Four Figures, 1930. Pen and ink on paper. Farnsworth Art Museum, bequest of Nathan Berliawsky 1980.35.34
“Charles Nevelson gave Louise ten dollars a week to live on, trying to force her to come back to him by making her uncomfortable. He didn’t know what to do with her and wanted to stop her. He wanted a beautiful woman for a domestic relationship. He didn’t know he had a genius.”
—Marjorie Eaton, interview with author, August 25, 1976
In the late 1920s the Art Students League was a vital force in the American art world. Some of the most celebrated American painters and sculptors had studied or taught there, including William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, John Sloan, and Thomas Hart Benton. From the time of its founding in 1875, it was—and still is—a remarkably democratic institution where neither students nor instructors are graded or earn degrees. The students come to study purely to learn their craft, and they can enroll for any period of time with any instructor they choose. The faculty members, initially hired because of their reputation in the art world, are invited to stay based on the number of students they attract and retain. Popular instructors may have crowded classes, though less serious students soon weed themselves out. An atmosphere of informality combined with dedication has always been the order of the day, as instructors and students frequently socialize with each other.
Kenneth Hayes Miller, in whose Life Drawing and Painting class Louise Nevelson enrolled in September 1929, was considered a leading urban realist and was one of the first American painters to have his work exhibited at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art.1 His goal as an artist as well as a teacher was to combine the best of classical tradition with a wholehearted openness to modernity. One of the most admired but not necessarily most popular painting teachers of the 1920s and 1930s, Miller was long the dominating force at the Art Students League, and an influential member of the board of the institution for ten years.2 Though a forceful personality himself, he did not push his students into his own mold and successfully propelled many of them, ranging from Isabel Bishop to Reginald Marsh, to find their individual styles.3
Though Lena Cleveland had gone to Pratt Art School, the Art Students League was “the big prestige school in the professional art student’s horizon,” and Louise had to have the best.4 At first Nevelson attended only morning classes with Miller because, as she explained, “I had a household myself.”5 Within three months she added afternoon drawing classes with Kimon Nicolaïdes, a former Miller student who had developed a sizable following.6 Students typically took classes with both teachers, because they were seen as useful counterpoints. With Miller, students tightened up their techniques and knowledge of the old-master traditions. With Nicolaïdes, they were introduced to the latest in European trends and a liberating series of drawing exercises.7
Nevelson remained in Miller’s class for two years and established a close relationship with him that continued through to 1933.8 She recalled him as “very sympathetic” and said, “We became very good friends.”9 Austere, articulate, and handsome, hailing from Oneida in upstate New York, Miller may have reminded Nevelson of the proud Yankee natives she knew from Maine. In retrospect, one can see much in Miller’s philosophy and teaching style that would have appealed to Nevelson. He de-emphasized technical instruction and encouraged students to develop their own intuitive experiences, putting great emphasis on each person’s finding his or her own artistic self.10
Possibly more important for Nevelson was the way Miller inspired his students to embrace a total devotion to art as a way of life. Nevelson’s diverse cultural training and experience had not yet placed her on a sure path as a visual artist. Miller was a man of iron will, a skillful technician, and was seen as “one of the most clear-headed speakers and thinkers on art … a philosopher on art who continually thought about form, about the design, about these elements as they occurred in the art of the ages.”11 A teacher such as Miller, whose complete devotion to art had brought him prominence, helped restore in Nevelson the earlier self-confidence nurtured by Miss Cleveland.
Another facet of Miller’s teaching, significant for Nevelson’s later development, was his interest in the sculptural qualities of painting. “His insistence on finding the bulk and structure of the figure as well as the more obviously sensuous qualities of light and color, his urging to ‘reach around’ the object, all suggested the three-dimensional medium of sculpture.”12 A number of Miller’s students, in addition to Nevelson, eventually became sculptors.
