Sculpture's Queen Bee

By ROBERT HUGHES

At 80, Louise Nevelson still brings a sense of drama to her life--and work

The house is an emblem of the life and the work. It sprawls on Spring Street in lower Manhattan, several blocks east of SoHo's boutiqueland and just above the bustle of Chinatown. Outside, the 19th century red brick structure is at once dignified and haphazard looking. Inside, it becomes a succession of caves: several buildings joined together (one of them a former abortion clinic or else a private lunatic asylum--the stories never tally), with the dividing walls knocked out, so that one goes up and down a series of levels. The floors are black and polished; the rooms are lined with matte black sculptures, whose cellular structures, like nocturnal honeycombs or trued-up ants' nests, intensify the labyrinthine feel of the house. Because most of the shutters are closed, the light inside is dim, and even those objects that are not black seem to be. The place is a continuous collage, from the ground floor workrooms--a former garage filled with stacks of the owner's working material: wood slats, newel posts, balls, balusters, a hive of infinitely replicated fragments awaiting wholeness--to the severe bedroom, with its pressed-metal industrial closets and barracks-like austerity. The collage extends into the cupboards, which, when opened, reveal a hoard of oddments and chotchkes: vanity sets, inlaid boxes, tarnished trays, ugly Edwardian candlesticks with silver frills, like the stock of a dotty junkshop owner who cannot tear to part with anything. Mere presence in the cave signifies "treasure."

The house belongs, of course, to the sculptor Louise Nevelson. She has lived in it for close on 30 years, acquiring more rooms, filling them up. By now it is the hive of the queen bee, where Nevelson presides over a small force of workers: carpentry and joinery assistants who help with the sculpture, and her archivist, friend, photographer and general factotum Diana MacKown. Nevelson still leaves it often enough to be a near legendary sight in Manhattan's galleries and shops, and an enduring staple in the pages of Women's Wear Daily. She likes to swathe herself in costume and go to parties; she dislikes cooking for herself and frequents small local restaurants in Little Italy and SoHo, where she is treated with the deference one would associate with Hizzoner the Mayor (which, in a cultural sense, she almost is).

Nevelson's disciplined work habits remain exactly the same as they have been for the past 40 years. Quick to correct those who call her a night owl, she describes herself as a "dawn person"; she likes to rise at 4:30 a.m. and start work, sometimes on the big constructions she is best known for, sometimes on the multitude of studies--a mere fragment of wood glued to a dark mounting sheet--that she produces in lieu of drawings and that form teetering stacks in the upstairs studios.

Nevelson is past 80, without seeming so. One of the results of having a public mask is that its wearer seems to age more slowly, and no persona in the field of American culture is more instantly recognizable than hers. The armature of bone is a little more visible through the gaunt face when the makeup is off; the immense clumps of false eyelashes, glued double or treble to her lids, seem rather darker against the skin; the expression is slightly more imperious. Otherwise there is little apparent change.

In looks, Nevelson's style may be described as collage driven relentlesrelentlessly to excess, a cross between Catherine the Great and a bag lady: pailady: paisley scarves, blue work shirt, full-length chinchilla, OrientaOriental brocade, embroidered waistband, flounces, a rattling boar-tusk necklace and a black riding cap. (When Nevelson was picked as one of the twelve Best-Dressed Women by Publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1977, few of her acquaintances were surprised: there was, as one friend remarked, nowhere else to put her and no known way to ignore her.) "Personally, I'm dramatic, it seems," she told an interviewer a few years ago. "I have a feeling maybe my appearance is deceptive. Because if you're going to put on a show like I do, they don't know beneath that fac,ade there's something else."

What lies beneath the fac,ade is a self-constructed woman, one of the four or five most distinguished living sculptors. By right, the grande dame of American art is Georgia O'Keeffe, 13 years Nevelson's senior; but O'Keeffe is reported to be almost blind and unable to paint any longer. Not so Nevelson, who sails into her ninth decade with undiminished vigor. The year 1980 brought her a load of work, commissions and exhibitions heavy enough to floor an artist half her age. It was her big year. In its wake, some 20 of her giant steel sculptures--scaled up from Nevelson's maquettes by the Lippincott works in North Haven, Conn., a foundry the size of a shipyard--are under construction for various corporate and civic bodies. She held a show of her wood constructions and collages at Wildenstein last spring, and throughout the summer a selection of her major "environmental" sculptures from the '50s and '60s--arrays and assemblies of separate pieces, meant to confront the viewer with whole surrounding families of shape and texture--went on view at the Whitney Museum in New York. This year, according to her dealer, Nevelson is "resting." Rest, in terms of a career like hers, is an extremely relative term.

