Arts & Entertainment

Mrs. N's Retrospective

Late-bloomer Louise Nevelson known for her groundbreaking monochromatic
sculptures and Warhol-esque persona gets her day at the Jewish Museum.

Louise Nevelson with her sculpture
Royal Tide ll, circa 1960.

Installation view of Dawn's Wedding Feast at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959. In front, are Bride and Disk and
Groom and Disk, with scenes in wood depicting a domestic life.

Eric Herschthal
The Jewish Week

I

n her day, Nevelson rivaled Warhol as
a fixture on the art scene:'
One isn't quite sure of what to
make of that. Taken from the introductory
wall texts of the Jewish Museum's excep-
tional exhibit "The Sculpture of Louise
Nevelson: Constructing a Legend;' running
through Sept. 16 in Manhattan, the line
perhaps confuses more than it clarifies
our understanding of this Janey-come-
lately 20th century master.
It isn't quite that the quote gets
Nevelson wrong — she was, to be sure, as
recognizable a figure, as outsized a perso-
na with her massive necklaces, outlandish

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August 9 • 2007

headdresses and inch-long eyelashes as
Warhol ever was — but it undermines the
painstaking journey it took for Nevelson
to get there.
The limelight didn't really begin to
shine on her until 1959, when she — at
60 — was chosen as one of several "new"
artists for the Museum of Modern Art's
career-launching "Sixteen Americans"
exhibit. (Other artists included Jasper
Johns, 29; Ellsworth Kelly, 36; Robert
Rauschenberg, 34; and Frank Stella, 23.)
But Nevelson was no sourpuss. After the
MoMA show, she told an interviewer, "My
whole life's been late:'
Nevelson made her name, however
haltingly, constructing highly idealized
sculptures out of discarded wood objects

— banister fragments, discarded baseball
bats, chair backs, lumberyard detritus,
dismantled crates. Then, she'd paint it all
black, give it a name and call it art.
The Jewish Museum's exhibit, which
brings together many of Nevelson's most
iconic works in the artist's first major
American retrospective since 1980,
expertly depicts Nevelson's personal evolu-
tion from struggling immigrant, to upper-
crust Jewish socialite and wife, to pioneer-
ing artist and innovator.
Born Leah Berliawsky in Kiev, Ukraine,
in 1899, the artist immigrated with her
parents to Rockland, Maine — a town
with few Jews — in 1905. Her father, Isaac,
was a woodcutter and junk dealer and,
obviously, an important influence on her

choice of artistic medium. Though the
young Leah always expressed an interest
in art, as a young adult she buried her pas-
sion and took a job as a stenographer at a
law firm in Manhattan, where she eventu-
ally met her husband, Charlie Nevelson, a
wealthy Jewish owner of a shipping com-
pany. They married in 1922, had a baby
boy, Michael, and lived the respectable life
of New York's elite.
But soon, Nevelson had had enough.
By 1931, "Louise had packed it in," writes
Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the exhibit's
curator, in the handsome companion book
co-published with Yale University Press
($40 softcover; $55 hardcover).
Nevelson left her only child with her
family in Maine and shortly after moved
to Munich, where she apprenticed under
the Cubist painter Hans Hofmann.
In the Jewish Museum's exhibit, we
see Nevelson's early fascination with the
dimensionally subversive Cubist move-
ment, with works like Moving Static-
Moving Figures (1945). A collection of
black terra-cotta figurines, each composed
of two to three blocks with incised lines
indicating facial features and limbs, this
early-period sculpture captures Nevelson's
embrace of world cultures.
Nevelson's worldliness also emanates
from other works in the exhibit's begin-
ning sections, like her important work
First Personage (1956), which was first

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