In his earlier teaching Miller had been on the side of experimentation, but by the late 1920s, the time Nevelson was studying with him, he was focused primarily on the old masters and tradition. As she recalled in the last year of her life, “When I went to art school it was all figurative art; we drew skulls made of white plaster, and we worked from models.”13
Students had to look elsewhere for information about the latest developments in modern art, especially in Europe.14 Enter Kimon Nicolaïdes, one of the most popular teachers at the League. He became known as a “second father” to the hundreds of students who flocked to his innovative drawing classes. Though she received her foundational art training in painting and composition from Miller, Nevelson’s eighteen months in Nicolaïdes’ afternoon drawing classes may have had a more lasting effect on her work. Dorothy Dehner, who later married David Smith, remembered his alerting students to the most exciting and avant-garde exhibits in the city.15 “The best artists in America were teaching at the League. It was a very yeasty place, and the most yeasty students were studying with Nicolaïdes.”16 When Nevelson talked about her relatively brief study with Nicolaïdes, she reported, as she often did when discussing her training, his having discovered her giftedness: “I went to him for a short while. The first week I was there he took mine [drawings as] choice things for the week and put them on the board. So already he recognized my talent.”17
Nicolaïdes, who worked painstakingly slowly and rarely exhibited, had trained as an artist at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the League. The son of Yankee mother and Greek father, he studied and lived in Europe for a year and was given a one-man exhibition at the well-known Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. He began teaching at the League in 1923, and his innovative methods became standard fare in art schools around the world.18
Nicolaïdes combined a rigorous way of training the eye and hand by insisting that students exactly follow the contours of the object without lifting their hand from the drawing or moving their eyes away from the object being drawn. An exercise, which was meant to counterbalance these slowly achieved contour drawings, was a “gesture drawing”—a sketch done in a few seconds aimed to capture the living movement of the model. Nikolaïdes advised students to do both types of drawing repeatedly so that their skill would become automatic. He argued that, “There is a vast difference between drawing and making drawings. The things you will do—over and over again—are but practice. They should represent to you only the result of an effort to study…. Your progress is charted, not on paper, but in the increased knowledge with which you look at life around you” (my italics).19 Nicolaïdes’ ideas fit perfectly with Nevelson’s recent lessons in dramatics, and it must have been a relief to know that she would not be judged by a single drawing but, rather, by the knowledge that came with practice.
The fluid line quality evident in almost all of Nevelson’s figure drawings is a testament to her classes with Nicolaïdes, as well as her appreciation of Matisse. Likewise, her assertion of the artist’s right to distort whatever body parts needed to be changed for aesthetic reasons speaks to what Nicolaïdes wanted his students to learn from the repetition process. (It also speaks to Nevelson’s lifelong appreciation of Picasso, whose drawn and painted bodily distortions look natural.) What Nevelson added to these homages to earlier masters was a playful perceptual quality, which made tiny heads seem just right on big bodies, and negative spaces that artfully intertwined with anatomical truths. Hands, heads, and feet usually played second fiddle to torsos and thighs. But a sculptural solidity was always present.
Four Figures, 1930. Pen and ink on paper. Farnsworth Art Museum, bequest of Nathan Berliawsky 1980.35.34
Nevelson mentioned neither Miller nor Nicolaïdes in her autobiography, speaking instead of her short-lived and artistically inconsequential lessons with the Baroness Hilla Rebay and her few weeks in the watercolor class at Boothbay Harbor. Yet it was her experience in Miller’s class that provided her with basic artistic skills and her work with Nicolaïdes that gave her the foundation for all her later drawings.
Nevelson was a hard worker, and by dint of her energy and effort she achieved more than competence in both drawing and painting. The fact that “I did about ten thousand of them [figure drawings]” in the course of her career “gave me a kind of strength”20—a statement which she repeated at various times in her later years—fits with both Nicolaïdes’ admonitions about the value of practice and Nevelson’s inclinations to produce vast quantities of work. But this comment should be taken with a bucketful of salt. There are perhaps a hundred extant line figure drawings done by Nevelson between 1929 and 1940, not many more. Her sister Lillian remembered: “If Louise ever made a mistake on a drawing, she wouldn’t throw it away. She wouldn’t erase it, she’d make another. According to her point of view, you never spoil anything. I don’t think she ever destroyed a drawing.”21
After two years of studying with Miller and Nicolaïdes, Nevelson knew that the new and modern in the visual arts were her future, but they were not yet truly accessible in New York City. This compelling reason was combined with her personal need to get away from the constrictions of being a wife and mother, and to come to some decision about how to go forward with her life. She was close to fully committing herself to the life of an artist. But she wasn’t quite there. Ten years of marriage with a man to whom she felt culturally and socially inferior and who had discouraged any attempt to build a life based on her own talent had taken its toll.
