Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

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Louise Nevelson (1900-1988) was an American abstract sculptor who explored both the density and transparency of materials. Her imagery was based on surrealist and cubist models.

Born in Kiev, Russia, Louise Nevelson emigrated with her family to the United States in 1905. She studied painting at the Art Students League, New York City, from 1929 through 1930 and traveled to Munich in 1931 to study with Hans Hofmann. In the mid-1930s, she turned to sculpture. In 1944, a piece designed an abstract sculpture composed of wood was shown to the public for the first time. In her early work she uses traditional materials and processes, and the images are almost exclusively figures, as in Mountain Woman (1949-1950).

By the mid-1950s Nevelson had emerged as a significant force in American sculpture. She constructed free-standing and relief pieces in wood that was finished in a monochromatic hue. Black Majesty (1955) is a series of totemic events vertically projecting from a horizontal pedestal. At the same time, the presentation of her pieces became environmental in scope, and she often exhibited them under a common title or theme, for example, The Royal Voyage (1956) with jagged forms sprawled on the floor as well as mounted on pedestals, The Forest (1957), and Moon Garden plus One (1958).

Some comparisons have been made between Nevelson's work of the 1950s and concurrent attitudes in American painting, such as abstract expressionism. However, her compositions - while at first glance open-ended and freely handled in their assembled state - exhibit greater control, both formally and in their mythopoetic intent. Like some contemporary sculptors, she used cast-off materials; but her ingenious framing and pedestal devices, such as the relief, the box, and the column, in addition to her painterly concerns with light and dark, set her apart.

By the end of the 1950s Nevelson had moved from black and natural surfaces to overall white in the memorable series Dawn's Wedding Feast. The scale of this exhibition seemed to forecast her large single wall reliefs Homage to 6,000,000 I (1964) and Homage to the World (1966). She, again returned to wood painted black (triangular) in Silent Music I (1964).

In the mid-1960s Nevelson came to prefer compositions with fewer elements, more rigidly controlling the relief space. She turned to such new materials as black lucite, aluminum, and magnesium, as in Atmosphere and Environment. In Environment she achieved open, freestanding structures that are as concerned with volume as with mass. In her work of the late 1960s she used welded vertical shapes; however, she also continued to execute wood constructions.

Nevelson's artwork of the mid-1970s, she utilized cast paper in Dawn's Presence (1976). The early 1980s and mid-1980s, she worked with detailed PHSColograms in Keeping Time with Fashion (1983) and painted wood in Mirror Shadow XI (1985). Remembered for her natural abstract sculptures, her death in 1988 marked a significant loss to the world of art.

Further Reading

The most comprehensive work on Nevelson is John Gordon's, Louise Nevelson (1967), published on the occasion of the Whitney Museum retrospective exhibition of her sculpture; Louise Nevelson (1970), by Mary Hancock Buxton is valuable for the artist's later work; Louise Nevelson: Prints and Drawings, 1953-1966, by Una E. Johnson (1967); and Louise Nevelson (1969), exhibition catalog of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and College of Fine Arts, University of Texas; useful for general background is a work by the editors of Art in America, entitled The Artist in America (1967); Nevelson's updated artwork can be located in Imaging Incorporated (1995-96); Early Nevelson (1997); and Pace Editions Inc. (1976); www.Artincontext.com.

(1900?-1988), artist. Nevelson became one of the world's best-known woman artists and the pioneer of environmental sculpture. Born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev in the Ukraine, she immigrated as a young child to Rockland, Maine, with her family. She moved to New York in 1920 to marry and initially explored dance, theater, and music. Dissatisfied with family life, she searched for a vocation. She turned to painting and drawing and studied at the Art Students League with Kenneth Hayes Miller, Kimon Nicolaides in 1928-1929, and briefly with Hans Hofmann in 1932. That same year she separated from her husband and took an extended trip to Europe. When she returned, they divorced and she dedicated herself to her work.

Although she had been exhibiting since the late 1930s, Nevelson arrived at a mature style only in her fifties. The twenty-five-year period of exploration before she arrived at her signature style (1933-1958) coincided with the development of New York City as the new center of the international art world. Working as an assistant to Diego Rivera on the Rockefeller murals and as an art teacher with the New Deal's wpa, Nevelson partook of contemporary trends and events. She was influenced in the thirties by the powerful forms of African, American Indian, and pre-Columbian art, and in the forties by the iconoclasm of dada and surrealism as well as the elements of dream and mystery represented in those movements.