To be prolific is nothing--it fails to distinguish an artist from a grunion--but Nevelson's abundant output has also been, until quite recently, strictly edited, so that it bears an imposing sense of consistency and energy. There are 80-year-old artists who are content to repeat their own formal inventions as cliches. Most, though not all, of Nevelson's work is free from that tendency. If she is not one of the great formal innovators of modern sculpture--and her contribution to its syntax cannot fairly be compared with Picasso's, Tatlin's, Brancusi's or even David Smith's--she has a very deep reservoir of feeling that has infused her art and saves it from looking arid or repetitious. As a sculptor of feeling, her only peer among living American artists is Isamu Noguchi. In a time of short careers and small careerists, in a commercialized art world strewn with cultural ghosts and aesthetic trivia, her obsessed, delicate and nocturnal imagination remains unusual, a legacy from the romantic belief in the healing and transforming powers of art, which is vanishing from our culture.

In the past 25 years Nevelson may fairly be said to have reinvented environmental art for herself. In the 1920s and '30s many artists worked on room-size environments in which painting and sculpture were melded on an architectural scale. But nobody had given this juncture between the categories of art the intense poetic charge that Nevelson brought to it. This became triumphantly clear in the large sculptures she started producing in the late '50s, the environmental walls. Essentially they consist of irregular stacks of shallow boxes, filled with forms in relief and painted black. They have an extraordinarily dignified, almost hieratic sense of presence. Under the unifying skin of black paint (ordinary house paint sprayed on the raw wood), the rich accumulations of shape, the curious offcuts and repeated units, are as effectively transmuted into pure shadow as the objects depicted in a painting by Seurat become pure light.

The box as miniature stage, containing strange images like a diorama of another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct for placement, for what shapes to repeat and where to repeat them, and how to break their sequence into daring asymmetries and unexpected detachments of rhythm, was carried out with an unfailing formal sense. This disciplined what might otherwise have been a too lush spread of metaphorical associations--with Russian altar screens, icon covers (for there is something numinous, if not exactly religious, about Nevelson's imagination), tombs and reliquaries.

At the same time, the flatness of the walls and screens--the boxes were shallow, and Nevelson rarely tried to make sculpture-in-the-round--gave them a great depth of pictorial suggestion. One seemed to be looking not at an explicit sculptural fact but at a dark reef of nuances: form laid beside and over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show at the Whitney), Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white, not black. The chalky surface now produced an effect of mummification, not atmospheric distance; the calcined forms, visually explicit, retreated from the eye in a startling way. She also made a number of gold-painted sculptures that were, on the whole, less successful. The same eloquence of arrangement was there; but because the gold paint was only paint, while trying to manifest a flat-out barbaric opulence, it looked (and still looks) faintly tacky, as substitutes do.

The black sculpture remains the core of her work. It reached its climax in 1977 with a big wooden construction, a sort of tempietto, or metaphysical shanty, called Mrs. N's Palace. "I fell in love with black; it contained all color," she comments. "It wasn't a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Black is the most aristocratic color of all, the only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing."

In no sense could Nevelson be called an intellectual artist. To talk to her for a while is to enter a blurred framework in which precise dates, influences, exact encounters and the normal to-and-fro of an artist's life are blended into a sometimes irritating sense of self-engendered myth. Nevelson is, in fact, the Martha Graham of sculpture, and both her work and her incessant recasting of her life have the same eventual purpose: the exorcism of solitude by fiction.

Nevelson's account of her childhood and youth has the deliberate quality of fiction, simplified and pruned of inconvenient facts. She presents herself as an infant prodigy, continuously inspired, the servant of her gifts, every part of whose life, even loneliness, was an act of choice. She says she knew at five that she was going to be an artist, and by seven that her art would be sculpture. Art did give Nevelson a sense of security and a vocation. "From the first day in school to the day I graduated," she says, "everyone gave me 100% in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you get 100%."

She went there fairly directly. She was the second child of four in a Russian Jewish family, landowners who lived near Kiev. Her father, Isaac Berliawsky, took off for the New World in 1903 and fetched up in Rockland, Me., where he began to establish himself in real estate and lumber. Left with her grandparents in Russia, the three-year-old Louise convinced herself that her father had abandoned her, and she refused to utter a single word for six months. But in 1905 passage money came, and the Berliawsky family took ship for America. At a quarantine depot in Liverpool, Louise had the first visual experience she can still clearly remember: a sweetshop at night, with rows of glass jars glittering under the electric glare, each jar filled with a different sort of colored candy--toffees, bull's-eyes, peppermints, fruit gums. "It looked like heaven," she recalls. "It was very magical." There is an obvious and durable link between that epiphany in the candy store and the regulating image of Nevelson's mature work: the serried boxes, each holding its array of repeated forms, offered for inspection in a shallow space.

