Louise Leah Nevelson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Nevelson

Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in Czarist Russia, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home. By the early 1930s she was attending art classes at the Art Students League of New York, and in 1941 she had her first solo exhibition. A student of Hans Hofmann and Chaim Gross, Nevelson experimented with early conceptual art using found objects, and dabbled in painting and printing before dedicating her lifework to sculpture. Usually created out of wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces, often 3-D. A unique feature of her work is that her figures are often painted in monochromatic black or white.[2] A figure in the international art scene, Nevelson was showcased at the 31st Venice Biennale. Her work is seen in major collections in museums and corporations. Louise Nevelson remains one of the most important figures in 20th-century American sculpture.

Contents [show] Early personal life[edit]

Nevelson (fourth from left) posing for a class portrait with her classmates, 1913, unidentified photographer. Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Louise Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky in 1899 in Perislav, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, to Minna[3][1] Sadie[4] and Isaac Berliawsky,[1] a contractor and lumber merchant.[4] Even though the family lived comfortably, Nevelson's relatives had begun to leave the Russian Empire for America in the 1880s. The Berliawskys had to stay behind, as Isaac, the youngest brother, had to care for his parents. While still in Europe, Minna gave birth to two of Nevelson's siblings: Nathan (born 1898) and Anita (1902).[5] On his mother's death,[5] Isaac moved to the United States in 1902.[4] After he left, Minna and the children moved to the Kiev area. According to family lore, young Nevelson was so forlorn about her father's departure that she became mute for six months.[5]

In 1905 Minna and the children emigrated to the United States, where they joined Isaac in Rockland, Maine.[1] Isaac initially struggled to establish himself there, suffering from depression while the family settled into their new home. He worked as a woodcutter before opening a junkyard.[5] Eventually he became a successful lumberyard owner and realtor.[4] The family had another child, Lillian, in 1906.[5] Nevelson was very close to her mother, who suffered from depression, a condition believed to be brought on by the family's migration from Russia and their minority status as a Jewish family living in Maine. Minna overly compensated for this, dressing herself and the children up in clothing "regarded as sophisticated in the Old Country".[5] Her mother wore flamboyant outfits with heavy make-up; Nevelson described her mother's "dressing up" as "art, her pride, and her job", also describing her as someone who should have lived "in a palace".[3]

Nevelson's first experience of art was at the age of nine at the Rockland Public Library, where she saw a plaster cast of Joan of Arc.[6] Shortly thereafter she decided to study art, taking drawing in high school, where she also served as basketball captain.[3][1] She painted watercolor interiors, in which furniture appeared molecular in structure, rather like her later professional work. Female figures made frequent appearances. In school, she practiced her English, her second language, as Yiddish was spoken at home.[3][5] Unhappy with her family's economic status, language differences, the religious discrimination of the community, and her school, Nevelson set her sights on moving to high school in New York.[7]

She graduated from high school in 1918,[1] and began working as a stenographer at a local law office. There she met Bernard Nevelson, co-owner with his brother Charles of the Nevelson Brothers Company, a shipping business. Bernard introduced her to his brother, and Charles and Louise Nevelson were married in June 1920 in a Jewish wedding at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Having satisfied her parent's hope that she would marry into a wealthy family, she and her new husband moved to New York City,[7] where she began to study painting, drawing, singing, acting and dancing.[4] She also became pregnant, and in 1922 she gave birth to her son Myron (later called Mike), who grew up to be a sculptor.[3][4] Nevelson studied art, despite the disapproval of her parents-in-law. She commented: "My husband's family was terribly refined. Within that circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven."[7]

In 1924 the family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, a popular Jewish area of Westchester County. Nevelson was upset with the move, which removed her from city life and her artistic environment.[7] During the winter of 1932–1933 she separated from Charles, unwilling to becoming the socialite wife he expected her to be.[4] She never sought financial support[4] from Charles, and in 1941 the couple divorced.[1]