Despite later avowals of her early certainty that she would be an artist, until 1929 Louise Nevelson’s life in New York showed her to be a society matron with diverse cultural aspirations. While her experience at the Art Students League helped her find her way to a profession that matched what she felt were her native abilities, she wasn’t ready to build a life based on her talents alone. Nevelson fit into the youthful student body at the League, though she was well aware she was at least a decade older than most. Her personal magnetism and energetic work habits disguised the difference between her actual life as a wife and mother and the less conventional lives of most of her fellow students.
When asked by an interviewer: “Who were your art friends at the League?” Nevelson responded: “Look, darling, I had a husband and a child, a household and everything. I wasn’t about to make many friends. I had a few, not many.”22 Nevelson tended to make friends with the students who came from a similar social background—such as Dora Lust, a divorcée from Chicago, who lived on New York’s Upper East Side near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I’ll tell you why. I’d already had a taste of diamond bracelets and things; it wasn’t quite what I wanted, but it was pretty good. I couldn’t quite make it in the world of art students. It was only later, when I left my husband and began this struggle, that I could communicate. But that took a little doing.”23
The “little doing” would include two trips to Europe: in 1931, for a painfully abbreviated period of study with the painter Hans Hofmann in Munich, and again in 1932, when she became more confident than ever in her calling to be an artist. But mostly it was the struggle with her conscience about leaving her son. While Louise was studying at the Art Students League, Charles Nevelson’s finances kept deteriorating. The Depression which devastated so many people at all levels of society had hit the Nevelson family hard, though their downward slide started well before 1929. When Louise began to take drawing classes at night—instead of making dinner and presiding at table—she precipitated even more heated fights at home. Finally, surrounded by many art students who raved about Hans Hofmann, the master art teacher from Munich, she succumbed to the siren call of Europe and the possibility of studying with the person who could teach her what she most wanted to learn.
Whether she saw the trip abroad as a departure from her marriage or just an extension of her studies is not clear. It was an important departure and she was aware on a symbolic level that it was a leave-taking, marking the beginning of the end of her married life.24
Why Hofmann and why Munich? Among the students in Nicolaïdes’ classes were some of the more conservative Miller students like herself. There were also others who were the followers of Jan Matulka, a Czech painting teacher recently returned from Europe. Matulka was a close friend of the painter Vaclav Vytlacil, an American artist of Czech ancestry who had studied for four years with Hofmann in Munich and was largely responsible for spreading his reputation of “the best and most inspiring teacher in Europe.”25
Over the objections of the older guard at the League, which included Kenneth Hayes Miller, Vytlacil had established a beachhead of the modern movement at the Art Students League in 1928–29, teaching and giving a celebrated series of lectures during that winter.26 Nevelson had just arrived at the League in 1929 when Matulka carried forward his friend’s fiery message of modernity by teaching about the latest in European painting, especially the work of Picasso and Matisse and the magically gifted teacher, Hans Hofmann, in Munich who knew how to translate the secret of those masters to serious students.
Born in a small town in Bavaria, Hans Hofmann had lived in Paris between 1904 and 1914, absorbing the principles of Modernism, witnessing the evolution of Cubism, and meeting Picasso and Braque, as well as Matisse and Delaunay, with whom he shared a passion for color and line. At the beginning of World War I he returned to Munich where he started an art school.
