Anthony Haden-Guest – Louise Nevelson

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
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