Artistic career[edit] 1930s[edit] Starting in 1929, Nevelson studied art full-time under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League.[1] Nevelson credited an exhibition of Noh kimonos at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a catalyst for her to study art further.[3] In 1931 she sent her son Mike to live with family and went to Europe, paying for the trip by selling a diamond bracelet that her now ex-husband had given her on the occasion of Mike's birth.[3] In Munich she studied with Hans Hofmann[4] before visiting Italy and France. Returning to New York in 1932 she once again studied under Hofmann, who was serving as a guest instructor at the Art Students League. She met Diego Rivera in 1933 and worked as his assistant on his mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Plaza. The two had an affair which caused a rift between Nevelson and Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, an artist Nevelson greatly admired.[3] Shortly thereafter, Nevelson started taking Chaim Gross's sculpture classes at the Educational Alliance. She continued to experiment with other artistic mediums, including lithography and etching, but decided to focus on sculpture. Her early works were created from plaster, clay and tattistone. During the 1930s Nevelson began exhibiting her work in group shows. In 1935, she taught mural painting at the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club in Brooklyn as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She worked for the WPA in the easel painting and sculpture divisions until 1939.[1] For several years, the impoverished Nevelson and her son walked through the streets gathering wood to burn in their fireplace to keep warm; the firewood she found served as the starting point for the art that made her famous.[3] Her work during the 1930s explored sculpture, painting and drawing. Early ink and pencil drawings of nudes show the same fluidity seen in the works of Henri Matisse. Nevelson also created terra-cotta semi-abstract animals and oil paintings.[8]

First exhibitions and the 1940s[edit]

Clown tight rope walker by Louise Nevelson, 1942? / John D. Schiff, photographer. Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In 1941, Nevelson had her first solo exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery. Gallery owner Karl Nierendorf represented her until his death in 1947. During her time at Nierendorf, Nevelson came across a shoeshine box owned by local shoeshiner Joe Milone. She displayed the box at the Museum of Modern Art, bringing her the first major attention she received from the press. An article about her appeared in Art Digest in November 1943.[9] In the 1940s, she began producing Cubist figure studies in materials such as stone, bronze, terra cotta, and wood. In 1943, she had a show at Norlyst Gallery called "The Clown as the Center of his World" in which she constructed sculptures about the circus from found objects. The show was not well received, and Nevelson stopped using found objects until the mid-1950s.[1] Despite poor reception, Nevelson's works at this time explored both figurative abstracts inspired by Cubism[8] and the exploitative and experimental influence of Surrealism. The decade provided Nevelson with the materials, movements, and self-created experiments that would mold her signature modernist style in the 1950s.[10]

Mid-career[edit] During the 1950s, Nevelson exhibited her work as often as possible. Yet despite awards and growing popularity with art critics, she continued to struggle financially. To make ends meet she began teaching sculpture classes in adult education programs in the Great Neck public school system.[1] Her own work began to grow to monumental size, moving beyond the human scale sized works she had been creating during the early 1940s. Nevelson also visited Latin America, and discovered influences for her work in Mayan ruins and the steles of Guatemala.[10] In 1955 Nevelson joined Colette Roberts' Grand Central Modern Gallery, where she had numerous one-woman shows. There she exhibited some of her most notable mid-century works: Bride of the Black Moon, First Personage, and the exhibit "Moon Garden + One", which showed her first wall piece, Sky Cathedral, in 1958.[1] The 1958 series of exhibitions were described by critic Hilton Kramer as "remarkable and unforgettable."[11] That year the Museum of Modern Art purchased one of Nevelson's Sky Cathedral works, and in 1959 Nevelson was included in MoMA's Sixteen Americans exhibition.[12] During this period, she painted her wood black and put on entirely black shows.[1] In the early 1960s, she began creating white and gold pieces, and enclosing her small sculptures in wooden boxes.[1] The change in scale of her sculptures, the influence of Latin American ancient art, and her gallery activity during this time is credited with bringing "Nevelson's sculpture in league with the grand scale of Abstract Expressionist painting, as well as the earlier mural painting of Rivera."[10]

From 1957 to 1958, she was president of the New York Chapter of Artists' Equity and in 1958 she joined the Martha Jackson Gallery, where she was guaranteed income and became financially secure. That year, she was photographed and featured on the cover of Life.[13] In 1960 she had her first one-woman show in Europe at Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. Later that year a collection of her work, grouped together as "Dawn's Wedding Feast", was included in the group show, "Sixteen Americans", at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 1962 she made her first museum sale to the Whitney Museum of American Art, who purchased the black wall, Young Shadows. That same year, her work was selected for the 31st Venice Biennale and she became national president of Artists' Equity, serving until 1964.[1]

In 1962 she left Martha Jackson Gallery, had a brief stint at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and then joined Pace Gallery in the fall of 1963. Nevelson had shows at Pace about every two years until the end of her career. In 1967 the Whitney Museum hosted the first retrospective of Nevelson's work, showing over one hundred pieces, including drawings from the 1930s and contemporary sculptures.[1] In 1964 she created two works: Homage to 6,000,000 I and Homage to 6,000,000 II as a tribute to victims of The Holocaust.[14] Nevelson hired several assistants over the years: Teddy Haseltine, Tom Kendall, and Diana Mackown, who helped in the studio and handled daily affairs. By this time, Nevelson had solidified commercial and critical success.[1]