Always alert to the new and the best, Nevelson paid close attention to the buzzing excitement about a teacher who could open doors to the most important developments in modern art. “I had seen reproductions of the Cubist works of Picasso and knew their power,” Nevelson later recalled. “At the League I heard of Hofmann. Everyone was talking about this great teacher in Germany who taught the subtleties of Cubism—I knew then that I had to go to Germany.”27
The cube was a fundamental principle for Nevelson—both visually and philosophically. Her understanding of metaphysics, to which she devoted many years of study, was always based upon the visual and the spontaneously intuitive:
When you square the circle, you are in the place of wisdom…. [Cubism] gave me definition for the rest of my life about the world. Before that … when I studied at the League … we knew that there was a shadow, but … I didn’t [understand] that that shadow was as valid as the light…. We wouldn’t see light without shadow. We wouldn’t see shadow without the light….
Cubism gives you a block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure.
I felt that the Cubist movement was one of the greatest awarenesses that the human mind has ever come to.28
The fundamental reason Nevelson went to Munich to study with Hofmann is that he taught the cube: the push and pull, positive and negative. According to his students, Hofmann regarded Cubism as a kind of basic grammar which was related to classicism.29 His particular gift was teaching how to bridge the gap between Cézanne and classical painting, as well as between Cubism and more recent post-Cubist developments in modern art. He concentrated his pedagogy on a description of the plastic structure of the object. The German Gothic masters—Dürer, Cranach the Elder, Holbein—as well as Cézanne and Picasso were held up as model draftsmen.
At the Art Students League Nevelson had been exposed to the classical rational approach to art through Miller. She had been exposed to a version of the spontaneous Surrealist approach through Nicolaïdes—and even earlier through her contact with Frederick Kiesler. She was searching for the bedrock wisdom that would give her both the rational and the intuitive foundation for her work. She wanted something that would combine the two and allow her to find herself, metaphysically and visually. She was sure that Hofmann was the one teacher who could show her how to do this.
Despite the darkening political situation in Germany, studying the masterpieces of art and architecture in Europe was a powerful goal for any serious American art student in the early 1930s. The respect for the brightest lights of the cultural past had been instilled at home and at school. It would have been an especially powerful draw for Nevelson, who had been consistently attracted to other stars from Europe such as Norina Matchabelli and Frederick Kiesler.
Moreover, in an article published the year Nevelson left for Germany, Hofmann discussed the importance of the fourth dimension in art. “All profound content in life originates from the highest phenomenon of the soul: from intuition, and thereby is found in the fourth dimension. Art is the expression of this dimension, realized through the other dimensions.”30 While we cannot be sure that she read this statement, Nevelson would surely have found it compatible with her growing interest in the fourth dimension.
Having determined to go to Munich to study with Hofmann in the fall of 1931, Nevelson went back to Rockland with her son. She was about to disrupt any semblance of stability in Mike’s life and ask her parents to stand in for her with her child. According to Nevelson’s sister Anita, at this crucial turning point in her daughter’s life and completely remarkable for the times, Minna Berliawsky gave Louise encouragement not only to study in Europe, but to leave her marriage. Lillian recalled: “My father and my mother both loved my sister’s husband, and when Louise came home and said she wanted to leave they were heartbroken. But they wanted to do what she wanted. Momma was very understanding.”31
Her family agreed to take over the care of her son while she was away and to finance the trip. Although the Depression had much reduced her father’s resources, her brother’s hotel business was thriving, and supporting Louise’s artistic career was not seen as too heavy a burden.
The major obstacle was her mother’s illness and an impending operation. Trying to calm her daughter’s doubts, as Anita recalls, Minna told Louise, “If I die, what’s the difference. If I live, I’ll see you when you get back.”32 Nevelson’s recollection comprises more of a commitment on her mother’s part, and is also more comforting: “Louise, you must go. You always wanted to continue in your art. If I don’t survive, it will make no difference. You go and study. We’ll send you an allowance, and we’ll take care of Mike and see that he has everything he needs…. Look, you don’t have to stay married. Before that you were so vital.”33 Nevelson continues her recollection: “My mother was very sympathetic—she thought I had lost my soul. She … had suffered through her own life. And so she was the one who really gave me the courage to take my freedom.”34
The bond between mother and daughter was strong, and Minna’s words helped Louise take the steps away from an unhappy marriage and toward the kind of independence the older woman had never been able to achieve, even as both of them may have unconsciously recognized that the young woman was leaving her child behind, just as Isaac Berliawsky had left his wife and children behind when he departed for America.
