Artists & Works

Louise Nevelson
American, born Russia (1899-1988)
BLACK LIGHT: ZAG 6 (1971)
painted wood
49” x 61.25”
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (1974)
screenprint
30"x 20"

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO,
Sculpture

Louise Nevelson entered art history late in life but had an enormous impact when she did. Known as the “Empress of Assemblage,” she achieved her great breakthrough in the late fifties, with extended wall-high stacks of boxes filled with found objects, all painted black, white, or gold. Nevelson had been living in New York since the twenties, studying singing, dancing, and acting, in the thirties participated in some of the WPA mural projects, and started exhibiting her artwork in the early forties. Once she became successful, she was able to have her boxes custom-fabricated. In 1959, Nevelson participated in her first important museum exhibition, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and had a solo show at the influential Martha Jackson Gallery. She was included in the Venice Biennale in 1962, and since then has had many major museum retrospectives.

Nevelson had been working for some time before she received any serious recognition for her art. In fact, her first shows were greeted with near-derision by the male critics of the time. “We learned the artist was a women in time to chek our enthusiasm,” was one of the most famous reactions. This was quite typical for women artists of the early and mid twentieth century. To Nevelson, art was a way of life; she felt she had no choice but to create, no matter how difficult it was for her and how many financial hardships it involved. Her earliest assemblages were made from objects she found on the street. She painted them black because she didn’t want to be influenced by color. For Nevelson, like many of the artists of her era, art was always a self-exploration process.

Black Light: Zag 6 is a typical work from Louise Nevelson's mature creative period. In the 1940s, after experiments in other media, the artist began to make constructions from wood she either found in the streets of New York, or more recently, had cut to her own specifications. These constructions are unlike any other sculpture because they shape space, becoming containers for the void, rather than reach out into space as traditional sculpture is apt to do.

Louise Nevelson's wooden constructions are either black, white or gold. She considers black to represent the shadow of the universe, white as reflecting the universe, and gold as representing the sun, moon, and stars. Black is especially important to Nevelson because, as she has said, "I identify with the shadow."

No one image or shape stands out from Black Light: Zagal; rather, it is a collection of shapes, angles, and recesses suffused with shadow and mystery. The work recedes into itself rather than imposing the three-dimensional presence we expect from sculpture. Nevelson's use of found objects is unique--she disguises and transforms them, rather than asserting their role as appropriated "junk."

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 1964 Interview of Louise Nevelson with Dorothy Seckler
"LN: I never thought I made sculpture or made anything. I'm not looking to make anything. I want something else entirely. I want that extra dimension where you don't make things; you live with that place and you give that place a form and in that place where you give form you bring back here and hope to communicate on that level. Some people do get it. Even if it's a little late, they get it. I don't know if I've said it well, but I'll say it again: I don't want to make sculpture and I don't want to make paintings; I'm not looking to make anything. I myself need, for my place of consciousness, a form. It's almost like you are an architect that's building through shadow and light and dark. You are really an architect in that place, but you don't want to make buildings for people; you are -- in another dimension -- you are the architect, you see. But it's a very real world. I never use a word like "imagination" because that word "imagination" means to me that you extend immediately to that great dimension. So it's not imagination. It's a great reality but the material you are using is in that place instead of in this place, you see. So it isn't through the intellect, it's through vision that you give form and structure to that place. And so, naturally, you are an architect in that place."