Tsarina of Total Immersion

By ROBERT HUGHES

A show of Louise Nevelson "environments" in Manhattan

Louise Nevelson, the doyenne of American sculpture, is 80 this year. Over the past four decades--she did not have her first exhibition until 1941--the work of this Russian-born artist, an immigrant from Kiev, has become one of the indispensable points of reference in American art as a whole. Her walls of wooden boxes, painted black, white or gold and containing arrays of scraps and found objects, occupy a unique mid-point between the grids of cubism and the dream landscapes of surrealism, displaying a tough analytical sense that is at the same time drenched in fantasy.

Nevelson's drive is something of a legend by now: few artists anywhere near her age keep working at such a pitch. Fittingly her formidable sense of vocation is currently celebrated in not just one but three Manhattan shows. At the Pace Gallery is a collection of models for metal outdoor sculpture Nevelson has done in just the past decade At the Wildenstein Gallery is a rich assemblage of wood constructions and collages. But in many ways the centerpiece of the Nevelson celebration is an exhibition called "Atmospheres and Environments" at the Whitney Museum.

The show sets out one of the main concerns of Nevelson's art as it has developed over the past 30 years: the making, not of single sculptures, but of environments, whole rooms of related works that are meant to be read cumulatively, rather than one by one. The effect is of total immersion, an old preoccupation of modern artists. "Atmospheres and Environments" condenses, into four rooms, all that remains of seven large environmental shows held between 1955 and 1961--a distilled essence of her work, large in scale and quite overwhelming in theatrical impact.

The first of the environments, called The Royal Voyage, consists of early pieces from the '50s that are too distinct and fragmentary to work together, but it prepares one for the Nevelsonian themes --those dark spikes and points, the torso-like fragments of turned baluster that are her equivalent of the cubist guitar, the plaques and table forms, the totems.

But to move into the next room, Moon Garden + One, is to see the full mastery of effect with which Nevelson could, and still can, transform a given space. These columns and stacks of boxes, with their carefully orchestrated suggestions of altarpiece, shrine, cave and iconostasis, suggest how far her desire for an environmental art has transcended decoration. The sculpture does not merely sit on the wall; it appropriates the whole surface, making the room itself an instrument of reverie. Spotlights play on the graphite-black surface of the sculptures, carving patch within darker patch of shadow until the inner forms of the wall are drowned in obscurity and only the faintest rustle of black under black suggests their presence.

All this could be melodramatic, without Nevelson's clear sense of formal diction. She knows exactly how far a space can be loaded with shapes before congestion takes over. And as a rule, her shapes are marvelously clear and decisive, a dream geometry of arcs, circles, balls and triangles, alternating with rougher and more battered fragments of wood. In this variety of texture and profile, which runs from Platonic solid to inchoate lump, her formal system seems to suggest the layers of definition from which memory itself is composed.

Part of the achievement of her work lies in the way in which she adapted the rationale of cubist composition to more mysterious ends. "Cubism gives you a block of space for light, a block of space for shadow," Nevelson has said. "Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube structure." transcends In and sum, the translates nature encompassing into ambition of Nevelson's work is to make a continuous surface so full, so engrossing and so minutely articulated with variety of detail that it can work as an abstract metaphor of nature itself.

This does not always come off. One detects (especially in parts of the gold-painted environment, The Royal Tides) a note of theatrical pomp, a weakness for the merely spectacular. But Nevelson's black rooms and her array of white sculpture entitled Dawn 's Wedding--the negative reversal of Moon Garden, every shape blanched and fully visible under the chalky candor of the white paint so that it seems ethereal and removed rather than dense and beckoning--afford an extremely satisfying sculptural experience. They are full of mystery, rigor and the calmly detailed expressive power that her own. -- Robert Hughes

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