Louise Nevelson had been married for eleven years, and at thirty-one years of age she was being given a new start as a single woman on a family allowance.35 Her new start was not without complications and pressures. When she left for Germany in September 1931, her husband was frantic. He didn’t know where she was, and his wife’s family would not tell him, even when he sent someone to Rockland to find out or when he tried to persuade Nate not to send her money.36 Her family did not want Charles to interfere with what they knew to be a very difficult decision for her.
Mike stayed in Rockland until mid-December when his father arranged for him to live with him in an apartment at 230 East Seventy-First Street in New York, where he had hired “an intellectual woman who had many years experience in teaching.” Her job was to keep house and prepare meals for the boy—“the only proper thing to do under the circumstances. Surely, Rockland was not the right environment for Myron.”37 This postscript from Charles was added to “Two-Gun Mike’s” letter telling his mother that he was “now in New York where Daddy hired an English lady to help me with piano [and] school … She is one of the Catholic Missioners but I like her. I am very happy here and everything is OK.”38
But everything was not OK, and Mike, also known as Myron, was clearly unhappy. He expressed concern that his mother was putting too many high-priced stamps on her letters to him. His missives are full of bravado: “I hope you are as fine as I am” … “I go to school alone every day but sometimes Daddy takes me”; “I have lots of friends and go to the park and make more friends. I am a regular mixer.” But belying that is his closing line in this letter dated April 24, 1932: “I hope you come back soon as I’m getting lonesome. With a big hug and three kisses. Your Loving Son Myron.”39
A month later, he writes to his mother that he is having a fine time because Daddy got a new car. But only after he had observed: “You state that you expect to leave for America soon but don’t say when.”40
The next letter is from Maine, thanking his mother for the new tie she sent him but notes that, “It’s too nice to wear every day.” He adds that he “likes the hat [which is either for him or his cousin George] too, although most boys of my age don’t wear them. I would like to have it for a relic of Germany. I don’t want to make you sorry you sent it cause there wont be any quarl [sic]. Just write who is to have it, but I don’t want you to buy another, because times are hard, and you shouldn’t spend [your money] when you need it for paints. Nathan will send some money soon.”41
At ten Mike is presenting himself as a precocious grown-up with a youthful mixture of bravado and bullying. His missives are sprinkled with, “I’m very sorry I did not write, but you know how a boy is.” And, “How are you? Is your apartment nice and clean and modernistic? I don’t understand your address. You say your [sic] in Munich, but your address is Munchen…. I received your photographs. Grandma thinks you look crazy, but she’s old and don’t know much. I think you look good, just like a great artist.”42
His letters suggest he was paying a high price for his mother’s freedom and trying to disguise his anguish with false cheerfulness, and that he was imitating his father’s paternalistic stance toward his wife, whom he believed would not be able to manage on her own.
The combined separations from husband, child, and family weighed heavily on the thirty-one-year-old woman. She may not have wanted to be a mother, and she certainly knew that marriage and motherhood had cost her her soul, her vitality, her very self. But she also felt guilty leaving her child,43 knowing that leaving him with her parents—whom she knew would be very imperfect guardians of a young boy—would have lifelong repercussions. She had begun the journey to be the artist she had always suspected she might become, but she had also irreparably damaged her relationship with her son. She would never stop paying the price for that damage. Nor would he.
