Photographer unknown. Louise Nevelson, 1922. Courtesy of Pace Gallery
“When I was married and could not work to my full capacity, I got abscesses and sciatica. My blood boiled as though on a stove…. If you have talent and don’t use it, it makes you neurotic and you die.”
—Louise Nevelson, 1973. Patricia Coffin, “Louise Nevelson, Artiste solitaire,” Single 1, no. 4 (November 1973): 94
Creativity was the key to freedom for young Louise Berliawsky, and it remained the highest value for her entire life. “Art was all that mattered,” she declared in her autobiography.1 She had some reason to hope that art could lead to a better future for herself, just as it had for her ancestor Issaye Berliawsky, the czar’s painter or sculptor or musician, as she knew the story, whose talent had propelled him to a position of high status in a hostile land.
Like her father, the oldest Berliawsky daughter looked forward. Only by keeping her focus on the future and its possibilities could she leave the lonely, limiting world of her mother and Rockland, Maine. Her father had overcome much more difficult odds to bring his family to safety and prosperity in America. She may have been naïve about the level of her artistic talents and how far they would carry her, but she was not unrealistic in sensing that if she could make her way to New York, as Miss Cleveland had done as a young woman, there would be no limits to what she could achieve.
Louise Berliawsky’s high school years were overshadowed by the First World War, and in her graduating class the girls outnumbered the boys three to one.2 Louise would have known that the remaining eligible young men in Rockland could never help her fulfill her dreams. Neither the New England Yankees nor the Catholics would wed her, and the few available local Jewish boys were not ambitious enough. In any case, Jewish males and females of marriageable age were expected to look outside Rockland for a possible mate.3 And so she found someone from New York who could give her both a new name and a chance to become the person she longed to be.
Like most of the girls in her senior class, Louise was encouraged to enroll in the commercial course directed toward office jobs rather than college. She took courses in stenography, bookkeeping, and typing and earned low grades in all of them. As part of her training she also worked for six weeks as a legal stenographer for a local lawyer, Arthur Littlefield.
The war had made Rockland again into a busy port, as ships were built, repaired, and camouflaged for the war effort. In the spring of 1918, Bernard Nevelson, president of the Nevelson Brothers shipping business in New York City, was in town to see about repairs to one of his ships. Needing legal documents to take the vessel out of the harbor, he stopped into Littlefield’s law office. As Louise recalled in her autobiography: “He was interested enough to want to know if there were some people of our kind [meaning Jews] in this city, and he met my father, and so I suppose there were some kind of inquiries made. I don’t quite remember.”4 Or, as her sister Anita recalls, once he was in the office, Louise asked him in Yiddish whether he was Jewish, and he said yes.5
Bernard Nevelson then introduced himself, made inquiries about her family and invited her to dine with him and the French captain of his ship at the elegant Thorndike Hotel, where they were staying. Although nervous about dining in a hotel—a first—much less being alone with two men, she walked to the hotel, accompanied by her brother. During the course of the dinner, Louise charmed the forty-eight-year-old New York ship-owner. Her youngest sister tells her version of the story. “So he [Bernard] took one look at her and wrote to his brother [Charles], ‘Come up. There are beautiful girls here.’ ”6
Abram Chasins, a young pianist and a lifelong friend of Bernard Nevelson, recalls a dinner with Nevelson and his wife shortly after Bernard returned from that trip to Rockland. “He spent the whole evening talking about the Berliawskys and especially about Louise. He sounded like a man deeply in love with the beautiful and talented young woman, calling her ‘a born artist, who had done some painting.’ ”7
Once he had returned to New York, Bernard Nevelson sent her a number of letters that she did not answer. Though he had told Louise that he was married and that his wife was expecting their first child, she was worried about his intentions. “I had heard about robber barons having young mistresses and so forth,” Louise explained later, “and I wasn’t about to venture into that kind of life.”8 Her parents may have calmed her fears by explaining the way things usually work in Jewish matchmaking. First, the families meet and approve of the prospective bride and bridegroom, and only then does the couple meet to see if they get along. At that point, the match can go forward.
Bernard Nevelson was the head of the Nevelson family, not just because he was the oldest but because he was a dominating man who had to be right about everything.9 He had come to America in 1891 at the age of sixteen from Riga in Latvia, where his father had a timber business. He was hard-driving, ambitious, intelligent, intellectual, and formal. By 1915 he had started the first of three successful shipping companies with two of his younger brothers, Charles and Harry. By supplying the United States with ships during the war, he had become rich and powerful. He referred to Woodrow Wilson so often during his conversations with the Berliawsky family that his future sister-in-law believed that they were personally acquainted.10
Bernard returned to Rockland a few months after having met Louise, this time with his wife. Louise and her parents were invited to call upon them. Apparently the Berliawsky family passed muster, because soon afterwards Bernard wrote to Louise that his youngest brother Charles would be coming up to Rockland to see about one of their ships and was looking forward to meeting her. Given the continual warmth of Bernard’s response to her and her awareness that he, as oldest and most enterprising sibling, was the powerhouse in the family, she suspected that his younger brother would be coming to Rockland to propose marriage.
