Louise Nevelson’s artistic life truly began in the early 1940s. She left her husband. “For me, life could not be a system in which master and slave complete one another,” she explained. Entrusting her son Mike, born in 1922, to her parents, she moved among the Surrealists who had taken refuge in New York, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.
The exhibition “Circus: The Clown Is the Center of His World,” which she presented in 1943 at the Norlyst Gallery run by Jimmie Ernst – the son of Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim – proved a failure, accompanied by sharply misogynistic criticism. Yet it was at this moment that she made her first attempts at reusing found objects – a bull assembled from a headboard and the back of a chair – and conceived an immersive scenography, placing her figurines on a ring of sand. She destroyed everything.
Only after a period of experimentation with anthropomorphic sculptures in painted clay – including the series “Moving-Static-Moving Figure,” reflecting her fascination with the choreographer Martha Graham – did she finally discover her sculptural language, her signature.
Cornices, banisters, bedposts, chair legs, door handles, wooden slats, fragments of fencing, mouldings, balustrades, clothespins… The variety of objects she gathered during her wanderings through her Manhattan neighbourhood was dizzying. As New York underwent rapid transformation, Louise Nevelson salvaged discarded wooden objects and staged them in boxes stacked one atop another.
Black – which she considered “the essence of the universe” – would remain her absolute colour, the one that ultimately came to dominate her work.
She ordered and tamed this chaos, unifying it through a neutral monochrome and structuring it along vertical and horizontal axes. She created walls, altars, retables, sculptures, totems and environments. Rather than circling them, as one would with traditional sculpture, viewers experienced them – even passed through them.
The first of these, Moon Garden + One, inaugurated in 1958 her collaboration with gallerist Colette Roberts at the Grand Central Moderns gallery. If black became her defining colour, she briefly experimented with white in Dawn’s Wedding Feast, created for the exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959 – where her work appeared alongside that of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella – and later with gold in The Royal Tides, presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1961.
She brought these explorations together at the 1962 Venice Biennale, where she represented the United States: “I was given the three large galleries. I painted the entrance room, which was circular, gold – it was the first environment. In the two largest galleries, the one on the right was white and the one on the left was black. I covered the glass ceilings, which were like skylights, with fabric in the colour of each environment.”
Black – which she considered “the essence of the universe” – would remain her absolute colour, the one that ultimately came to dominate her work.