Later career and life[edit] Nevelson continued to utilize wood in her sculptures, but also experimented with other materials such as aluminium, plastic and metal. In the fall of 1969 she was commissioned by Princeton University to create her first outdoor sculpture.[1] After completion of her first outdoor sculptures, Nevelson stated: "Remember, I was in my early seventies when I came into monumental outdoor sculpture ... I had been through the enclosures of wood. I had been through the shadows. I had been through the enclosures and come out into the open." Nevelson also praised new materials like plexiglas and cor-ten steel, which she described as a "blessing".[15] She embraced the idea of her works being able to withstand climate change and the freedom in moving beyond limitations in size. These public artworks were created by the Lippincott Foundry. Nevelson's public art commissions were a monetary success, but art historian Brooke Kamin Rapaport states that these pieces were not Nevelson's strongest works, and that Nevelson's "intuitive gesture" is not evident in the large steel works.[16]

In 1973 the Walker Art Center curated a major exhibition of her work, which traveled for two years. In 1975 she designed the chapel of St. Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan.[1] When asked about her role as a Jewish artist creating Christian-themed art, Nevelson stated that her abstract work transcended religious barriers.[14] Also in 1975, she created and installed a large wood sculpture titled Bicentennial Dawn at the new James A. Byrne United States Courthouse in Philadelphia.[17][18] During the last half of her life, Nevelson solidified her fame and her persona, cultivating a personal style for her "petite yet flamboyant" self[19] that contributed to her legacy: dramatic dresses, scarves and large false eyelashes.[20] When Alice Neel asked Nevelson how she dressed so beautifully, Nevelson replied "Fucking, dear, fucking", in reference to her sexually liberated lifestyle. The designer Arnold Scaasi created many of her clothes.[3] Nevelson died on April 17, 1988.[1]

At the time of his death in 1995, her friend Willy Eisenhart was working on a book about Nevelson.[21][22]

Style and works[edit]

Louise Nevelson's hands at work, between 1964 and 1975, Lewis Brown, photographer. Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. When Nevelson was developing her style, many of her artistic colleagues – Alexander Calder, David Smith, Theodore Roszak – were welding metal to create their large-scale sculptures. Nevelson decided to go in the opposite direction, exploring the streets for inspiration and finding it in wood.[13] Nevelson's most notable sculptures are her walls; wooden, wall-like collage driven reliefs consisting of multiple boxes and compartments that hold abstract shapes and found objects from chair legs to balusters.[23] Nevelson described these immersive sculptures as "environments".[11] The wooden pieces were also cast-off scraps, pieces found in the streets of New York.[24] While Marcel Duchamp caused uproar with his Fountain, which was not accepted as "art" at the time of its release due to Duchamp's attempt to mask the urinals true form, Nevelson took found objects and by spray painting them she disguised them of their actual use or meaning.[10] Nevelson called herself "the original recycler" owing to her extensive use of discarded objects, and credited Pablo Picasso for "giving us the cube" that served as the groundwork for her cubist-style sculpture. She found strong influence in Picasso and Hofmann's cubist ideals, describing the Cubist movement as "one of the greatest awarenesses that the human mind has ever come to."[8] She also found influence in Native American and Mayan art, dreams, the cosmos and archetypes.[3]

As a student of Hans Hofmann she was taught to practice her art with a limited palette, using colors such as black and white, to "discipline" herself. These colors would become part of Nevelson's repertoire.[8] She spray painted[24] her walls black until 1959.[23] Nevelson described black as the "total color" that "means totality. It means: contains all ... it contained all color. It wasn't a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all. The only aristocratic color ... I have seen things that were transformed into black, that took on greatness. I don't want to use a lesser word."[3] In the 1960s she began incorporating white and gold into her works.[23] Nevelson said that white was the color that "summoned the early morning and emotional promise." She described her gold phase as the "baroque phase", inspired by the idea being told as a child that America's streets would be "paved with gold", the materialism and hedonism of the color, the sun, and the moon. Nevelson revisited the Noh robes and the gold coin collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for inspiration.[25]