Though she had always claimed that she was dead set against living a conventional life as a married woman, she had listened to her mother’s warnings. No matter how much Minna and her husband supported their daughter’s ambition and talent, in the early twentieth century, with the uncertain state of the world one year after the ending of the “war to end all wars,” it would be impossible for a respectable young Jewish woman to live on her own in New York City in order to study art.11
The summer after high school graduation Louise was working as a ticket-taker in a local movie house. Long after the fact, Louise Nevelson claimed that she was determined to go to Pratt Art Institute in New York City that fall—just as her mentor Lena Cleveland had done decades earlier. Yet she was clearly contemplating other options, and marriage may have been more in her thoughts than she later admitted. An anecdote tells the tale:
While working at the movie theater, Obadiah Gardner, a former U.S. Senator living on their street, came to buy a ticket and said: “My, what a pretty face, what a pretty girl! What is your name?” She responded, “Louise Berliawsky.” He observed that her name was as homely as his face, and she responded tartly that she, at least, had hopes of changing her name.12
However much she may have been grateful to Lena Cleveland for recognizing her talent, she nevertheless saw her mentor as “an old maid”13 and was well aware that her own good looks—and a rich husband—were her best chance of winning a way to New York City and staying there. Since she knew that divorce was not an acceptable option for a Jewish woman at that time, getting to New York by marrying a wealthy New Yorker was a guaranteed one-way ticket to the big city.
By the time Charles Nevelson arrived, Louise had made up her mind: He would become her “pass boy out of poverty.”14 On their first date, he proposed. As soon as he had arrived at the Berliawsky house to escort her to dinner—or, in the alternate story, as soon as he called and asked her out to dinner—Louise took her mother into the kitchen and said: “Mr. Nevelson is here, and he’s going to propose to me this evening, and I’m accepting.”15 Which is exactly what happened.
Their conversation at dinner allegedly included a discussion of her wish to study art and pursue a creative life. According to her autobiography, Charles Nevelson “said that was all right and there was no reason I couldn’t continue. We could still get married.” She also recalled that he had agreed during their engagement that they would not have children.16 It seemed like the perfect deal. He was going to have a beautiful, vibrant, well-brought-up, artistic wife, and she was going to have the opportunity to pursue all her cultural interests in the biggest, most glamorous American city. Finally, marrying Charles would give Louise Berliawsky American citizenship, making her the first in her family—aside from Lillian who had been born in Maine—to achieve that important status.17 As it turned out, the deal proved to be far from perfect for both members of the couple.
The apparently amiable and decent Charles Nevelson was short—five feet four—plump and beginning to go bald, and more than twice Louise’s age. When they met, she was eighteen and he thirty-seven. He was, however, charming, a fine dresser with excellent manners and a genteel air; as far as Louise Berliawsky was concerned, he was a Wall Street millionaire. Not unlike his fiancée, Charles Nevelson embroidered his own history and presented himself as having a more illustrious past and being more successful than he actually was. For example, he claimed to have courted President Wilson’s daughter.
A rich Jewish ship-owner who wanted to marry her and take her to New York—it may have seemed almost too good to be true. She had been hugely impressed with the wealthy out-of-towners who came to Rockland every summer and had longed to live like them. Now, suddenly, the dream looked like it could become a reality. Whatever misgivings she may have had about marriage melted in the face of golden opportunity. Her mother, who had married at the same age, encouraged the match. She could see how meager her daughter’s prospects would be if she stayed in Rockland.
Photographer unknown. Charles Nevelson, not dated. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Many years later it seemed to Nevelson that her meeting and marrying Charles Nevelson was more than coincidence. “He came with the car and chauffeur, took me for a ride and I got a proposal. Sometimes I feel I willed it on him. It had nothing to do with intellect. It was almost like a vision. I think that you project the fulfillment of your wishes.”18
Bernard Nevelson’s friend, Abram Chasins, met Louise Berliawsky and her family and recognized immediately that the beautiful and vibrant oldest Berliawsky girl would not have a successful marriage with Charles Nevelson. They didn’t love each other and, for all his pretensions as a passionate amateur and member of the Russian intelligentsia, Charles was stuffy, pompous, and mannered. “Charlie,” according to Chasins, was not an intellectual and was aesthetically unaware. More to the point, he didn’t have a clue about the real nature of the young woman to whom he had just proposed.19 She was disappointed that her groom was so restrained in his choice of an engagement ring—a mere one-carat diamond from a conventional jeweler, while she was hoping for a big diamond, more fitting to her new status.20
As part of his courtship, Charles invited Louise and her mother for a three-week trip to New York, installing them at the Martha Washington Hotel for women. The stated aim of the visit was to introduce Louise to her future in-laws and their friends as well as to give the couple an opportunity to get to know each other. It was probably also true that Charles wanted to impress his beautiful, tall, intense, and potentially unruly fiancée. Louise was thrilled by the visit. They began at the Nevelsons’ imposing home at 300 Central Park West, a grand, elegant European-style apartment building. She was taken to a Broadway show, the Century Club, and many nightclubs. They dined at the St. Regis Hotel and visited the Statue of Liberty. They were out every evening and she loved it all. Louise’s mother liked Charles and was pleased that her daughter had found a good opportunity for a grand life and for reaching her dream of living and studying art in New York. Louise’s move to the city would be a big step up for the whole family, and it was assumed that once Louise was safely ensconced in her new life that she would find ways to help her siblings get out of Rockland—and she did.21
Louise visited her fiancé’s family in New York one more time during the two years before they married, and Charles made a number of trips to Rockland. In the meantime she prepared herself.
The engagement period in those days involved assembling a trousseau. Given what we know about the way her mother shopped and the fastidious preparations she made for any public outing, we can easily guess how much time and energy went into buying the clothes her daughter would need for the wedding itself (the bride-to-be chose an expensive lace gown and hat) and for her glamorous post-nuptial life in New York. The marriage ceremony was to take place in Boston—halfway between the two families—at the elegant Copley Plaza Hotel.
