Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor who represented Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, and Cubism. Her massive monochromatic sculptures, environments, and installations made from wooden objects, found in urban debris piles, and other materials reflected the artist’s personal experience of dislocation and self-invention.
Background
Louise Nevelson was born as Leah Berliawsky on September 23, 1899, in Perislav, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (currently Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, Kiev Oblast, Ukraine). She was a daughter of Anne Minna Ziesel Smolerank and Isaac Berliawsky, a lawyer who stood for women’s rights. He worked as a contractor and lumber merchant to support the family.
Nevelson had two sisters, Anita Weinstein and Lillian Mildwoff, and one brother named Nathan Berliawsky.
Education
Louise Nevelson’s father, Isaac, moved to the United States when she was three years old toddler. Louise was so dispirited by her father’s departure that she kept silence for six months. In 1905, fleeing from the cultural discrimination of the Jewish community by Tsarist Russians, Nevelson’s mother joined her husband in America who had settled down in Rockland, Maine.
In the beginning, Isaac supported his family by serving as a woodcutter, and then he became a prosperous lumberyard owner and realtor.
In her childhood, Louise was strongly attached to her mother who made clothes for herself and her children to overcome the depression caused by the hardships after the relocation. Louise Nevelson decided to become an artist after her visit to the Rockland Public Library in 1908 where she observed a plaster cast of Joan of Arc.
To achieve her goal, Louise attended drawing classes at Rockland High School where she studied English and was a captain of a basketball team as well. She developed her skills by painting detailed watercolor interiors and sometimes female figures. Nevelson graduated from high school in 1919.
The following year, she took voice classes from Metropolitan Opera Coach, Estelle Liebling. Later, in 1926, Nevelson studied drama with Norina Matchabelli, and in a couple of years attended lectures by a philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti in the Town Hall of New York City.
From 1929 to 1930, she pursued her studies in art at the Art Students League where she attended art classes by Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides. While there, she studied painting, modern dance, and sculpture. A year later, she came to Munich, Germany where she developed her artistic skills under Hans Hofmann.
In 1934, Louise Nevelson took lessons from a sculptor Chaim Gross at the Educational Alliance Art School. The course was in Yiddish.
Later in life, Louise Nevelson received Honorary degrees from Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, Smith College, Boston University, both in Massachusetts, Columbia University, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, both in New York City. She also had Honorary Doctorates from New York University, Harvard University, Tufts University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The start of Louise Nevelson’s career can be counted from the end of the 1910s when she became a stenographer at a local law office in Rockland, Maine. While there, she met and then married Charles Nevelson.
After the separation with Charles in 1931, Louise initiated her one-year trip around Europe. Nevelson visited France, Italy, and Germany where she tried her hand as an extra in movies in Berlin and Vienna. Then, the artist came back to New York City.
While there, she got acquainted with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera whom she assisted on the mural for the New Workers’ School in 1933. Throughout the decade, she also tried her hand in academics teaching art at the easel painting and sculpture divisions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. So, in 1935, she taught art at Flatbush Boys Club and spent four more years working at WPA.
It was about this time when Nevelson's attention shifted from painting, lithography, and etching to sculpture. She used the wood gathered from the streets of New York City to burn in her fireplace as a material for her sculptural compositions. The debut solo exhibition of the artist took place at Nierendorf Gallery in New York City in 1941 which became the representative of her art for six following years.
The show that attracted the first attention to Nevelson’s sculptures made from various found object pieces was followed by another presentation at the Norlyst Gallery the following year, the Peggy Guggenheim's show ‘Exhibition by 31 Women’, and again at the Nierendorf in 1944. The works shown at Norlyst received poor reviews from critics, and the artist abandoned the use of found objects as materials. Instead, she experimented with stone, bronze, terra cotta, and wood exploring cubist figurative art and Surrealism. She stayed away from the contemporary artists' groups during this period of time.
At the beginning of the 1950s, Nevelson traveled to Mexico where she explored Pre-Columbian art. Sculptures made by Nevelson during this time became bigger in size compared to her creations of the 1940s. During the decade, she participated in more and more exhibitions which forged her popularity, including the shows at Lotte Jacobi Gallery and Grand Central Art Galleries where she presented such works as ‘Bride of the Black Moon’, ‘First Personage’, and her first wall sculpture, ‘Sky Cathedral’ which was acquired by Museum of Modern Art in 1958.
Nevertheless, the artist had financial problems, and to support herself, she joined the Great Neck public school system where she taught sculpture in adult education programs. From 1957 to 1958, Nevelson headed the New York Chapter of Artists' Equity. In 1958, she began collaborating with Martha Jackson Gallery which finally provided her with financial stability.
The year 1960 was marked for Nevelson by her first solo show in Europe which was held at Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. Later the same year, her installation ‘Dawn's Wedding Feast’ was included at the group exhibition 16 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, alongside the art of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Due to the fame Louise Nevelson received in the 1950s in the United States, she was selected to represent the country at the Venice Biennale of 1962. The same year, the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased her ‘Young Shadows’, and the artist became a head of the Artists' Equity serving in that capacity until 1964.
It was at that time when Louise Nevelson changed her membership at Martha Jackson Gallery for the brief stint at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Although the artist left one of the main sources of income in the person of the Martha Jackson, the fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop (currently Tamarind Institute) she received supported her during the period.
While at Tamarind, Louise Nevelson worked on twenty-six lithographs from such unusual media as cheesecloth, lace, and textiles which added special texture to the works. In 1963, Nevelson came back to New York City where she started collaboration with Pace Gallery which would organize regular exhibitions of her works till the end of her professional career.
