Anthony Haden-Guest – Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson
The way I think is collage
Texts by
Robert Indiana
Bill Katz
Anthony Haden-Guest

By the time I first laid eyes on Louise
Nevelson, which was soon after I arrived
in Manhattan, she had become, to adapt
Norman Mailer’s phrase, an advertisement
for herself. She was not a National Treasure
- that’s a label pinned on individuals,
usually men, whose passions and poisons
have been safely expended in the past -
but a more formidable creature, a Sacred
Monster, seemingly a bit afloat above
mundane reality on the hovercraft of fame.
This, after all, is the woman who announced
during an Avedon shoot for Vogue “When
I’m the star, I never get bored.”
Face to face Nevelson could have an
astringent, take-no-prisoners manner but in
the wider world she owed that fame mostly
to her appearance, which is to say the
feathery barricades of dolly-bird eyelash,
the exotic headgear, the clothing which, as
with an Edward Goreyesque grande dame,
veered from the operatic to the Haute Bag
Lady and which might incorporate ethnic
dress, tablecloths, ornaments made out of
detritus, and vintage furs.
The mandarins of the art world who incline
to be suspicious of outré bohemianism - as
when Degas snapped “My dear Whistler,
you have too much talent to behave the way
you do.” - forgave Nevelson largely, or so I
would guess, because it was understood that
she was not just a needy eccentric, but that
there was an authentic streak of theater in
her life, as in her work (She hugely admired
Martha Graham).
Edward Allbee, who knew Nevelson
well, has said that she told “half truths
to most people.” She would give utterly
contradictory reasons for her use of black,
for instance, or for her preference for wood.
Thus when she was 35 she said “I often hear
the remark ‘Oh! If I could be a child again!,’
but somehow, for myself, I am always so
busy living in the present that I never look
back to relive my childhood but more to
search the ‘why and wherefore’ of things of
the present.”
So. That childhood. She was born Louise
Berliawsky in 1899 in Kiev, which was then
Tzarist Russia, and she sailed for America
with her mother at the age of six to join her
father who had gone before, There was a
stop en route at the ship depot in Liverpool.
Of this, she remembered “I can still see
it filled with light, it was a fantasy. There
were many shops that I thought were houses
under one roof that could have been the
heavens. There was a store that sold dolls.
I had never seen a doll and was fascinated
by the eyes. When you laid her down her
eyes closed every time - I marveled at how
unhuman I was because my eyes could
remain open.”
Most Jewish immigrants to the United
States settled in the big cities but the
Berliawskys set up in Rockland, Maine.
There was little of Old Europe’s visceral
anti-Semitism in this rock-ribbed Yankee
community but plenty of un-neighborly
chill. Isaac Berliawsky would ultimately do
well in lumber and as a contractor but at
the beginning he supported his family by
picking bits and pieces he could sell from
the dumps. And little Louise soon became
absorbed in picking up and collecting little
bits and pieces of stuff too.
She was a shy, lonely child in Rockland.
And here let me introduce another lonely
child, Philip Haldane, who appears in The
Magic City, a 1910 children’s book by E.
Nesbit, who Gore Vidal ranked as second
only to Lewis Carroll. Philip, an orphan,
who feels abandoned by his older sister, sets
to building a city on a tabletop.
He was accustomed to the joy that comes
with making things, wrote Nesbit. He
put everything you can think into it; the
dominoes, and the domino box; bricks and
books; cotton-reels that he begged from
Susan, and a collar-box and some cake-tins
contributed by the cook. He made steps of
the dominoes and a terrace of the domino
box. He got bits of southernwood out of
the garden and stuck them on cotton-reels,
which made beautiful pots and they looked
like bay trees in tubs. Brass finger-bowls
17

Page 16
Louise Nevelson, 1971; Mort Kaye Studios, Inc., photographer;
Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art.
Louise Nevelson in straw hat;
Photographer unknown;
Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive.