Louise Berliawsky may have had some misgivings about the intimate aspects of married life. She had no direct knowledge of sexuality and had grown up with parents who hadn’t slept together since she was six years old. Though she had been briefly courted by a “Navy man” stationed in town, she had not had boyfriends or even dates in Rockland, knowing that any doubt about her virginity would doom her chances of leaving Rockland as a respectable wife. Her sexual inexperience combined with her mother’s evident antipathy for intercourse made her a typically repressed woman of the early twentieth century. She was, as a result, quite unready for marriage. But off she went into matrimony, and even her father bent enough to invite his brothers and their relatives, whom he had avoided for decades, from Waterville. The couple honeymooned in New Orleans and Cuba, where pleasure could be combined with the business of buying more steamships.
According to Louise’s sister Anita, Louise had several reasons for marrying Charles Nevelson: “In the first place, she was a country girl, and she felt New York would give her an opportunity. Second, he was a rich man. Also, he was a nice man and my people were mad about him—gentle, refined, cultured. As for love—I don’t know whether she loved him, I don’t know whether any of us four children actually loved.”22 Unfortunately for Charles Nevelson, who wanted a conventional upper-middle-class Jewish wife, the young woman he had just married was too vital and ambitious ever to be satisfied with that role.23
Louise Nevelson’s first home in New York City was on Riverside Drive near 155th Street in Washington Heights, an elegant Jewish neighborhood in the early years of the twentieth century. She and Charles moved into a sizable apartment on the twelfth floor, and she jumped feet first into haut-bourgeois life. As she recalled it, she was now a resident of the same city as the Vanderbilts, who lived in one of the “big private houses … that seems to have stamped itself most strongly on my mind at that time. That was the true New York.”24
As a young matron in a wealthy community, Louise did as other young women in her circle did: shopping, luncheons, tea parties, even playing cards and mahjong. In the evening the Nevelsons usually went out—to the theater, the Metropolitan Opera, or concerts at the New York Philharmonic. They visited nightclubs and attended lectures with like-minded friends and family from the Jewish intelligentsia. In the summer they would visit the Berliawsky family in Maine, traveling in a chauffeured car or by train and arriving in the style Louise had always dreamed of.
However much Louise Nevelson loved living the high life in Manhattan when she first arrived, she soon felt bored and constricted. “I didn’t like the whole performance. We were born free in the country, and all of a sudden I learned I had to be home for dinner at seven p.m. We had a maid, and I said to my husband: ‘Why can’t she give you dinner?’ I mean, I was what you called hemmed in a little bit, and I was too young to understand a lot of things.”25 Not only were there a maid and a cook, but soon there would also be a German nursemaid for her child.26
Her parents’ dysfunctional marriage—with a husband always out and a wife always sickly and depressed at home—had left the children largely on their own. Louise had no model to prepare her for the kind of life expected of her. In Rockland, Louise had been a creator of events, the natural leader among her siblings. Her older brother recalled: “Louise was the primary influence on my sisters and me.”27 Her sister Lillian’s version was that: “Louise saw to it that we had everything. She was always ambitious about culture, music, dance, clothes.”28
Being relegated to the role of an observer and appreciator of culture did not sit well with the young woman. She repeatedly remarked about the Nevelson family’s ethos: “You could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.”29 Decades later, in a conversation with her friend and dealer Arne Glimcher, she described Bernard Nevelson, the de facto head of the Nevelson family, as distinguished but over-refined. “You couldn’t be a creator,” she observed. “You are just supposed to be an audience.”30 Louise’s new family considered themselves to be sophisticated and highly cultured people. The over-refinement of the Nevelsons consigned her to the inferior status of a country girl unfamiliar with big city life. Their dismissive and patronizing attitude toward her desire for a creative life added to her frustration.
Much to her amazement and dismay, Louise, like her mother, became pregnant within a year of her marriage. It was not part of her plan. Myron Irving Nevelson was born on February 23, 1922.
Nevelson had a Caesarean delivery, which she said she had requested because she had not wanted the baby to be born vaginally, perceiving regular childbirth as “revoltingly animalistic.”31 Instead of quieting her restless temperament, motherhood made her anxious. “Soon after Mike was born in 1922 I went into a depression, right down to the tip of my toe.”32 In retrospect we could call this a postpartum depression, which was exacerbated by Nevelson’s expressed intent never to be a mother.
Photographer unknown. Louise Nevelson and Myron (Mike) Nevelson, after 1922. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Years afterwards, Nevelson was able to acknowledge that she wasn’t equipped for this new responsibility: “I don’t even think I understood what being a mother meant.”33 She gave her son little attention in his early years, relegating him to the care of a succession of nannies and governesses. One of the boy’s earliest recollections was of pleading with his father not to leave for work in the morning because he dreaded being left along with his distracted, unavailable mother. He was tested for retardation when he was slow to speak, only for his parents to learn that the boy was simply inexperienced in verbal exchange, as his mother rarely talked to him. His father was at his office during the day, and his nannies usually spoke only German. Despite these tales of Louise Nevelson’s dismay about having a child, photographs of her with her young son show her smiling. No doubt her feelings were more mixed than she later acknowledged.
Having taken singing lessons, as well studying piano and elocution in Rockland, Louise wanted to return to these pursuits once she was in New York. It was socially acceptable and also satisfied her intense personal need for creative expression. A few months after her son was born, she selected the renowned singing coach Estelle Liebling as a teacher. She later recalled that she had never stopped studying voice after starting lessons in Rockland.34 Along with her later study of dance, Nevelson’s vocal study was motivated by a desire to overcome her shyness. Her Rockland upbringing had burdened her with a conflicted combination of confidence within the family and fearfulness outside her home. “I was a shy person and I couldn’t confront all these things and I was terribly nervous, and consequently I recognized that I had to free my body, had to free my throat and had to free my being.”35
Estelle Liebling had sung at the Metropolitan Opera and been decorated by English royalty. And her studio was studded with photographs of her famous pupils, including Amelita Galli-Curci, whose records Isaac Berliawsky had eagerly purchased and often played at their home in Rockland. Now Liebling was training singers not only for the Met but also for the new medium: radio. She taught breathing, diction, and the usual vocal skills. But, most important for Louise Nevelson’s future, she encouraged her pupils to develop presence, poise, and confidence—necessities for singers who would be performing for huge, invisible audiences.