In addition, her timing was unfortunate. She had arrived in Europe in the fall of 1931, full of hope and optimism. Instead of support she found painful rejections and frightening surroundings. She could not have missed the implications of what was happening in Germany, especially in Munich, where Hitler’s power was growing stronger and where, she had told her sisters, “People were starving, eating dry bread or had nothing to eat or wear.”44
She began to attend the small life drawing classes daily at Hofmann’s school just as he was working on his plans to leave for America. She recalled that he paid attention only to the students who could help him with emigration—students currying favor with him, repeatedly bowing and saying “Herr Professor Hofmann.”45 Nevelson claimed to be averse to this kind of obsequious behavior: “I wasn’t about to bow down to anybody.”46
This turn of events would have been discouraging enough for the would-be artist, but Hofmann added a more devastating blow by asking Nevelson to leave the class, telling her not only that she would never be a great artist but that she would never be an artist, period, and that she was wasting her time.47 Both of her sisters clearly recalled this unexpected event. “She was heartbroken. She told us time and time again that she felt pretty rotten about it but thought he didn’t know what he was talking about.”48
While Nevelson never publically admitted that Hofmann had sent her away, her description of her experience with him in Munich makes the actual events clear, and demonstrates how easily she could reverse a painful rejection later on by recalling anecdotes in which a disparaging teacher inevitably ended up recognizing her talent and originality. She did the same in her recollection of the rejection and reversal she encountered with her first art teacher, Lena Cleveland (although the guidance and encouragement Cleveland later provided suggests that that first reversal was not Nevelson’s invention). Whether or not there is evidence that Nevelson’s other art teachers actually did reverse their opinions, these narratives indicate that Nevelson learned early that, if she persisted in the face of “failure,” she would eventually succeed. With Hofmann, she translated his rejection of her into her rejection of him. “I’d made a great sacrifice. I’d left my son with my family, and I expected more than I found…. I wasn’t in tune with his vibrations. It wasn’t my fault. He was just looking another way. He didn’t give us much attention because he knew he was coming to America…. I didn’t stay as long as I intended because I didn’t care for that.”49
In 1970, it was easy for Nevelson to tell Arne Glimcher, as she summarized her education as an artist, “Art was the thing that pleased me from the day I started school. And then I went through school in Maine. And after I moved to New York I went to the Art Students League. And then I went to Munich to study with Hofmann. And they all gave me one hundred plus. Well, you are always going to stay somewhere where you shine and are happy.”50
Six years later she completed the narrative with a story of Hofmann’s ultimate about-face. Recounting an evening she spent with him years later at her sister Lillian’s, she recalled him saying: “ ‘Do you know,’ he said, pointing to one of my walls, ‘this is original. It is personal. I haven’t found myself, so now that I’ve retired and have money I will work for myself. Teaching has taken so much out of me.’ ”51
After Hofmann’s rebuff, Louise Nevelson was not ready to come back home and turned briefly to the activities she had pursued in New York with Estelle Liebling and Norina Matchabelli: singing and acting. In Munich she spent her evenings in cafés and nightclubs and was frequently invited to sing the then-popular American spirituals and folk songs. Her vocal and acting talents were sufficient and her personality was winning, and, by her own account, she was offered parts in films by theatrical friends she had met in Munich.52
Seeing acting as the means of supplementing the funds she received from her family, she took small parts—mostly as an extra—in Munich and then in Vienna. But she soon discovered that being “in the movies” was too passive for her type-A personality. “You sit there for hours,” waiting for the few moments on camera. “Some people would knit. In Europe I sang in nightclubs—no audience, just actors. They wanted to engage me and to write in parts for me, but I had other commitments…. I knew I couldn’t fulfill what I wanted this way.”53 Her sisters recalled: “When Hofmann kicked her out she went right into the movies for money … she could have been on stage forever. They wanted her to be a star but she said ‘no’ for art.”54
Her movie experience merely confirmed what she had already realized. She needed to be in control—total control—of her environment: “To project yourself there [in a film] you have directors and other people playing the game too. Here [as an artist] I am all alone. If I want to stand on my head, I can.”55
Her faith in herself somewhat restored, she traveled to Italy, visiting Rome, Pisa, and Florence, admiring early Renaissance artists like Giotto, whose works she had studied in Miller’s class. Nevelson ended her first trip to Europe with a brief stay in Paris, visiting the Louvre and the Musée de l’Homme.
While she studied the old masters on her first trip to Europe, Nevelson was not yet confident enough to meet the new masters. Her claim that she did not approach Pablo Picasso in Paris because she did not want to intrude on his time sounds very unlike a bold, beautiful young woman striking out on her own. It may be that her encounter with Hofmann, as well as the months of being alone in foreign territory amidst an increasingly turbulent political situation, had taken a greater toll on her self-confidence than she could admit.