Louise Nevelson in sunglasses and fur coat
in front of volcano image; Photographer unknown;
Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive.

served for domes, and the lids of brass
kettles and coffee-pots from the oak dresser
in the hall made minarets of dazzling
splendour. Chessmen were useful for
minarets too.
He worked hard and he worked cleverly,
and as the cities grew in beauty and
interestingness he loved them more and
more. He was happy now. There was no
time to be unhappy in.
I don’t want to be simplistic, just to suggest
that Nevelson’s Scavenger Aesthetic, the
urge that drove her to make her sculptures
and these collages, has deep, primal roots,
both formal and romantic. Nevelson would
later speak of her life as an immigrant child
amongst the Maine Yankees and she related
it to the fact that she began to see “almost
anything on the street as art.”
Louise met Charles Nevelson, a well-to-do
entrepreneur, through her father. She was in
her late teens and had been set on being an
artist since she saw a statue in the Rockland
library when she was nine. Nevelson took
her to New York when she was 20. She
stayed in the Martha Washington Hotel for
Women on East 29th and they went to see
the bracingly new Flatiron Building and the
Statue of Liberty. She rhapsodised about
“the water and the sky and this wonderful
oversized thing. It looks like she reaches to
heaven.”
Louise and Charles married in 1918 but
she was increasingly pulled apart by the
demands of home-making and making
art. “I continued my studies, and then my
child was born. The greater restriction of
a family life strangled me, and I ended my
marriage,” she observed flintily. Her child
was a son, Myron. Nevelson would earn a
reputation for ruthlessness but her friend
Marjorie Eaton would tell of her obsessive
guilt at her desertion of her family, of her
talking of it incessantly as she painted.
Reading accounts of Louise Nevelson’s
development as a young woman artist,
working her way into middle age, is
agonizing, but not quite as agonizing as it
must have been to live, because she was
such a late developer that it is essentially a
long preamble, a bildungsroman, with the
important buildings only popping up in
the last chapters. And, like Mark Rothko,
Nevelson would neither forget nor forgive
her years of privation.
An account of her life is also an account of
the art world before the fame, the money.
Nevelson joins the Art Students League;
there are squabbles; getting left out of
groups; studying with Frederick Kiesler,
the radical Viennese architect, with Hans
Hofmann and with Baroness Hilda Rebay,
a force behind what was on its way to
becoming the Guggenheim Museum for
Non-Objective Art; and working, although
not as closely as she sometimes liked to
suggest, with the Mexican muralist, Diego
Rivera.
There was her outspokenly active sexlife
- “I love romances and I like to have
affairs” - which included flings with Kiesler
(probably) and Rivera (certainly). And
there are other more unexpected elements,
such as Nevelson’s interest in Spiritualism,
Buddhism, dream analysis and the like.
Laura Lisle, author of Louise Nevelson: A
Passionate Life, quotes Hans Hoffman’s
observation that “the fourth dimension is
the realm of the spirit and imagination,
of feeling and sensibility,” and notes a
suggestion that the Fourth Dimension is the
unseen fourth wall in Cubism. There’s not
much occult hoopla in the art world these
days. It pursues other gods.
The art world differed in another
substantial way. Nevelson struggled for
thirty years, working in near obscurity and
making no sales. She was given a show by
Karl Nierendorf, a dealer from Cologne,
who had opened a gallery close to MOMA
at 20 West 53rd Street. It soon became one
of New York’s best. Her show opened on
September 22, 1940 and got a number of
reviews, mostly favorable.
Nothing sold.
Nevelson, who was already drinking
20

