Louise Nevelson
I had a bookstore in San Francisco on Valencia Street back in the late eighties and nineties before the neighborhood gentrified with a vengeance. When I go back there now, something I very rarely do, it can be disorienting. Most of the businesses I remember and almost all of the people I knew are gone. But the real crux is the light. The light has changed. So many new buildings have been built, some where car lots used to be and somewhere other buildings used to be, that the streets seem darker and cramped. I can go back to the same coordinates on the map, but the place itself is lost.
For those who have lost their homes and their entire neighborhoods, there is plenty of sunlight but no shadow. The land remains, but the landmarks are gone or transformed into ruins. Houses can be rebuilt, in time, but the familiar place can’t be restored. Trees can take decades to mature. The weave of new and old that made up those places can’t be rebuilt to the same profile. Rebuilding and preserving aren’t the same.
There is something about our experience of place that goes beyond the physical. In religious terms this is usually described as awe. We experience awe most often in nature. This is how we react to grand vistas like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, to sunsets and storm clouds, to mountains and the sea. We are not alone in this. Jane Goodall noted chimpanzees gazing in awe at waterfalls. A friend mentioned to me a regular pilgrimage of monkeys who gathered on a hill each night to watch the sunset. This is something that is in us deep. There are physiological explanations that one can attach to the specifics of our perceptions, but how those physiological factors relate to or form our emotional states is not so easy to explain. With or without God, there appears to be a spiritual aspect to our lives.
In 2008 I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of the sculpture of Louise Nevelson at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. When I was young, I would see pieces by Nevelson in the various museums that I went to. I knew that she was important. I grew up with a board game called “Masterpiece” when I was a kid. In the game you tried to acquire a collection of fine art. It was a Milton Bradley game like Life and Monopoly. You add up your money at the end and the one with the most money wins. I think that there was a Nevelson among the artworks, by which I mean, my understanding of Nevelson was limited. The exhibit at the De Young was eye-opening. Emerging from the Museum back into the light of bright afternoon, it felt as if the way that sense of sight worked was transformed. The whole world looked changed. From a sensory point of view, it was the most intense experience I have ever had of art.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, when Nevelson experienced both her artistic and commercial breakthroughs, and ending with her death in the late-1980s, Louise Nevelson was everywhere and known by everyone. After her death, legal wrangling over her estate kept her off the radar. Neither museums nor galleries felt comfortable showing her work. The only way you would see her work in that period was to see individual works in Museums or to see one of her large steel public art contributions. Neither are the most auspicious ways to see her art. In the world of art criticism, she is considered the creator of the idea of environments as an art form. The experience that I had at the San Francisco exhibit came about because it reproduced the types of environments that she has created in the exhibits of her work during her lifetime.
The idea of an environment is separate from architecture. It is a shaping of an existing space. One can see as a predecessor Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, described as a room-sized collage.
Nevelson’s wood sculptures are three dimensional collages of wooden detritus. Schwitters was also a collagist separate from his construction of the Merzbau. One can also look at her environments as static versions of Happenings that were a major artistic phenomenon in the late 1950s and early 1960s, primarily in New York City. She is also a precursor to Robert Smithson’s outdoor works and to the indoor and outdoor work of James Turrell. Works by Turrell and Nevelson have been exhibited together.
Louise Nevelson was born Pereiaslav near Kiev in 1899. Her father immigrated to the US ahead of the rest of the family, settling in Maine. His family had been in the lumber business which accounted for his immigration to Maine, rather than a more Jewish location like New York City. It was a difficult time to be in a little village like Pereiaslav. Pogroms happened in villages around them. The trauma of it rendered young Louise mute for a time. Her mother and siblings joined their father in Rockland, Maine. Her father began as a junk dealer, but ultimately purchased a lot of land and pulled the family out of poverty. Living in Rockland was OK for Louise’s father, but it was very difficult for Louise and her mother. Louise never felt accepted in Rockland and married Charles Nevelson, a businessman from New York, to get out of town as quickly as possible. Her artistic talent was recognized early on and she was strongly influenced by her high school art teacher as a model. Her teacher had gone to Pratt in New York and remained single. She also had a strong sense of color.
Nevelson’s marriage didn’t work for her. She had a son, Mike. When she left the marriage, she left Mike with her relatives. It upset her that she could not be a good mother to Mike, but being a mother and a serious artist wasn’t something she felt that she was able to do. She had mixed experiences in the art world. As she sought out teachers, they often dismissed her work and her talent. This began with Hans Hofmann, who she travelled to Germany to study with.
She was introduced to the idea of the Fourth Dimension in art in the 1920s through the German architect Friedrich Kiesler, who opened up an art school in New York with Princess Matchabelli. Belief in a Fourth Dimension as a spiritual dimension was related to Theosophy, a movement that was very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of the Fourth Dimension was also an aspect of Non-Euclidean Geometry. As the Cubists and the Futurists sought to illustrate reality in ways that went beyond visually realistic representations, both the spiritual and mathematical ideas about the Fourth Dimension came into play. Kiesler and Princess Matchabelli were vague in their expression of just what the Fourth Dimension was, but it was to them something “Beyond.” This idea stayed with Nevelson throughout her life. She also became interested in the writings of Krishnamurti in the 1920s and studied his teachings throughout her life. Nevelson was a secular Jew early on, but these ideas allowed her to find a path to spiritual expression outside of any organized faith.
In 1954 she turned from working in terra-cotta to creating wood assemblages. In her exhibit “Ancient Games, Ancient Places,” she felt that the Fourth Dimension was an essential element of the meaning of her work. She said, “It’s known fourth-dimensionally. It gives me a private dimension. And that private dimension has more space. Everything is unlimited in that place.” This was key for her personally. As a woman artist, when being a serious woman artist was extremely difficult, she needed the extra space, the space beyond what one saw, in order to come to a place where she could express herself with full artistic freedom. It also allowed her to create a highly personal art without making something confessional.
She began working with boxes and creating large wall pieces that were long and high out of the individual boxes assembled into groups. Initially the boxes varied in size, but she did sometimes later use uniformly sized boxes. To her, these were the cubes of cubism. From this point on, she became very interested in how her works were lit when they were exhibited. She considered herself a master of light and shadows. Later on she began working with boxes that opened in the back as well as the front and became more concerned with having the rear of her work shown.
It is possible to discuss the meaning in Nevelson’s work in a biographical or psychological manner, but this doesn’t really get at what is most special about it. There are many photographs of her work online, but her art is not made to be seen in photos. One really needs to be with it. From my experience of the exhibit at the De Young, I couldn’t describe the work in any detail. The experience was one of presence.
Nevelson’s art is not specifically religious, although she did create a suite of work for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at St. Peter’s Church in New York and large wall works that contain Aron Kodeshes for two synagogues. Her large public art pieces built out of Cor-Ten steel try to recreate the sense of environment that she was able to create indoors, but I don’t think that they compete successfully with great natural objects.
A street, neighborhood or city can, and usually does, reach a level of potency capable of carrying a spiritual identity that can be sensed or felt. I don’t think that it is possible for one person to so thoroughly shape a place that the spirituality of the place can be put down to them (though Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks challenge my statement). Los Angeles as a place is spiritually challenged. It is a place where shared and public spaces are devalued. Things have improved, but bad values associated with Los Angeles history remain in easy view in the built environment. We wait to see what will follow the losses that the city has experienced. Will we build with greater equity and with more generous aesthetics? Will we build only in three dimensions or will we build in four?