In the early summer of 1932 she had been in Europe almost eleven months, traveling mostly with friends she had met in Munich but sometimes by herself. She was ready to return home and deal with her guilty feelings about having left her son for such an extended time with her father and ailing mother. When she arrived in June she found her son well and her mother recovered. Shortly afterward, back in New York City, she found that the long absence from her husband had done nothing to resolve her marital discontent, and she decided about six weeks later—again with her mother’s encouragement—to return to Paris.56 She rationalized that she had not seen enough of the city’s artistic treasures on her previous visit and that she needed to get away from the stifling roles of wife and mother.
In order to make the second trip to Europe, Nevelson claimed to have pawned a diamond bracelet.57 Her sisters remembered a different story. She called her brother-in-law Ben Mildwoff and said that she urgently needed $250. Thinking she had to have the money for an unmentionable purpose—an abortion—he gave it to her right away. That same evening she was on a ship heading back to France. A photograph taken of her on board shows a well-dressed young woman, wearing an elegant suit, white gloves, hat, and necklace, and carrying a clutch bag.
During her second stay in Paris, Nevelson learned more about art, spending her daytime hours visiting Versailles, Chartres, and the Louvre, and “all the cathedrals … all the museums.”58 In the evening she would frequent the café-restaurant Le Dôme, meeting artists and intellectuals—at least the ones who could speak English. Beyond the intellectual stimulation it provided, the Paris trip was also a period of intense sadness and self-doubt, during which she faced her moral and personal dilemmas. She scribbled barely comprehensible poetry on hotel stationery, pouring out her longing and confusion:
Must I wait for immortality to be at the home that is my destiny …
I’m afraid ….
I am tired, oh say tired searching, hunting just to be in the place I hope is for me ….
In that land where … man at last is free to be himself in reality….
I am willing to try to fly but it seems too far for even I….
I continue to be at sea….
I do not know which shore to come too [sic]….
I do not know which land to land at for all I see are worshipping dead ideality not reality.59
About her poetry and period of distress in Paris, Nevelson described in her autobiography: “This time in Paris I was freer in a way, mentally. And yet I was discouraged. I was discouraged with friendships and I was up a dead end…. I was desperate and I was at sea, because everything seemed to me so disjointed and I wasn’t connected with anything…. It seemed that everything I touched was negative … it threw me back on myself. It gave me a kind of determination not to look too much out…. It was a tough lesson…. And slowly what happened through searching was a rebuilding into myself and constantly taking full responsibility for my life.”60
Alone in Paris, Nevelson clearly questioned her ability, and willingness, to stay connected to other human beings, specifically to her husband and her son. So far, those connections had led to disappointment and frustration. Read one way, her actions are those of a selfish woman, who abandoned her responsibilities in order to pursue her passions. And yet it’s evident, from her letters and poetry at that time, and her later recollections, that in the depths of her anguished ambivalence she believed that her only way forward in her life was to search for her true self: to find “the home that is my destiny” and to “wait for immortality.”61
The daunting prospect of becoming her own person was conceptualized into the idea of projecting her self and her ideas onto the world, as she had learned from Krishnamurti. The need to discover her unique self—not the various identifications she had been assembling—and to create her own reality was the main realization of these two trips.
It was a dark time for her, and, as she later said, she comforted herself by recalling Sholem Aleichem’s prophetic words: “She was destined for greatness.”62 The second trip to Europe did little to blunt the painful experiences of the first trip. At the end of July 1932, the Nazi party had triumphed in Germany, and Nevelson would have been aware of the fear and pessimism among the artistic and intellectual crowd she knew in Paris. Most European artists followed politics closely and were awake to the implications of the rapid rise of Nazism and of the terrible things to come for all Europeans, especially for Jews.