heavily, fell into such a depression that she
actually found the daylight painful. Many
good artists were suffering similarly at
the time but Nevelson was also a “woman
artist.” Cue magazine reviewed her thus on
October 4 1941: We learned the artist is a
woman, in time to check our enthusiasm.
Had it been otherwise, we might have
hailed these sculptural expressions as by
surely a great figure among moderns. No
wonder Nevelson said of this period in a
television interview when she was 78: “You
have blinders like a horse. You don’t look
too much. You have a place to go.”
In 1943 Jimmy Ernst, the son of Max
Ernst, and his partner, Elenore Lust, gave
Nevelson a solo show, her third, at New
York’s Norlyst Gallery. It was called The
Circus. That too was excellently received.
Again not one piece sold.
When the work was returned to her studio,
Nevelson, who was running short on space,
picked out a few bits and pieces for recycling
into future work, hauled the body
of the show out to the lot behind her Tenth
Street building and burned it.
Success came when Nevelson was pushing
sixty. How many hopefuls these days would
give it that long? Then the sales came,
the fame built. Life in 1958 described
her as “A sorceress at her desk.” But her
long-contained rage was always ready to
explode. When Alfred Barr asked her where
she had been all these years, Nevelson
snapped “Right here in New York, working
- where the hell have you been?” Laura
Lisle relates how she sat at the bar at one of
her openings, in tears, and saying again and
again “It’s too late, it’s much too late.”
Actually, the timing had been absolutely
right. Nevelson’s work had always looked
interesting, but seldom seemed wholly
resolved. Only now was she beginning to
produce the unerring series of sculptures
and collages such as these. Only Philip
Guston, fourteen years her junior, comes
to mind as a comparable late bloomer.
And Guston, of course, had been an early
Above
Louise Nevelson with Bill Katz, Marisol, Jasper
Johns, Alfonso Ossorio and Victoria Bar;
Photographer unknown; Farnsworth Art Museum
Nevelson Archive.
Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana and others,
1973; Diana MacKown, photographer; Louise
Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art.
21

loomer also, but producing different
blooms..
There was both luck and happenstance
in Nevelson’s blossoming, but it’s the luck
and happenstance that you need to be able
to recognize and make work for you. Lisle
notes that in 1957 Louise Nevelson got
a crate of liquor as a Christmas present.
She investigated it. In terms of their form
crates were Cubist, and Cubism was her
enduring passion, but it was a Cubism
without spatial illusion, unless you count
the shadows as illusion. And the crates were
also boxes, appropriate places to show off
her bits and pieces. Ahead lay the great wall
pieces.
As for these collages they are another
repository for her essential bits and pieces.
The pieces Nevelson liked to show off,
turn into something else, build with, play
with, create with. Like the bits and pieces
she had begun collecting as a girl of six in
Rockland, Maine.
Anthony Haden-Guest
Page 22
Louise Nevelson at age twenty, c. 1919;
Photographer unknown; Farnsworth Art Museum
Nevelson Archive.
Above
Louise Nevelson standing in profile, ca. 1974;
Arnie Zane, photographer; Louise Nevelson papers,
Archives of American Art.
Page 24
Louise Nevelson, captain of the Rockland High
School girls basketball team, Rockland, Maine,
1916; Photographer unknown; Farnsworth Art
Museum Nevelson Archive.
Page 25
Louise Nevelson in the kitchen of her East 30th
Street home, c. 1954, with column form First
Personage, completed in 1956; Photograph by
Richard Goodbody; Farnsworth Art Museum
Nevelson Archive.
23

Louise Nevelson
The way I think is collage
Publication © Galerie Gmuryznska, 2012
Credits
Concept: Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer
Coordination: Mitchell Anderson, Jeannette Weiss
Support: Guadalupe Alonso, Alessandra Consonni
Texts:
Robert Indiana
Bill Katz
Anthony Haden-Guest
Printed by: Grafiche Step, Parma
Photographs:
© Arnold Newman/Getty Images
© Mike Zwerling, Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
© Steve Balkin, Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
© Tom Jones, Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive
© Diana MacKown, Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
© Arnold Newman/Getty Images
© Mort Kaye Studios, Inc., Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
© Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive
© Arnie Zane, Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
© Richard Goodbody, Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive
© John Pedin/NY daily News Archive via Getty Images
© Ara Guler, Courtesy of the Louise Nevelson papers, ca. 1903-1979,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
© Robin Platzer/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
© Diana Walker/ Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
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ISBN
3-905792-02-8
978-3-905792-02-7