Four years later, the first retrospective of Nevelson’s art was held at the Whitney Museum. The show presented one hundred pieces by the artist including drawings she had produced at the begging of her artistic path. Over the years, Louise Nevelson was helped by several assistants both in the studio and daily routine. There were Teddy Haseltine, Tom Kendall, and Diana MacKown among them. The end of the decade was the climax of her career.
In 1970, the artist was commissioned the first monumental outdoor sculpture for Princeton University. She completed the task producing the Cor-Ten steel monumental screen, ‘Atmosphere and Environment X’, which was placed on the university's campus a year later. Among the works Nevelson created for public art throughout the decade was also design for Saint Peter's Lutheran Church in midtown Manhattan for which she applied one of her earlier pieces. The next major exhibition of Nevelson’s art was hosted by the Walker Art Center in 1973.
Louise Nevelson continued to produce sculptures until the end of her life.
A Jewish artist, Louise Nevelson elaborated design for the chapel of Saint Peter's Lutheran Church in 1975. Later, asked about how it was to create work of Christian art being follower of another religion she said that her abstract pieces exceeded religious bariers.
Views
Louise Nevelson appreciated the Cubist movement and characterized it as “one of the greatest awarenesses that the human mind has ever come to.” She named Pablo Picasso and Hans Hofmann as those who provided her with base for her cubist-style sculptures. The artist also found inspiration in Native American and Mayan art, the cosmos, and archetypes. So, some of her masterpieces were influenced by the art of an Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García.
Black and white were the favorite colors of Nevelson. For her, black incarnated totality in the sense that it gathered all colors, and white was the color that “summoned the early morning and emotional promise.” Later in her career, inspired by the materialism and hedonism of gold, a symbol of the sun, and the moon, she also incorporated it in her pieces. Nevelson described the period as the “baroque phase”.
Another symbolic element of her sculptural compositions was the bride which referred to the artist’s personal rejection of matrimony.
Louise Nevelson was also certain about the fact that art serves to express the individual not the views of a woman or a man.
Quotations:
"Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind."
"Only a few basic forms unify the art of all periods, the rest are variations."
"A white lace curtain on the window was for me as important as a great work of art. This gossamer quality, the reflection, the form, the movement. I learned more about art from that than I did in school."
"My total conscious search in life has been for a new seeing, a new image, a new insight. This search not only includes the object, but the in-between place. The dawns and the dusks. The objective world, the heavenly spheres, the places between the land and sea...Whatever creation man invents, the image can be found in nature. We cannot see anything that we are not already aware of. The inner, the outer = One."
"The greatest thing we have is the awareness of the mind. There we can build mansions. There we have all the things that are not given to us on earth."
"Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing color."
"Most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within."
"Humans really are heir to every possibility within themselves, and it is only up to us to admit it and accept it. You see, you can buy the whole world and you are empty, but when you create the whole world, you are full."
"I only know this that you can't give advice to an artist."
"I have never liked the middle ground – the most boring place in the world."
"I never feel age... If you have creative work, you don't have age or time."
"When you are centered, people can’t control you because they are your reflection. By the same token, you are their reflection."
"I'm not a feminist. I'm an artist who happens to be a woman."
Membership
Throughout her life, Louise Nevelson was active in such organizations as the International Association of Artists, Artists Equity, National Historic Sites Foundation, Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, National Association of Women Artists, New York Society of Ceramic Arts, and American Abstract Artists. In 1954, she became a member of Sculptor’s Guild, and in 1979 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Sculptors Guild
,
United States
1954
American Academy of Arts and Letters
,
United States
1979
Personality
Louise Nevelson was a charismatic and hard-working person. She carefully constructed not only each of her sculptural compositions but the exhibition environment around them.
At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Nevelson gifted many of her papers and documents to the Archives of American Art, as well as her impressive art collections and furniture to art museums and friends.
Physical Characteristics:
Louise Nevelson had an extravagant personal style with ethnic clothes, colorful scarves, eccentric jewelry, mink eyelashes, and grotesque headdresses as essential attributes. Since the end of the 1960s, she was dressed by a fashion designer Arnold Scaasi. Nevelson considered her extravagant style as the extension of her quaint works.
Quotes from others about the person
"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
Interests
Native American art, Ancient Mayan art
Artists
Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Hans Hofmann
Connections
Louise Nevelson met her future husband, Charles Nevelson, while she worked as a stenographer in Rockland, Maine. Charles served in a shipping Nevelson Brothers Company. Louise and Charles married in June 1920 at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. After, they relocated to New York City. In a couple of years, Nevelson gave birth to their son firstly named Myron (later changed for Mike). Mike followed his mother’s steps and became a sculptor.
Louise and Charles separated in 1932, and by 1941 the couple had received an official divorce.
The family of Mike Nevelson produced two daughters, Maria and Neith. When Neith chose the profession of an artist, Maria Nevelson helped to distribute information about her notable grandmother by lecturing at museums and providing research services.
Louise Nevelson
The monograph was published on the occasion of Louise Nevelson's first retrospective exhibition which was held at the Whitney Museum of art from March 8 - April 30, 1967
1967
Louise Nevelson: Atmospheres and Environments
A tribute to the acclaimed American sculptor on her eightieth birthday presents the five major 'environments' mounted by the Whitney Museum in her honor
1988
Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life
The biography of Louise Nevelson provides fascinating insights and information discovered in archives and public records, letters and diaries, and the artist’s own prose and poetry