The bored young woman had some hopes for a performing career, and she auditioned unsuccessfully at local radio stations for singing roles. Her voice was not up to the job, but she found parts in amateur theatricals and opera, including a studio performance of La Traviata.
While Nevelson herself did not recall those early, frustrated ambitions, her sisters did, and they were convinced that, had she had a more tolerant husband, she could have made a successful career in theater or music. Abram Chasins, the young musician whom she met through the Nevelson family, recognized that though she may have wanted to be a professional singer, it would never happen because she had “a screechy soprano voice with a permanent wave.”36 In addition, the very correct, genteel Charles Nevelson did not approve of his wife’s ventures into public life. She had to sneak to her singing lessons. He opposed much of what she wanted to do, recalled her sister Anita, because he was so afraid of losing her:37 “Charles was … really a sweet man, but he dominated. He wouldn’t let her breathe. I remember one day she came home from shopping with a little coat, it was so becoming—she looked gorgeous. But he said: ‘I don’t like it. You take it right back. I don’t want my wife to look like a whore!’ He was so jealous.”38
Within six months of her marriage, Abram Chasins, who had admired Louise Berliawsky’s earlier vitality, already saw her frustration and emerging anguish. Once her son was born “she looked absolutely sunk.”39 Though she never expressed it directly to Chasins, “It was obvious that she was trying to conceal her bitterness, her disillusion, her dissatisfaction with everything and everyone, starting with Louise…. Her eagerness, her growing enthusiasm had all but been extinguished. She was much less sure of her self than she had been before.”40
Chasins, who was by then well on his way to becoming a successful pianist, saw that Louise Nevelson had not yet found herself but, knowing that divorce was “unthinkable” in their social circle, worried that she had no way of getting out. He was astonished to see her a few months before she left for Europe in 1930 with a new determination, courage, and the desire to fight and win.41 He could not have known—not even Charles Nevelson knew—that behind the scenes her mother had given her permission to break the shackles that were binding her.
During the mid-1920s Nevelson also studied visual art, but periodically and in short spurts. In November and December 1924 she attended Saturday afternoon drawing classes for beginners at the Art Students League with Anne Goldthwaite. Goldthwaite was the only female instructor at the League, and though she was a respected portrait painter—a Southerner trained partly in Paris and an early advocate of civil rights—she did not inspire Nevelson, who could only learn from someone with whom she could identify. As she told me in 1976: “I didn’t study; I identified with a person.”42 In 1926 she took painting lessons with Theresa Bernstein, a prize-winning artist only nine years older than Louise and the wife of the painter and etcher William Meyerowitz. Bernstein and Meyerowitz gave private classes at their studio in the fashionable Hotel des Artistes on West Sixty-Seventh Street. Nevelson said she worked with Bernstein for only a few months (it might have been longer, but her memory invariably shortened her periods of study), and the focus was on watercolor.43 The work—what little of it remains from the art classes Nevelson took when she first moved to New York—is below the level she assumed was her natural right as best artist in her class.
Nevertheless, Bernstein and Meyerowitz recalled Nevelson as “a column of vibrating development.” She had a “glowing personality” and she seemed to “immediately come forward and express herself.”44 They noted that she seemed to have innate confidence. Bernstein’s recollection of Nevelson as a student was quite specific: “She had an unusual feeling for form. She was always piling things up on canvas, striving to get structure into her ideas.”45 Bernstein recalled: “I thought she was very talented and I told her so. The way she used her palette knife and put the accumulated paint together—I said to her ‘You must sculpt.’ ”46
Bernstein and Meyerowitz had good reputations as artists, and Nevelson remembered them as “very well known.” They were famous for, among other things, their portraits of Albert Einstein. She had learned from both her parents the importance of going to the best—or at least the best known. Nevelson was sometimes taken in by good advance billing—perhaps she had some difficulty discerning glitter from gold. Or perhaps it took her a long time to trust her intuitive sense of quality. When that failed her, she relied instead on reputation.
Though the unhappiness she experienced in her early years in New York is usually linked to the constrictions her conventional husband and in-laws placed upon her, that is only partially true. Her crisis of confidence is likely also to have been related to the distressing discovery that her artwork and her skills were below the standards of a big-city scene. While she had gone from being the eldest daughter of a family of “foreigners” to the young wife of a wealthy Jewish man in a city that had welcomed Jews in large numbers, she had lost and gained at the same time. She was no longer Miss Cleveland’s best student and she was beginning to feel out of her league among the vast number of talented individuals with whom she was competing.
As early as the year of their wedding, the Nevelson family’s fortunes began to decline. The shipping business was hit by a severe depression, and the value of the Nevelson brothers’ fleet had dropped precipitously. By the summer of 1921 the United States Shipping Board had repossessed the last of the ships it had sold them for failure to pay. The family also owned 150,000 acres of mahogany forests and banana plantations in Nicaragua, but was forced to sell them at a huge loss to the rapacious but increasingly successful United Fruit Company. As Nevelson recalled it: “Along came the United Fruit Company which was a powerful monopoly and made [the Nevelsons] an offer. They said, ‘We want to buy you out. If you don’t sell to us, we’ll break you.’ They rejected the offer, and the United Fruit Company put them out of business.”47 Bernard’s absolute refusal to be taken over doomed all of them. The autocratic elder brother couldn’t face that his world, his business, was collapsing.