Nevelson had the first of five one-woman shows between 1941 and 1946 at the prestigious Nierendorf Gallery in New York. Her most daring and prophetic works from this period were wood sculptures showing the effect of surrealist whimsy and her penchant for collage. They were included in her first thematic exhibition, The Circus, the Clown Is the Center of His World, at the Norlyst Gallery in 1943. She was prodigiously productive during the next fifteen years, and her style evolved from chunky terra-cottas to the evocative collages made of discarded wood scraps that became her specialty. During this period she also began her work as a printmaker.

In 1958, after four annual thematically designed exhibits, she mounted a show, Moon Garden + One, in which walls of boxed black wood collages surrounded the viewer in darkened rooms. This dramatic exhibition established Nevelson as the pioneer environmental American artist and an artist of the first rank. Although she produced some striking work in white-and-gold-painted wood, it was the black sculpted walls in wood and metal with their aura of mystery that captured the public imagination for the next thirty years. She also came to be celebrated for her unique flamboyant style of clothing and her forceful public personality.

Major shows in New York followed her success of 1958: at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967. From 1964 on she showed regularly at the Pace Gallery and eventually at galleries and museums in most of the world's art capitals including London, Milan, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Tokyo, Turin, and Zurich. In 1962 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. She received many public commissions, and in 1979 the Louise Nevelson Plaza, an entire outdoor environment of her black sculptures, was created in Lower Manhattan.

Bibliography:

Louise Nevelson, Dawns and Dusks, ed. Diana MacKown (1976); Laurie Wilson, Louise Nevelson: Iconography and Sources (1981).

Author:

Laurie Wilson

See also Painting and Sculpture.

Louise Nevelson
Louise and Neith Nevelson c.1965
Birth name	Leah Berliawsky
Born	September 23, 1899(1899-09-23) Kiev, Czarist Russia
Died	April 17, 1988 (aged 88) New York, New York
Nationality	American
Field	mainly Sculpture
Movement	see article

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson (born Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899, Kiev, Czarist Russia - d. April 17, 1988, New York, New York) was a Russian-born American artist.

==Interpretation==

she is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her [[Assemblage (art) |“assemblages”]] or assemblies, one of which was three stories high: "When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

Contents 1 History of work 2 Means of expression 3 Personal life 4 Trivia 5 Gallery 6 Books 7 External links 8 References

History of work

Nevelson studied at the Art Students League in New York City during 1929-30. She later studied with Hans Hofmann in Munich, and worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera. As a part of the Works Progress Administration, Nevelson taught art at the Educational Alliance art school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City.^[1] At the Educational Alliance art school Nevelson studied sculpture with Chaim Gross. At the Art Students League Nevelson studied life drawing and painting with George Grosz. ^[2]

Means of expression

Some work done by Nevelson memorialized the Holocaust. Nevelson often worked in shallow-relief, often monochromatically. Nevelson's work is not easily allied with any one movement, though it has been variously linked to Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract expressionism, Minimalism, feminism, and installation art.^[3]

While executing sculptures in wood throughout her career, Nevelson also worked in lucite, aluminum, and magnesium. Nevelson also worked in cast paper. ^[4] During the early 1980s Nevelson employed Cor-ten steel as sculptural material.^[5]

Personal life

Louise grew up in Rockland, Maine and spent most of her adolescent years there. There is a street named for her there. She married Charles Nevelson a wealthy ship worker after she graduated from high school in 1918, and together they had a child named Myron Nevelson. Louise and Charles later separated in 1931.

Trivia

Mercedes Ruehl played Nevelson in Edward Albee's play "Occupant" at the Signature Theater in New York in summer 2008.

Gallery

Sky Cathedral, painted wood, 1982, Smithsonian American Art Museum

'Night Leaf', plexiglas sculpture by Louise Nevelson 1969, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Books

• Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960's (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1
• Wilson, Laurie; Louise Nevelson : iconography and sources (New York : Garland Pub., 1981) ISBN 0-8240-3946-7
• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 20045.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p.246-249

External links

• Pace Wildenstein Gallery: Louise Nevelson
• Louise Nevelson Papers Online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

References

1. ^ http://www.pacewildenstein.com/artists/ViewArtist.aspx?artist=LouiseNevelson&type=Artist&guid=073698d9-1fde-4f89-a6d9-9a4f7c7e1d16
2. ^ http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/2/Art/History_and_Theory/Jewish_Art_History/Medieval_and_Modern/Modern_to_Postmodern/Louise_Nevelson.shtml
3. ^ http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/7aa/7aa729.htm
4. ^ http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:cHqhP6MBEgkJ:www.answers.com/topic/louise-berliawsky-nevelson+%22Louise+Berliawsky+Nevelson%22&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
5. ^ http://www.pacewildenstein.com/artists/ViewArtist.aspx?artist=LouiseNevelson&type=Artist&guid=073698d9-1fde-4f89-a6d9-9a4f7c7e1d16

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