Through her work, Nevelson often explored the themes of her complicated past, factious present, and anticipated future.[24] A common symbol that appears in Nevelson's work is the bride, as seen in Bride of the Black Moon (1955). The symbol of the bride referred to Nevelson's own escape from matrimony in her early life, and her own independence as a woman throughout the rest of her life.[26] Her Sky Cathedral works often took years to create; Sky Cathedral: Night Wall, in the collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, took 13 years to build in her New York City studio. On the Sky Cathedral series, Nevelson commented: "This is the Universe, the stars, the moon – and you and I, everyone."[23]

Legacy[edit]

Louise Nevelson, ca. 1979, Basil Langton, photographer. Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Louise Nevelson constructed her sculpture much as she constructed her past: shaping each with her legendary sense of self as she created an extraordinary iconography through abstract means. – The Jewish Museum, 2007[24] A sculpture garden, Louise Nevelson Plaza (40.7076°N 74.0080°W), is located in downtown New York City and features a collection of works by Nevelson.[4] Nevelson donated her papers in several installments from 1966 to 1979. They are fully digitized and in the collection of the Archives of American Art.[1] The Farnsworth Art Museum, in Nevelson's childhood home of Rockland, Maine, houses the second largest collection of her works, including jewelry she designed.[6] In 2000, the United States Postal Service released a series of commemorative postage stamps in Nevelson's honor.[27] The following year, friend and playwright Edward Albee wrote the play Occupant as a homage to the sculptor. The show opened in New York in 2002 with Anne Bancroft playing Nevelson, but it never moved beyond previews owing to Bancroft's illness. Nevelson's distinct and eccentric image has been documented by photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Hans Namuth and Pedro E. Guerrero.[3] Nevelson is listed on the Heritage Floor, among other famous women, in Judy Chicago's 1974–1979 masterpiece The Dinner Party.[28]

Upon Nevelson's death her estate was worth at least $100 million. Her son, Mike Nevelson, removed 36 sculptures from her house. Documentation showed that Nevelson had bequeathed these works, worth millions, to her friend and assistant of 25 years Diana MacKown, yet Mike Nevelson claimed otherwise. Proceedings began about the estate and will, which Mike Nevelson claimed did not mention MacKown. There was talk of a potential palimony case, but despite public speculation that the two women were lovers, MacKown maintained that she had never had a sexual relationship with Nevelson, as did Mike Nevelson.[29]

Feminism and Nevelson's influence on feminist art[edit] I'm not a feminist. I'm an artist who happens to be a woman. – Louise Nevelson[7]

Louise Nevelson has been a fundamental key in the feminist art movement. Credited with triggering the examination of femininity in art, Nevelson challenged the vision of what type of art women would be creating with her dark, monumental, masculine and totem-like artworks.[20] Nevelson believed that art reflected the individual, not "masculine-feminine labels", and chose to take on her role as an artist, not specifically a female artist.[30] Reviews of Nevelson's works in the 1940s wrote her off as just a woman artist. A reviewer of her 1941 exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery stated: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." Another review was similar in its sexism: "Nevelson is a sculptor; she comes from Portland, Maine. You'll deny both these facts and you might even insist Nevelson is a man, when you see her Portraits in Paint, showing this month at the Nierendorf Gallery."[31]

Even with her influence upon future generations of feminist artists, Nevelson's opinion of discrimination within the art world bordered on the belief that artists who were not gaining success based on gender suffered from a lack of confidence. When asked by Feminist Art Journal if she suffered from sexism within the art world, Nevelson replied "I am a woman's liberation."[27]

Louise Nevelson, Sculptor, Is Dead at 88 By JOHN RUSSELL Published: April 19, 1988 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ EMAIL SHARE PRINT REPRINTS Louise Nevelson, a pioneer creator of environmental sculpture who became one of the world's best-known artists, died Sunday evening at her home on Spring Street in Manhattan. She was 88 years old, and had been in poor health for several months.

She had worked steadily almost until her death, and had recently produced a 35-foot black steel sculpture, which is being installed at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. A show of her work from the 1950's will be seen this summer at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Mrs. Nevelson was an artist of the first rank, and among the most arresting people of her time. Known for Wall Sculptures

She was known above all for her wall sculptures. When modern sculpture in general was getting more and more open and transparent, Mrs. Nevelson caught the public imagination by her command of darkness and deep shadow. She brought mystery back into sculpture, and the observer who stood for some time in front of one of her black walls was reminded of something not easily found in north America: the impact of carved wood and stone in a twilit Gothic cathedral. 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.