The Berliawskys were one of 30 Jewish families in a provincial town whose anti-Semitism stung in a thousand ways. Nevelson remembers her father taking to his bed for weeks at a time when things got too much for him. Her mother was "misplaced in every conceivable way"--intelligent, pretty, neurasthenic, miserable in her marriage but devoted to her offspring. By the prevailing standards of Maine she had a ripe sense of style; she rouged her cheeks and dressed as though she were in New York City, thus laying the foundation of her daughter's passion for maquillage as armor and costume as spectacle. Her father's ventures prospered, and within the inward-turned circle of her family young Louise was completely indulged, the focus of two high-strung parents who, not always getting on with each other, loaded her with approval. "Being a female was never a handicap for me," she says. "I felt--I knew--that I could do anything I wanted. So I did it."

In 1920 she married a young cargo-ship owner named Charles Nevelson, who took her to live in New York. The city was the stronger marriage. "New York is a city of collage," Nevelson would pronounce 50 years later, at the dedication ceremony of one of her outdoor sculptures in lower Manhattan, "a collage with kinds of religions, and the whole thing is magnificent ... There's no place like it."

Here, at last, the big world started to act on the intense, self-dramatizing neophyte from Maine. "I've always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself," Nevelson recalls. "I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself--if someone went six, I'd go twelve, you know? I had to move, not to get frustrated; and I was frustrated enough. In 1920 I went into everything you could imagine--Bahai, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, vegetarianism ... well, that didn't last long. I have to eat meat." She studied art, acting and dance; she also took singing lessons ($50 a shot, at a time when a quarter bought a meal) from Metropolitan Opera Coach Estelle Liebling. The remnants of the drama and dance lessons can still be seen in Nevelson's carriage and in the ceremonious gestures of her hands when she talks.

These interests soon drowned her marriage to Nevelson--a cultivated and decent man, but by her terms "not a poet." The birth of her son Myron in 1922 threw her into a severe depression: "I wasn't ready for motherhood; I didn't know how to live." Mother and father stayed together nine more years, finally separating in 1931.

She fled to Europe. "Everything had collapsed, and it was of my own choosing in a way, but it didn't make it easier," she says. She decided to seek out in Munich a famous avant-garde teacher named Hans Hofmann--the same artist who, a year later, would emigrate to America and play a formative role in the ideas and practice of abstract expressionism. It was Hofmann who made her look at cubism, "the key to my stability ... Positive and negative. A block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure." On seeing her first cubist Picassos, Nevelson recalls, "I understood it at once. I felt related, as if I had done them. So was I going to leave that?"

But she was still unfocused and drifted around Europe, doing a little film acting in Vienna and Munich, visiting museums. After coming home, she returned the next year to Paris "to really study." On the boat she had an improbable involvement with the bitterly anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who, she says, wanted to marry her. ("Don't you know that fanatics, if they hate Jews, love to marry Jewish women?") It was from this trip that she came back fully determined to be a professional. Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League, joined the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera's army of assistants, took up modern dance and worked at her sculpture.

Her early bronzes and terra cottas were heavily influenced by French Cubist Sculptor Henri Laurens, and their dominant rhythm was taken from Mayan art--a blockish, crankshaft-like sequence of shapes. They may have been stylistically uncertain, but they were powerful, and on seeing them, a leading New York dealer named Nierendorf gave Nevelson her first one-woman show, in 1941. She was past 40, an age when some artists start thinking not about their debuts but about their retrospectives.

In the 1940s this solid sculpture began to give way to assembled pieces looking like figures or standing totems. One influence on them that Nevelson likes to recall was the black iron stanchions of the Manhattan subway stations, "sculptures in themselves"; another was a carved African figure of a leopard she remembered from the Musee de l'Homme in Paris: "It was the first time I recognized the power of that animal, not as an animal, but the power of its forms." Nevelson was drawn to what was mythic and magical in sculpture just as a yearning for the primitive, the instinctively efficacious, was diffused throughout the American avant-garde in the 1940s. It was the root of Jackson Pollock's and Mark Rothko's early work and became an essential part of abstract expressionism in general, as it was of dance through the influence of Martha Graham.

But Nevelson did not want to make her totems from steel--"it was too mechanical for me"--and so she resorted to wood, the stuff of her childhood in Maine. She began collecting stray bits and pieces from the street, from junkyards, from antique shops: scroll-sawed offcuts, bits of molding, battered planks and ribs of crates, balusters, toilet seats, sheets of split veneer, gun-stocks, dowels, finials, anything that seemed to have some character. The amassing of these things was an act of love and salvage. "I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection," she remarked years later. "When you do things this way, you're really bringing them to life. You know that you nursed them and you enhance them, you tap them and you hammer them, and you know you have given them an ultimate life, a spiritual life that surpasses the life they were created for."