Photographer unknown. Louise Nevelson, Mike, and Charles on porch, ca. 1924. Courtesy of Nevelson llc / Art Resource, New York
By 1924 Louise and Charles’s diminishing finances forced dispiriting moves to increasingly less elegant and smaller quarters. The first move was to a small house in the suburban community of Mt. Vernon, New York, near the home of Charles’s brother, Bernard. Louise and her sisters later referred to this home as “a mansion.” But Louise found that living in the suburbs—despite lengthy visits from her sister Anita and taking the occasional sketch class—was suffocating. Her distress took the form of psychosomatic ailments, including severe sciatica, migraines, and boils. The vibrant and forceful young woman with beautiful flashing eyes who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Rockland, Maine, had become a lost soul.48
Repeating her mother’s pattern of dissatisfaction with and withdrawal from married life, Louise Nevelson refused to have sex with her husband. His jealously and suspicions of infidelity increased, as did her paralyzing depression. It seemed that one of the few things that could lift her spirits was the acquisition of beautiful objects. Like her father, she was entranced with antiques, so she studied brochures and frequented the New York auction houses to teach herself about objets d’art. She was an impulsive acquisitor and deeply resented her husband’s strictures on spending money. They had numerous fights about sex and money. Their son recalls his parents running around the dining room table screaming at each other.49
Bernard Nevelson and his wife Lily did not approve of their sister-in-law’s negligent attitude about domesticity or her ambitions for artistic achievement. Bernard lectured Louise, and Lily, when not making condescending remarks, presented an icy exterior. Despite the culturally narrow life she had lived in Rockland, Louise’s confidence had been propped up there by the ever-faithful Lena Cleveland and near-total support of her parents and her siblings. Now she found herself in an environment that was psychologically desolate, with fewer hopes, and a greater feeling of alienation than she had ever had in Rockland.
When they had married, neither Charles nor Louise Nevelson had fully realized how potentially divisive were the differences between them. As time passed and the financial stresses grew, those differences became almost intolerable. “I had recognized right from the beginning that truly I didn’t have very much in common with my husband. I was never married in the true soul sense. Oh, he was very sweet with the child. But under the turmoil of my life at that given time, I was kept in a highly nervous state and if ever I had an inferiority complex—that was the time.”50 Charles Nevelson loved music and played the flute, mandolin, and piano. Bored by his endless focus on music-making, his wife threw plates at him and refused to accompany him at the piano.51
The worst of their years together was 1926, as the family made ready for yet another move, this time to Brooklyn, near Prospect Park and Flatbush, where Charles had started a metal-stamping business. Six years earlier and full of hope for her future, Louise had married a millionaire, but now she was reduced to living in an unstylish part of New York City, without money to pay for domestic help and resentful of having to do her own cleaning and cooking. Even worse, she was tied to a man who neither trusted her nor had much sympathy for her cultural interests and ambitions.
Throughout these years Louise Nevelson received moral support and regular companionship from her two sisters, Anita and Lillian, who moved to New York and lived alternately in the Nevelson household or very nearby.52 They would accompany her to museums, galleries, concerts, or shopping expeditions.53 She introduced them to the cultural life of New York and encouraged them to join her avid pursuit of art and music exactly as she had done in Rockland. If she took singing lessons, so must Lillian. If she waxed enthusiastic about an art exhibition, so must Anita. Her brother, Nate, who lived with them while he worked for a time with Charles, recalled: “You had to be an artist for her to have much respect for you. If you paint, she likes you. She’s been after me to paint for years.… But I wouldn’t. I’ve seen that girl go through so much suffering.”54
The fact that both Anita and Lillian helped out with the caretaking of Mike is another instance of the closeness among the three sisters. At one point Lillian was Mike’s kindergarten teacher at a nearby private school. At a moment that must have seemed dark and desperate for the twenty-six-year-old woman, a bright spotlight suddenly shone on a path that would eventually lead her back to the hopeful dreams of her childhood. In February and March of 1926 Nevelson visited the International Theatre Exposition, in the Steinway Hall Building on West Fifty-Seventh Street, where there was an exhibition of avant-garde set design. The exhibition, which had been created by Frederick Kiesler, a renowned Viennese architect and one of the most innovative set designers in Europe, included many examples of Russian constructivism and futurism and modern art: Twenty pieces by Picasso were shown, as well as works by Picabia, Tzara, and Moholy-Nagy. Nevelson was so excited about what she saw that she visited it at least three times, each time insisting that her sisters accompany her.