She was born in Kiev in the Ukraine in September 1899. (The exact date of her birth was uncertain, but she settled for Sept. 23). She was the second of four children. Her parents were Isaac Berliawsky and his wife, Minna Zeisel Smolerank.

Her father and her grandfather were in the timber business. In 1902 her father decided to start a new life in the United States. True to the family tradition, he went into the lumber business in Rockland, Me., and made a success of it.

His family remained in the Ukraine until he could offer them security in the United States, and this separation was particularly painful to Louise, who lost the power of speech for six months by way of unconscious protest. A Feeling For Wood

When the family was reunited in Rockland, Mr. Berliawsky saw to it that they were dressed in a luxurious and flamboyant style that heightened their foreignness. Louise was indoctrinated into this mode of life to the point of lifelong addiction; and although she cared nothing for possessions and still less for comfort, she was to the end of her days a spectacular figure for whom no combination of clothing, headgear and jewelry could be too startling.

It never occurred to her to be anything but an artist. In her autobiographical book, Dawns and Dusks, she related how a librarian in Rockland asked her what she would be when she grew up. I'm going to be an artist, she replied. A sculptor. I don't want color to help me. A feeling for wood had been bred into her, and by the time she was 6 she was already working with small pieces of wood that she had scavenged from her father's lumber yard. She told friends in later years that in school she was always cold and only found warmth when she was in art class.

She also inherited from her parents a passionate belief in freedom and independence of thought, a radical orientation in politics, and a crusader's attitude to the emancipation of women. A Dabbler in Different Arts

She grew up to be a tall, rangy, speculative and almost preternaturally determined young woman who was bent on trying all the arts, either one by one or simultaneously, until she found the one that fulfilled her completely. It turned out to be her first love, sculpture; but on the way to that definitive realization, she tried painting and drawing, tried the piano, tried acting, singing and modern dance.

I never made friends, she said later, because I didn't intend to stay in Rockland, and I didn't want anything to tie me down. In 1920, however, she married Charles Nevelson, whose family was in the shipping business, and moved to New York. Her son and only child, Myron Nevelson, was born in 1922.

From 1920 onward she was responsible for her own education. With her fiery and tenacious nature, she was not cut out for the routine and restraints of a well-run, well-financed family life. After 11 years of ever-increasing discontent, she separated from Mr. Nevelson in 1931. Thereafter she was responsible - financially, morally and in every other way - for herself alone. This had its price, but she paid it gladly. An Extra in Films

In 1929-30 she studied at the Art Students League in New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller. But her regained freedom allowed her to go to what then seemed to her the indispensable source of modern art: Hans Hofmann's school in Munich. Hofmann was indeed a great teacher, but in Munich in 1931 the rise of the Nazi Party made it difficult for him or his students to give of their best. After a few months, Hofmann went into exile and Mrs. Nevelson thereby lost her main reason for being in Europe.

People in Germany responded, as they did everywhere, to her uproarious vitality, and for a time she worked in Berlin and Vienna as an extra in the movies. But that uproarious vitality could turn to melancholy and self-questioning; both then and in 1932, during a second journey to Europe, she had low moments at which her longed-for fulfillment seemed as far away as ever.

As she was a practicing artist for 30 years before she made her first sale, Mrs. Nevelson's progress could be said to have been both slow and scant. But she was bent on working in her own country and on her own terms. I could be a leaf on the tree in Paris, she once said, but I could be the whole tree in America.

Even so, that tree had to be planted. Mrs. Nevelson returned to this country for good in 1932, but it was several years before she made anything that was distinctly her own. She drew, studied for a while with Hofmann (who in the meantime had established himself in New York), she kept up her studies in theater and dance, and for a time she worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera while he was preparing his murals for Rockefeller Center.

Like many others at that time, she was preoccupied with the art of pre-Columbian Mexico, and in 1933 she made a small stone group of two figures in a style closely akin to the reclining figures that Henry Moore was making at that time and under that same influence. Constant Change, Constant Work

In the spring of 1936, Mrs. Nevelson entered a competitive exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery in New York and was one of four young artists invited to show at the A.C.A. in September of that year. Her work on that occasion was singled out for extended notice in The New York Times, in which her sculptures were described as unlike anything we've ever seen before.

But a good notice doesn't pay any bills, and for most of the 1930's Mrs. Nevelson had no success and little or no money. She lived in one place after another, treating her studio as an ark to be filled, and no sooner filled than left. Such was her compulsion to work hard and move on that she seemed to be reliving in microcosm the trauma of enforced migration that was endured by hundreds of thousands of European refugees in the 1930's, and shortly to be experienced by even greater numbers of people.

