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VOLUME 1, ISSUE 26 | July / August, 2007
Cecil Beaton’s photo of Louise Nevelson, 1978
Queen of the woods
By Jerry Tallmer
When Mrs. N’s Palace, the room, or house, or Pharoah’s tomb, that Louise Nevelson put together over the 13 years from 1964 to 1977, was first made available to press and public, she took me inside it to hear the story of where she’d picked up from the sidewalk this wooden lintel or that door frame, this ancient chair or some other evocative piece of discarded junk that had gone into it.
How I wished I could have accompanied her on one or another of these scrounging expeditions, up and down Spring Street in SoHo — the street of her dwelling place and studio — long before there was a SoHo in these parts. Though she was almost exactly the age of my mother — Louise was born 1899, in the Ukraine, my mother was born 1898, in this city — Mrs. N., batting her famous sable eyelashes, was even then considerable of a flirt, a seductress, and she knew it. She had to be, to hold her own (as curator Brooke Kamin Rappaport points out) against that generation’s Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly, who were each 30 or more years younger than she.
Still standing there with me inside Mrs. N’s Palace, a monumental piece you can now explore to your heart’s content in the powerful Nevelson retrospective at the Jewish Museum through September 16, Leah Berliawsky, as she had once been, began talking about her father Isaac Berliawsky, the woodcutter and junkdealer who had brought his wife, their three children, and himself, from the Ukraine to Rockland, Maine, USA, way back in 1905. It takes no great master detective or Sigmund Freud to see where Louise acquired her lifelong love of — feel for — commitment to — such a simple, natural thing as wood.
Clockwise from top: Louise Nevelson’s Model for The White Flame of the Six Million, 1970; Night Landscape, 1955; Bride and Disk and Groom and Disk, 1959-67, from America-Dawn, 1962, originally from Dawn’s Wedding Feast, 1959; The King and Queen, 1953-55 (printed 1965-66); Transparent Sculpture IV, 1968
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Glimcher.
© Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
And then she had to go and paint it black. All black. Or all white, as the case may be. That monochromatic dedication does cry out for a psychic detective smarter than I. Was it something as simple as, well, it was easier and cheaper in the beginning to make things all black, and then she just kept on doing it? I don’t know. I do know that the all-blackness of, say, her early (1956) autobiographical First Personage, may be less relevant than the array of spikes that shoot out one side of it. Louise was one of the least monochromatic, least deathblack personalities on earth, but she did indeed have a spikiness that, one assumes, had to do with being that woman alone — an artist — a sculptor — in a male universe.
The very large wall pieces like Sky Cathedral Presence (almost 16 feet wide, 1951-64) are the rubrics that made her famous, and are almost prehistoric in feel — dinosaurs once walked here. Archaelogists will dig here. Yet Sky Cathedral oddly also reminds me of the cams-and-levers and rotating gears of the Museum of Science and Industry of my youth — and, of course, of Chaplin’s Modern Times. Just incidentally, how on earth (or off earth) did she lift all this stuff into place? With pulleys? Block and tackle? Masculine assistance? Did she paint (or dip?) all these hundreds of elements before, during, or after they were implanted in the piece?
The Art Institute of Chicago, Grant J. Pick Purchase Fund, 1967.387. © Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photograph by Robert Hashimoto. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.
Not that it matters, because now we come to the wall that does matter and a blackness without which this one wouldn’t work. It’s called Homage to 6,000,000 I [painted wood, 1964], and it’s on loan from the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, Japan. Its width is divided into three shallow connecting arcs, each of them a sort of chest of drawers, or file cabinet, or safe-deposit vault of an enormity of detritus only hinted at in our grimmest imaginations. The Germans had their storerooms of suitcases, shoes, wedding rings, eyeglasses, human hair, human teeth; well, we have this massive storeroom of human souls.
Directly opposite is an installation — two cornering walls — of blinding white. Virginal white. A thing again of (hinted, metaphorical) clockwork, a la Modern Times, with undertones of something Assyrian abutting six narrow columns that might possibly be taken for phallic. All this whiteness is Diana’s Wedding Feast (1959), the sculptor’s tribute, or guilt trip, in re the brief marriage to ship owner Charles Nevelson that produced son Myron and not much else. My mother went off with the (then) starving young artist from Berlin with whom she would spend the next 30 years of their lives. Louise Nevelson went off to Munich to study Cubism with Hans Hoffman.
Look. She was far from the first to make art out of found objects — Picasso and Duchamp spring immediately to mind — but Louise Nevelson did do with it something no one else has ever done: Turned the Found Object — the junk wood of Spring Street — into an art form in itself that was — and is — hers alone. Hundreds and hundreds of works, each one, unmistakably, “a Nevelson.” That she herself, in her hats and scarves and swathes and fingernails, was the one art form rife with color was the best joke of all.
THE SCULPTURE OF LOUISE NEVELSON: CONSTRUCTING A LEGEND
Curated by Brooke Kamin Rapaport
The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue (at 92nd Street), (212) 423-3200, or www.thejewishmuseum.org, through September 16.
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