Everything about the exhibition at Steinway Hall—and especially the thunderous public-relations campaign as the exhibit went into an extra week—spoke of the glorious future in theater, the art form to which Nevelson had already been attracted.55 The headlines on March 15, 1926, in the New York World shouted: “FOURTH DIMENSION PLAYS FOR MASSES: Director Kiesler Explains and Princess Interprets Plan to Unchain Drama.” The article went on to explain: “Kiesler announced that in cooperation with Princess Matchabelli—an internationally famous actress … he would conduct a school for teaching the drama of and for the masses…. The Fourth Dimension would enter as a factor in projecting the art of the new theatre across the footlights to strike a responsive chord in audiences…. Frederick Kiesler, interpreted by Princess Matchabelli, explained that he was the exponent of the free theatre as contrasted with the drama ‘which was chained to the old standards of imperialism.’ ”56
Nevelson would have read Kiesler and Matchabelli’s explanations of the fourth dimension in the evening paper. Matchabelli’s words are vague and largely incomprehensible. “The idea is to have all the elements of the theatre function toward the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is the will and the emotion, a purely subjective thing to be thrown out as radio waves.” Kiesler added his perception of the fourth dimension in the same article: “the theatre of tomorrow in which fourth dimension acting will be offered on a ‘space stage.’ Seats in the new theatre will be … set on a spherical eminence resembling an ant hill, with each member of the audience in full view of every other member, that they might have mutual enjoyment of each other’s reaction to the play.”57 However confusing or unintelligible their words may have seemed, Nevelson was fascinated by both Matchabelli and Kiesler and knew she wanted to learn more from both of them. Whatever the two of them had to say about the fourth dimension, there were other ways she could have learned about it, living in New York and becoming acquainted with the art world. While Nevelson most likely did not have a coherent understanding of the idea of the fourth dimension in the 1920s, she was aware that it was important to progressive artists and thinkers. Much later she would elaborate her own views on the subject.
The fourth dimension was a stimulating concept in the art world as early as 1910 and had at least two different but sometimes related meanings.58 The first referred to non-Euclidian geometry, where an imagined spatial dimension represented an ideal realm—a hyperspace differing from the more ordinary materialistic three dimensions known to all. Some of the cubists around Picasso were fascinated by the idea and saw the multiple perspectives surrounding a three-dimensional object as representing the fourth dimension.
As the pre-eminent scholar on the subject Linda Henderson explains:
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the fourth dimension was a concern common to artists in nearly every major modern movement….
Like non-Euclidian geometry, the fourth dimension was primarily a symbol of liberation for artists…. Specifically, belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional. The late nineteenth-century resurgence of idealist philosophy provided further support for painters to proclaim the existence of a higher, four-dimensional reality, which artists alone could intuit and reveal.
Among those who subscribed to this were the Cubists, Kupka, the Futurists Boccioni and Severini, Max Weber, Malevich and his Russian colleagues, and Mondrian and Van Doesburg. For the artists in this group whose distrust of visual reality was most deep-seated, belief in a fourth dimension was an important impetus to create a totally abstract art.59
Nevelson always admired Picasso and the Cubists and would have learned about them from various people in the New York art world, including her friend Max Weber, a Russian émigré artist in New York who published, in 1910, an influential article, “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View.”60 Weber brought the ideas and images of the Parisian Cubists to New York, where he became a central figure transmitting the most recent events and ideas from Europe.
The second meaning of the fourth dimension was mystical and became a common concept for theosophists and esoteric writers, such as P. D. Ouspensky. For them and the artists whom they influenced, notably Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, the fourth dimension represented “cosmic consciousness”—an inner awareness that allowed them to both transcend and represent the everyday imperfections of the human condition through their art. Weber was also inspired by the spiritual aspects and was striving in his painting and theorizing for a transcendent and spiritual fourth dimension. It was this second meaning that Nevelson could have learned from Matchabelli, who was deeply involved with spirituality.
A princess working alongside a social revolutionary! How could such a dramatic pairing not touch Nevelson’s heart? Two weeks later, the New York Review announced Kiesler’s plan to open a school which would be “a laboratory of the modern stage…. Matchabelli will develop in the psychological department of the laboratory the fourth dimensional power of the actors and the audience.”61 It would soon open in a four-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, only a few subway stops away from where she now lived. Just at the moment she most needed it, Louise Nevelson had found a golden combination—an opportunity to learn from enlightened, liberated teachers as well as to escape from her dreary downward-sliding world.
The founding genius of the new International Theatre Arts Institute, as it was soon named, was the beautiful Italian actress Norina Matchabelli. Born Norina Gilli, a naïve, untrained young woman, she had fifteen years earlier played the part of the Madonna in the widely known and frequently performed spectacle-pantomime play The Miracle, written by Karl Vollmoeller and directed by Max Reinhardt. By the time she came to New York, the actress had married and divorced Vollmoeller and subsequently married an impoverished Russian prince and diplomat named Matchabelli.62
Nevelson followed the public-relations push and unfolding story of the new venture founded by a woman who epitomized her highest aspirations: beauty, charm, aristocracy, creativity, and public acclaim. Many decades later she would speak about her own goals and aesthetic intentions in language much like that of Norina Matchabelli in her opening speech in the ballroom of the Hotel Astor on October 3, 1926, honoring the new educational venture: “The ideal is to develop the power of a methodical will to modify and multiply human forces…. To vitalize and stimulate imagination and free creative powers. To awaken the authority of instinct and intuition … and consciousness of soul, brain and body in a co-ordinated whole.”63
Nevelson’s recollections about Matchabelli reveal how forcefully the Italian actress had impressed the Jewish girl from Rockland, Maine:
She had a great mind…. Maybe she wasn’t a great artist, but she was a wonderful woman, a great beauty…. I’d probably say she and Garbo were the two greatest beauties that I have ever seen…. Now we’re talking about exquisite, sophisticated people. She had this dark mink coat and a big hat, and she never touched the earth when she walked—and that’s the truth. Even when she was fifty-eight I saw her once [in 1938]—she never walked like others.64
After explaining to an interviewer how the beguiling actress, with her excitable Italian personality, had alienated the impresario who had brought her to New York, which left her stranded, Nevelson continued: “So her husband and she were broke, and Kiesler was broke. Since they knew each other, they started a little school just up the street in Brooklyn. So I joined them.”65
Nevelson’s new circle of teachers and mentors gave her a foundation on which she could once again find her footing. When Nevelson called the Institute to register for classes that October, she must have been delighted to find herself among not more than six or eight other students. Thus began a lifelong identification with another inspiring mentor. As had been the case with Lena Cleveland, an older woman offered her answers when she was most confused and distressed. There were many ways she would have been able to see herself in Norina Matchabelli—the statuesque beauty, the enterprising and ambitious woman, the dramatic spiritual person, and the successful divorcée.66 Though Nevelson was not ready to divorce her husband in the mid-1920s, she was certainly unhappy in her marriage and could well have been inspired to think about eventually taking such a dramatic step by her contact with Matchabelli.