Nevelson was not, of course, the first artist to do this: her forerunner in the art of reclamation was German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who made thousands of collages from street refuse. When the sculptor Jean Arp saw Nevelson's great black environment Sky Cathedral in 1958, he wrote her a poem hailing her as Schwitters' spiritual granddaughter, but the fact seems to be that Nevelson had seen nothing by Schwitters.

Nevelson's attempt at a fusion of painting and sculpture ended by confusing her reputation during the 1960s. The art Establishment was dominated by a formalist view that took it as gospel that art should be "self-defining"--so that painting must eliminate every attribute not unique to painting, and sculpture likewise to sculpture. To this Establishment Nevelson seemed impure to the point of sloppiness and her love of metaphor and allusion quite improper. Nor did it help that she was a woman. Thus, in one of the most celebrated curatorial blunders in recent memory, she was left out of a vast survey show intended to define all that had been important in U.S. art since the war, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-70," mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since its curator, Henry Geldzahler (now New York City's commissioner of cultural affairs), was a creature of mode and whim with no marked convictions of his own, the exclusion of Nevelson may be said to have reflected a general consensus of dealers and formalist critics at the end of the '60s.

Such snubs are long past; for ten years Nevelson has been almost monotonously anointed with praise, and her extreme popularity among collectors has introduced other problems. A fine line exists between fecundity and overproduction, and one may suspect that Nevelson's very success has edged her across it, demanding--in contrast with her actual masterpieces like Mrs. N's Palace--a steady output of second-line goods to keep the market happy. It is hardly imaginable that, 20 years from now, anyone except dealers will be taking Nevelson's abundant prints and recent multiples very seriously.

The only area in which this presents a real problem is in her larger sculpture. Despite her virtuosity, Nevelson has not made a good crossing from private to public space, although she is besieged by commissions. In fact, there is hardly one major 20th century artist--not even Alexander Calder or Henry Moore-- whose essential oeuvre includes much public, commissioned sculpture. On the public scale, the suppleness of intuition tends to stiffen and is replaced more often than not by a mild form of self-parody. The old cliche was the bronze general on horseback, humiliated by birds. The new one is the abstract ashtray by some Top Name in the windy downtown plaza, victimized by creeps with spray cans.

Since the death of Calder, Nevelson has become the most frequently commissioned sculptor on the public scale in America, the chief beneficiary of an overflowing pork barrel. Yet a great deal is lost when her work is transferred from the room to the lobby or the plaza. The sense of intimate contact goes. So does the feeling of envelopment, the mysterious orchestration of additive detail in a limited, and hence obsessive-seeming, space. Nevelson's open-form, welded sculptures, such as the set of Shadows and Flags recently installed on a handkerchief-size plot near Wall Street (which New York City benevolently renamed Louise Nevelson Plaza), are big, imposing and mannered. They leave one convinced that this kind of postconstructivist sculpture-in-the-round is not her forte at all. In her hands the idiom has neither the power of David Smith's welded constructions nor the finesse and precision of Anthony Caro's.

Pieces like Nevelson's Celebration, a 30-ft.-high steel construction done for the PepsiCo headquarters at Purchase, N.Y., in 1976, or the 54-ft. Sky Tree, 1977, in San Francisco's Embarcadero Center, have an ornamental blandness that verges on the slick--the last word that could imaginably apply to her wooden walls and environments. One is left with the impression not of sculpture that confidently occupies its own scale but of inflated maquettes. Night Presence IV, 1972, which Nevelson offered as a personal gift to New York City--it stands at Park Avenue and 92nd Street--is the most successful of her public sculptures, but it is a virtually literal copy in Cor-Ten steel of a wooden piece that she made in 1955, enlarged to ten times the height.

Do such questions matter? In the short view, yes; in the long, not very much, since an artist is entitled to be judged by her best work, and the best of Nevelson possesses a unique energy, authority and wholeness. Even her picturesqueness is not a show, at least not in the sense of amusement; it is a carefully sustained, aggressive and rather spiky mask that renders her un available to those who would take her casually, as mere spectacle. In getting to this pitch of achievement, she, like Georgia O'Keeffe, has also redrawn the assumptions that surround the role of women in art. In that respect she belongs to the culture as a whole, not just to the art world and its concerns. "I think you have to look into yourself and do what you think is your fulfillment," she says. "If women have not taken their rightful places, they were in a world that was male oriented . . . they were meant to look pretty and throw little handkerchiefs around but never to show that they had what it takes. Well, I didn't recognize that, and I never never played the role. If you play that role, you don't build an empire." Nevelson has built hers, and not only for herself.

--By Robert Hughes

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