Mrs. Nevelson felt such things in her whole body, as a great dancer feels them; and with her well-developed sense of theater and her first-hand experience of the film studio, where whole environments are no sooner built than they are dismantled, she gradually felt her way toward the work for which she eventually became famous. Celine Was a Suitor

Meanwhile, life touched her at many points. While crossing the Atlantic in 1932, for instance, she met Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the French novelist who was already famous for his Journey to the End of the Night and was to become notorious during and after World War II for the ferocity of his anti-Semitism. Celine was attracted to her, as were many other gifted men. Some years later, when he wanted to stay on in the United States, he went so far as to propose marriage. Mrs. Nevelson by then could see where his sympathies lay, and with characteristic forthrightness showed him the door and told him she would rather see him dead than alive.

I was often depressed and alone, she later said of herself at that period, but I was functioning as my own person and that kept me going. After she had pawned the last relics of her comfortable married life, it would have been natural for her to apply to the Works Progress Administration for one of the mural or sculptural commissions for which she was well suited. But she was proud and kept putting it off, and in the end all that could be offered her was a teaching post at the Educational Alliance School of Art in Lower Manhattan. 'I Built an Empire'

That apart, Mrs. Nevelson had total control of her time. That she was very poor was part of a price that she paid. There's a price for what you do, she once said, and there's a price for what you don't do. It's a two-way deal. Even at the lowest point in her outward fortunes she refused to contemplate any change in her working habits. I needed my full consciousness to project ideas, she said later. I didn't want to make things. I built an empire, and you don't build on that scale by cutting time.

Even so, it irked her that nobody saw her work. In 1941 she decided that after 20 years' work she had the right to have an exhibition, not just a show, but a show at the best gallery in town. She picked Karl Nierendorf, whose gallery at that time had enormous prestige. She went in to see Mr. Nierendorf, undeterred by the fact that he had never before shown an American artist. Such was the force of her conviction that he came to her studio that same evening and agreed to give her a show the following month. A Circus Is Devised

Nothing remains of this show, but from all accounts it is clear that Mrs. Nevelson conceived of an exhibition as an environment that could remind the visitor of a prehistoric cave, an Egyptian tomb or an unusually well-conceived shop window. Since 1931 she had been interested in African and in American Indian art as well as the art of pre-Columbian Mexico; and since the Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Art-Dada and Surrealism of 1936 she had been aware both of the potential of the dream and the automatic procedures that were an important part of European surrealism.

When she showed as a guest at the Norlyst Gallery in 1943, she devised a complete circus in which the performers (both human and animal), the audience and the walls of the circus tent were all most carefully presented. The sculptures in question combined standing African figures, the collocations of found objects fundamental to surrealism, and her own sturdy and unceasing invention. Nothing from the show was sold, and when it was over she took the work back to her studio and burned it.

What in another artist might have been either perversity or pique was in her case a recurrent compulsion to close the account and move on. As of 1943, Mrs. Nevelson's habits became less nomadic, in that a legacy from her father allowed her to buy a house and garden on East 30th Street. Karl Nierendorf's continuing support added a further element of stability, and 1944 and 1945 in particular were years of great creativity, in which a powerful and irreducible nature was clearly getting close to its definitive expression. Sculpture as Cinema

In 1946 she had an exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery called Ancient City. In this, perhaps for the first time, she proved that she could sum up a complete world - most often, a vanished and unpopulated one - with just one or two disparate objects. What she needed to arrive at her definitive and entirely personal style was a way of combining many insights of this sort within a single monumental sculpture.

The concentrated effort that she needed to put forward to that end was blocked, however, by a long series of misfortunes. Mr. Nierendorf died, she herself underwent serious surgery and was too weak to go on working as usual, and none of the media with which she experimented proved satisfactory. Nearly 10 years were to pass before her next substantial exhibition, at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in 1955.

Most of the pieces in that show stood on wooden crates, which Mrs. Nevelson fragmented and reconstituted to form, in effect, a shallow cubist space. Eventually, at Christmas 1957, it appeared to her that spaces of this kind need not merely support her sculptures. They could enclose them, forming thereby an indefinitely extensible grid. It was on this principle, which reputedly came to her after close scrutiny of an empty liquor crate, that her mature style was based.