Matchabelli’s ideas about the “Fourth Dimension” soon became Nevelson’s, and were always associated for her with spirituality. They appear again thirty years later when the artist articulated her aesthetic notions as she found her signature style. “I’ve never thought of myself as an intellect,” Nevelson said when she was seventy-seven years old,67 but, as she noted in her autobiography, “I have had strong desires. My desire was really to delve into life. We can tap it and say reincarnation, we can say metaphysics, we can say a lot of things. But that is not the ultimate…. It’s still unknown. I feel even at this point that if I could find an added dimension I would pursue it.”68
Given her history of depression and confusion, Nevelson was susceptible to purportedly profound “answers,” which seemed authoritative, persuasive, and capable of simplifying the challenges she faced. Neither of her parents had believed in organized religion, and they had not been able to provide their children with satisfactory responses to questions about life’s meaning or a base on which to build a spiritual life. Louise Nevelson had discovered for herself that marriage and maternity did not bring her the gratification it offered to many other women. She had also discovered how ephemeral the “good life” could be and how empty she could feel when she had no access to expressive and creative activity.
The International Theatre Arts Institute was the beginning of freedom for Nevelson. Her study at the Institute with Matchabelli and Kiesler lasted the several years she lived in Brooklyn, and what she learned there transformed her. Nevelson later claimed that she studied acting with Matchabelli only because she was very inhibited at that age and knew she had to free herself.69 But behind her “shyness” was a combination of frustrated rage, ambition, and paralyzing helplessness, as she, together with her unsuccessful husband, lost their fortune and social standing. She felt trapped in a marriage with a husband and a son, neither of whom she really wanted in her life. Mostly, she was unable to pursue her art. So the frustration may have been less about the family losing their social standing and financial security, and more about her own unsatisfied artistic ambitions.
For the rest of her life—after working with and modeling herself on the princess—Louise Nevelson had a commanding, charismatic presence with an astonishing reserve of poise and self-assurance. She could stand and walk with pride and confidence and go anywhere in the world, certain to make a smashing personal appearance.
An anecdote shows how quickly and naturally Nevelson learned how to entrance a crowd. In 1930 a young woman named Lillian Mildwoff, who would eventually be Louise Nevelson’s sister-in-law, was celebrating her eighteenth birthday.70 She described how, very soon after Louise, wearing beige and sable, walked into the party with Charles Nevelson, “All the young boys and girls gathered around her … Louise just took us over. It was marvelous, thrilling. She would just talk, you know. She was interesting, she was a thriller. She was so dynamic.”71
Charles must certainly have noticed how frequently his wife took center stage wherever she was, as the battle continued between her desire for a creative life and her husband’s stern disapproval. Her new friends and mentors offered her acting roles, but Charles Nevelson “wouldn’t let her go on stage or do anything creative.” Her sister Lillian said, “That’s why she left him…. Marriage was horrible for her. She wasn’t going to sit still and be a wife to a very jealous husband. She was like a bird in a cage.”72 According to her sister Anita, “Charles dominated her and wouldn’t let her breathe. She had a good voice, and they wanted her on stage. Louise had an opportunity to be in the opera Carmen at the Institute where she was studying, but Charlie wouldn’t allow it.”73
In the summer of 1926, Louise took her four-year-old son Mike to Boothbay Harbor in Maine, where she had planned to take classes in landscape painting. After a few days, the director of the school advised her to leave, telling her that she wasn’t ready for the program and was far behind the other students. He offered to refund her tuition, but she refused to leave and kept working to develop her skills.
She had learned the value of persistence as a child, and once again it paid off. A few weeks later, the director praised her work as “the most vital, because it was so dynamic and colorful. Now had I left when he suggested, I would have felt so defeated. But I stayed. I never ran.”74 This capacity to stay and not run when it came to artistic endeavors would prove to be one of Louise Nevelson’s greatest assets.
Through Norina Matchabelli, Nevelson heard about Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian wise man who traveled the world as a speaker and educator on the workings of the human mind. Krishnamurti’s central message was always the same: People need to find their own way to a true and vital life of freedom. “My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free,” he said.75 This remained his focus throughout his long life.
In the spring of 1928 Krishnamurti came to New York and lectured at Town Hall, and Nevelson was in the audience. The handsome young mystic delivered his lecture in an elegant upper-class British accent, and inspired Louise Nevelson to persist in her efforts to find her own way in a lifelong quest for spiritual succor. “I already leaned toward metaphysics and had read that he rejected the superimposition of being labeled a Messiah…. And he wanted to free humanity so that each individual could claim their total being.”76 She went to hear Krishnamurti speak on several later occasions, and his liberating mantra became her foundational philosophy. Six decades later, in the last year of her life, she was still reading Krishnamurti’s writings.77
Nevelson’s later focus on the self is foreshadowed in Krishnamurti’s words and likely takes them as its ideological base:
I have only one purpose: to make man free … to help him to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give him eternal happiness, will give him the unconditioned realization of the self….
As an artist paints a picture because he takes delight in that painting, because it is his self-expression, his glory, his well being, so I do this and not because I want anything from anyone….
