Louise Nevelson

Starting in 1929, Nevelson studied art full-time under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League.[4] Nevelson credited an exhibition of Noh kimono at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a catalyst for her to study art further.[6] 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.[6] In Munich she studied with Hans Hofmann[7] 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.[6] Shortly thereafter, Nevelson started taking Chaim Gross's sculpture classes at the Educational Alliance.

Nevelson 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.[4] In 1936 Nevelson won her first sculpture competition at the A.C.A Galleries in New York.[12] 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.[6] 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.[13]

Clown tight rope walker by Louise Nevelson, c. 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.[14] In 1943, Nevelson exhibited her work in Peggy Guggenheim's show Exhibition by 31 Women at the Art of This Century gallery in New York.[15] 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.[4] Despite poor reception, Nevelson's works at this time explored both figurative abstracts inspired by Cubism[13] 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.[16]

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.[4] 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.[16] In 1954, Nevelson's street in New York's Kips Bay was among those slated for demolition and redevelopment, and her increasing use of scrap materials in the years ahead drew upon on refuse left on the streets by her evicted neighbors.[17] 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. 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[18] and had her first Martha Jackson solo exhibit, as did her friend and supporter Norman Carton, also a president of an Artists' Equity chapter (in Philadelphia). 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.[4]

In 1962 she left Martha Jackson Gallery for a brief stint at the Sidney Janis Gallery. After an unsuccessful first show in which none of her work sold, Nevelson had a falling out with gallery owner Janis over sums he advanced her and was unable to recoup. Nevelson and Janis entered into a contentious legal battle that left Nevelson broke, depressed, and at risk of becoming homeless.[19] However, at this time Nevelson was offered a funded, six-week artist fellowship at Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now Tamarind Institute) in Los Angeles, which allowed her to escape the drama of New York City. She explained, "I wouldn't ordinarily have gone. I didn't care so much about the idea of prints at that time but I desperately needed to get out of town and all of my expenses were paid."[20]

At Tamarind, Nevelson made twenty-six lithographs and became the most productive artist to complete the fellowship up until that time. The lithographs she created were some of her most creative graphic work, using unconventional materials like cheese cloth, lace, and textiles on the lithographic stone to create interesting textural effects.[21] With fresh creative inspiration and replenished funds, Nevelson returned to New York in better personal and professional circumstances. She joined Pace Gallery in the fall of 1963, where she had shows regularly 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.[4] 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.[22] 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.[4]

Louise Nevelson and granddaughter Neith Nevelson, c. 1965

Nevelson continued to utilize wood in her sculptures, but also experimented with other materials such as aluminum, plastic and metal. Black Zag X from 1969, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an example of the artist's all-black assemblages incorporating the plastic, Formica. In the fall of 1969, she was commissioned by Princeton University to create her first outdoor sculpture.[4] 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".[23] 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.[24]

In 1969, Nevelson was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal.[1][2][3]

Mrs. N's Palace (1964–1977) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022

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.[4] When asked about her role as a Jewish artist creating Christian-themed art, Nevelson stated that her abstract work transcended religious barriers.[22] 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.[25][26]

During the last half of her life, Nevelson solidified her fame and her persona, cultivating a personal style for her "petite yet flamboyant" self[27] that contributed to her legacy: dramatic dresses, scarves and large false eyelashes.[28] 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.[6] Nevelson died on April 17, 1988.[4]

At the time of his death in 1995, her friend Willy Eisenhart was working on a book about Nevelson.[29][30]

I'm not a feminist. I'm an artist who happens to be a woman.

— Louise Nevelson[11]

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, and totem-like artworks which were culturally seen as masculine.[28] 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.[44] 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."[45]

Mary Beth Edelson's Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles; Nevelson was among those notable women artists. This image, addressing the role of religious and art-historical iconography in the subordination of women, became "one of the most iconic images of the feminist art movement".[46][47]

Even with her influence upon 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."[48] Don Bacigalupi, former president of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, said of Nevelson "In Nevelson's case, she was the most ferocious artist there was. She was the most determined, the most forceful, the most difficult. She just forced her way in. And so that was one way to do it, but not all women chose to or could take that route."[3]