It proved ideal for her purposes. It gave an all-over structure within which incidents of every conceivable kind could be accommodated. Though immutably and self-evidently frontal, it offered deep shadow and an illusion of depth. What had previously stood was literally boxed in, and the wall-sized sculptures that resulted had something of theater - and of cinema also: Mrs. Nevelson had not forgotten that what we see on the screen is just a long succession of single images, each one of them boxed into a celluloid frame of identical size. Breakthrough in 1958

When two of the earliest and grandest of these walls, Sky Cathedral, was shown in 1958, Hilton Kramer wrote of them in The New York Times that they were appalling and marvelous, utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the subject of sculpture and the confusion of genres, yet profoundly exhilarating in the way they open an entire realm of possibility.

As much as any artist of her generation, Mrs. Nevelson had to wait for success. Her first real breakthrough in terms of widespread public attention did not come until the winter of 1958-59, when Dorothy Miller included her in one of the anthologies of new American art that she organized at the Museum of Modern Art.

Mrs. Nevelson was in her 60's before she could count on a steady income from her work, and she never forgot, as she once said, what it was like to be an American and not be respected by collectors. But gradually the big museums and the big collectors came around to the fact that a major artist was in their midst. As for her colleagues, they, too, recognized her human stature. She was president from 1957 to 1959 of the New York chapter of Artists' Equity and president of National Artists' Equity from 1962 to 1964. A Host of Awards

In 1962 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she characteristically showed gigantic works, made for that place and that occasion, which could not be turned to profit.

She had shows in London, Baden-Baden, Dusseldorf, Zurich, Turin and Berne in 1963-64.

In 1965 she took part in the National Council on Arts and Government in Washington. In 1967 she had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Public commissions came her way often.

In 1969, she was awarded the MacDowell Colony medal and in 1971 the Brandeis University Creative Award in Sculpture and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. In 1973-75 a large traveling exhibition of her work visited Minneapolis, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, Kansas City and Cleveland. In 1975 an exhibition organized by the United States Information Agency was seen in Iran, India and Japan. From 1964 on she showed regularly at the Pace Gallery in New York, where she found in Arnold Glimcher not only a wholehearted champion of her work, but a biographer as well. Commissions Through the 70's

Commissions included work for Princeton University in 1969; a 55-foot wall for Temple Beth-El in Great Neck, L.I., in 1970, and major sculptures in 1973 for Boston, Scottsdale, Ariz. and Binghamton, N.Y.

In 1975 she made a piece called Bicentennial Dawn for the James A. Byrne Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia, and a black steel sculpture called Transparent Horizon for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1979 Mrs. Nevelson made her most visible imprint on New York in the form of the Louise Nevelson Plaza, an entire outdoor environment of her black sculptures on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan. Her most recent commissions included a large white interior created for the Georgia-Pacific Corporation in Atlanta, and a large black steel outdoor environment for a corporate sponsor in Chicago.

Mrs. Nevelson never allowed success to alter her way of life. If anything, she became progressively more and more independent of material possessions. Her collection of paintings by Louis Eilshemius was sold in times of stress, as was her collection of primitive art. In her house on Spring Street she lived as simply as it is possible for a human being to live, though she saw to it that her guests were looked after in exemplary style.

Nor was she ever deterred by the challenge of a new material or a new kind of commission; one of the great successes of her career, opened in December 1977, was the Chapel of the Good Shepherd in St. Peter's Church on Lexington Avenue at 54th Street. Like the Matisse chapel in Vence, France, and the Rothko chapel in Houston, this exemplified the powers of adaptation that some artists can carry into old age. But then Louise Nevelson was never touched by old age. She put it in its place and went on with the only thing that mattered to her: her work.

She is survived by her son, Myron, three granddaughters and two great-granddaughters. Funeral services will be private. A memorial service will be announced at a later date.

photo of Louise Nevelson (NYT/Neal Boenzi)

לואיז נבלסון

' (באנגלית: Louise Nevelson; ‏23 בספטמבר 1899–19 באפריל 1988) הייתה ציירת ופסלת אמריקאית. נחשבה לאחת הפסלות המובילות של המאה ה-20 והתמחתה ביצירת פסלים בנויים ממערכת של חפצים מצויים צבועים. זכתה במספר פרסים, בניהם פרס art USA ופרס מכון האמנות של שיקגו. אחת מיצירותיה, "מחווה לששת המיליון" נרכשה על ידי מוזיאון ישראל בשנת 1965.[1]

למדה בבית הספר לאמנות מודרנית של הנס הופמן בגרמניה.