I maintain that the only spirituality is the incorruptibility of the self, which is eternal, is the harmony between reason and love. This is the absolute, unconditioned Truth, which is Life itself.…
So you will see how absurd is the whole structure that you have built, looking for external help, depending on others for your comfort, for your happiness, for your strength. These can only be found within yourselves.78
During that Town Hall address in 1928, Nevelson “saw a vision of moving lips superimposed on [Krishnamurti’s] heart, which was a visual projection outside of him but placed in front of his heart. That was the strangest experience I ever had,” she said. “And it lasted during the whole lecture.”79
The incident helped Nevelson realize that she could not yet claim her true heritage as an artist totally devoted to her art, because she was responsible for her son, who was then six years old. In time, Krishnamurti’s message of freedom would ripen, and she would give herself permission to let her son go. But that was still several years away.
The startling experience she had listening to Krishnamurti was not the first or last time Nevelson would be deeply moved by a visual hallucinatory event. As she reports in her autobiography, her life seems to have been marked by such events, which usually occurred at moments when she felt unable to move in any direction. She reports on two later events in which a visual sensation became overwhelming—both occurring when she was feeling depressed and paralyzed by marriage and motherhood. The first took place immediately after describing in her autobiography how disoriented she felt as a young mother: “Here I had a son and I didn’t feel like living. I just felt like I was lost. One day I walked down Fifty-Seventh Street, and at the time they had many stores with antique furniture. Well, somewhere along the line I spotted, like a sunburst, two antique French chairs in the window. They had yellow satin covers with no design at all. The shade of yellow and the touch of satin and the softness of that satin was an instantaneous healing.”80
Beauty, elegance, and an intensely tactile experience reconnected Nevelson to herself. When she was very depressed she tended to focus on the bad feelings that burdened her. She hadn’t wanted to be a mother, and she felt guilty about her lack of loving concern for her son. She ignored him as much as she could—which was possible at first because the German nursemaids could replace her. She mostly wanted to be out and about in the exciting city to which she had moved, but her husband wanted her home. Seeing beautiful objects in a store window reminded her of her own strengths and talent, balancing out her bad feelings: “It cured me more than anything else could have cured me.”81
The second event occurred in 1929, shortly after the Nevelsons moved back to Manhattan, to an apartment at 108 East Ninety-First Street,82 and Louise visited an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Again, the sight of something beautiful lifted her out of what appears to have been a severe and paralyzing depression. She later recalled:
You know how we humans get into suspended animation? Like a trance…. You’re so unhappy that you get frozen and you don’t even know you’re unhappy. And I saw no way of breaking this state of mind.
I didn’t live very far from the Metropolitan Museum…. So I walked to the museum one day and walked in and they had an exhibition of Japanese Noh robes. Let me say that there are things in us that we find parallel outside us, so these Noh kimonos … each robe was a universe in itself…. Some had gold cloth with medallions, and the cloth was so finely woven that the likes of it I never saw, and then the medallion was gold, so it was gold on gold. I looked and I sat down without thinking, and I had a barrel of tears on the right eye and a barrel of tears on the left eye…. And so I sat there and sat and wept and wept and sat.
The thing that hit me was that they used it with such elegance. It was the reverse of what people think, that gold material was a little vulgar. It was made out of … sheer-thin thread…. The light and shade…. It was the height of human refinement…. And I thought, well, if there’s been a civilization of this development, then we have to recognize that there is a place on earth that is an essence. I went home and it gave me a whole new life.83
The Noh robes were on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum throughout the winter of 1928–29.84 Nevelson had been teetering between exhilaration—in her study with Matchabelli and Kiesler, and her discovery of Krishnamurti—and mind-numbing depression at home. She eloquently describes how paralyzed she could be, unable to feel anything, “frozen and you don’t even know you are unhappy.” Seeing the beauty of the fabric designed by an exotic and refined civilization—fabric that must have recalled her mother’s exotic clothing and how fabric could confer status, lifting poor immigrant Jews above the common lot, above the Yankee aristocracy, even if only for an afternoon—recalled Nevelson to the opportunities beauty itself could provide.
She knew how lovely Norina Gilli had risen above hundreds of trained actresses to become a famous star and eventually a princess. She knew how her own ability to reproduce something “beautiful” in art class lifted her above her classmates, at least in Lena Cleveland’s eyes. And she had personally experienced how her own beauty had enabled her to move to her longed-for mecca New York City, by attracting and winning her husband Charles, the former millionaire.
His family would probably not have recognized the beauty in the super-refined Japanese fabric. It might have seemed “vulgar” to them. But for Louise Nevelson it touched a chord and finally freed her to weep, and to move on. Pushing oneself to the very edge could signify “the height of human refinement.” Beauty could be an escape, a solution and, most certainly, a reversal of the despair she now felt.
Her “barrels of tears” marked the end of a dream—that being a wife could satisfy her needs, that a rich husband could help her achieve her goal of fame and fortune. Now she would have to find her way alone. Since her depression seemed so overpowering, it is no wonder that the antidote would be a work of art—such as a Noh kimono—which was extravagant and grandiose in comparison with an ordinary object. If the beautiful woven gold fabric could lift her above her sadness, she could find a way of making beauty with her own hands. This is what Nevelson meant when she wrote of “things in us that we find parallel outside us.” The knowledge of her own ability to create art offered her a solution, and making art would be Nevelson’s way of finding the inner core of who she really was and what meant most to her. She had tried what turned out to be a false self: being a bourgeois wife and mother. It didn’t work, and she would spend the rest of her life on the path to her true self—a creative individual who would find her unique way as an artist.
And so in the fall of 1929, she enrolled at the Art Students League and set herself onto a path from which she would never again lose her way.
