on Saturday. Call 212-423-3200 or visit www.thejewsihmuseum.org.