תוכן עניינים 1 קורות חיים 1.1 חיים אישיים 1.2 קריירה אמנותית 2 עבודות אמנות 3 פעילות פמיניסטית 4 ראו גם 5 קישורים חיצוניים 6 הערות שוליים

קורות חיים חיים אישיים לואיז נבלסון נולדה בעיר פריאסלאב שבאוקראינה בשנת 1899 להורים יצחק ברליווסק ומינה סאדי.

בשנת 1905 היגרה יחד עם משפחתה למיין בארצות הברית שם למדה בתיכון רוקלנד. חמש עשרה שנה לאחר מכן נישאה לצ'ארלס נבלסון וכעבור שנתיים נולד בנם מיירון. ב-1931 התגרשה לואיז מצ'ארלס, אך מעולם לא חזרה לשם נעוריה או התחתנה שנית.

קריירה אמנותית עד סוף שנת 1934 הספיקה נבלסון ללמוד מגוון אומנויות כגון דרמה, פיסול, מחול מודרני ואף עבדה כעוזרת של הצייר המקסיקני דייגו ריברה בהכנה של ציור הקיר "דיוקנה של אמריקה."

בשנת 1943 החלה לראשונה להציג עבודות עצמאיות בגלריות בניו יורק.

בין השנים 1969 ל-1984 הציגה נבלסון מספר תערוכות במקומות שונים ברחבי העולם כמו מסצ'וסטס, יוסטון, איראן, טוקיו, מילאנו, הודו וקליבלנד וזכתה במספר תוארי כבוד ממוסדות אמנות שונים ברחבי ארצות הברית.

נבלסון המשיכה ליצור במשך שנים עבודות אמנות שקצרו פרסים רבים ונפטרה בביתה בשנת 1988.

22 שנים לאחר מותה הונצחו עבודותיה בחמישה בולים של דואר ארצות הברית.

עבודות אמנות בתחילת הקריירה האמנותית שלה עבודותיה של נבלסון נעשו בעיקר על ידי גרפיט על דפי נייר. בשנת 1942 הציגה נבלסון לראשונה את היצירה 'הקרקס, אוסף חיות' 3, בו השתמשה לראשונה בחפצי עץ מצויים כדי ליצור את עבודתה, סגנון שאת השראתו שאבה מעצי ההסקה שנאלצה לאסוף לחורף שנים רבות קודם לכן. סגנון זה הפך מאפיין לעבודותיה הבוגרות וחזר בעוד רבות מעבודותיה בהמשך. בין יצירותיה הבולטות של נבלסון נמנות "קתדרלה שמימית" שיצרה ב-1958, ו"גן ירח" שנוצר ב-1957. שתי העבודות נבנו באמצעות חפצי עץ מצויים שנצבעו בשחור. פסליה הבאים, כמו "מחווה אמריקנית לאנשי בריטניה" נעשו אף הם ברוח אותו עיקרון אך נצבעו בלבן. לצד בחירתה לפסל בעץ נבלסון יצרה אף פסלי מתכת כגון "אטמוספירה וסביבה" שנוצר ב-1966. ב-1965 עבודתה "מחווה לששת המיליון" נרכשה על ידי מוזיאון ישראל.

פעילות פמיניסטית לואיז נבלסון היוותה גורם מרכזי לפיתוח התנועה האמנותית הפמיניסטית[2] נבלסון הייתה אמנית שאהבה לקחת השראה לעבודותיה מכל יצירה, תופעה או חפץ שראתה, דבר שהעניק לה ידע וניסיון בתחומי האמנות השונים. בשנות ה-70, תקופתה של נבלסון, היה מקובל שגברים בלבד יוצרים פסלים ויצירות בקנה מידה גדול, ואילו נשים אמניות עוסקות בעיקר בציור ורישום. פסליה הגדולים של נבלסון, שהיו מאוד יוצאי דופן בעת ההיא, ערערו מאוד את התפיסה הזאת והשפיעו על אמנים רבים בזרם האמנות הפמיניסטית.[3]

"אני לא פמיניסטית, אני אמן שהוא במקרה אישה"

המקור באנגלית — לואיז נבלסון ראו גם רשימת עבודותיה של לואיז נבלסון קישורים חיצוניים ויקישיתוף מדיה וקבצים בנושא לואיז נבלסון בוויקישיתוף Green globe.svg אתר האינטרנט

של לואיז נבלסון ה ערך על שמה של נבלסון

באנציקלופדיה בריטניקה הדף של נבלסון

באתר the art story לואיז נבלסון , באתר "Find a Grave" (באנגלית) https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%90%D7%99%D7%96_%D7%A0...