The “dead ideality,” as she described it, that she saw being worshiped by people around her could have been the art she had been soaking up in Paris, with its many monuments to the past glory of France: “French art is too cultivated; each brushstroke contains a tradition of greatness.”63 It might also have been a reference to the old guard’s conventional way of being in the world—the Bernard and Charles Nevelson way, maybe even the Kenneth Hayes Miller way. By the end of the summer of 1932, Paris no longer held her, and she returned to her true home in the New World. “I could be a leaf on the tree in Paris,” she observed, “but I could be that tree in America.”64
She was also on the verge of discovering that in order to create her own reality—as a woman and as an artist—she could never again let a life partner intrude on her freedom. She sensed that her self-exploration through art would eventually lead her to her “destiny,” however painful the journey. The second Paris trip was an ending and a beginning, a culmination of all she had learned from her mother, Minna; her art teacher, Lena Cleveland; and her guide in dramatics and metaphysics, Norina Matchabelli.
It was night and she was crying. The wall was white and she was crying.
Wings of spirit why don’t you get nearer it.
Wings of flight it is getting night and I have fright—in the soul of the night
It is dark and….
I too must have light so my soul can be bright.
But no, it is dark and how I feel the wall in search of day which may never come. Yet it is always dark for me. God must have chosen it to be and ….
I am tired … searching, hunting just to be in the place I hope is for me.
Oh it’s cold and I want to get warm. Warmer and warmer but it’s cold.
Must it always be cold for me? Do you all see it’s cold for me?
Higher and higher maybe some day I too will go and find my way.65
Whether she realized it at the time, Louise Nevelson had finally begun to find her way. It was a path on which the only firm footing would be her art. Nothing, absolutely nothing else, would satisfy her deepest needs. Her mother had given her permission to leave her marriage and even to separate from her son. Her family had supported these moves emotionally and financially. From this time on Louise Nevelson would rely on them to help whenever necessary so that she could concentrate on finding her way as an artist.
Judging from the work she had produced up to that point, Nevelson was not yet certain where her true talent and genius lay. She knew that she had something inside her that was right—sometimes she would call it “style,” more often she recognized it as an intuitive sense of what looked right. But she didn’t yet know how to identify or express it. It would take her almost twenty-five more years to do that. In the meantime she worked and worked and worked. She believed in herself, but in her art she was still at sea.
By late summer or early fall of 1932, Louise Nevelson had returned to New York fully determined to move forward as a visual artist. She partially moved back with her husband to an apartment at 39 East Sixty-Fifth Street, within walking distance of the League, and she signed up for two months of evening classes with Hofmann, who was teaching painting and composition. It was a characteristically courageous and bold step. She knew that she still had things to learn from him and would not let his earlier rebuff get in the way. At the League she was in control. If she wanted to study with Hofmann, she was a paying art student and (unlike in Munich) he could not kick her out of class.
In March 1933, back at the League for another month of study with Hofmann, she met Marjorie Eaton, a lively, elegant young woman from a wealthy California family whose interest in the arts paralleled her own. Telling Eaton about her experience in Munich, Nevelson characteristically reported Hofmann’s extremely positive response to her work. “Then Marjorie invited me to something and we became friends.”66
As usual there are inconsistencies in the story of their first becoming friends. Eaton recalled that Louise was a woman of great style and impressive concentration. “Louise seemed to be aware of everyone in class without looking at them…. She invited me to tea, and we walked back to her house on the corner of Park Avenue—the apartment she still shared with the husband whom she had recently left. She went back once a week to see to his laundry. It was a large, handsome, high-ceilinged room, and everything was covered with sheets. She undid his laundry and put it away, then she prepared tea.”67 It is unclear exactly where Louise Nevelson was living during this transitional period. At times she stayed at the apartments of friends, a rooming house on East Sixty-Fifth Street, and other times in the apartment with Charles.68
Eaton was impressed with Charles Nevelson but realized how different he was from his wife: “Louise left him for the creative life. He was conventional and didn’t have the depth of feeling she did. He wanted to put her back into Aladdin’s lamp. She didn’t know that about him when she married him. She just wanted to get to New York. Her parents understood and knew why she had to leave him.”69
Eaton witnessed the complicated relationship Louise had with her husband, and she watched with amazement as Charles obdurately maintained that his wife would not be able to manage on her own, even as his own financial situation deteriorated.
Though Eaton would shortly select the theater as her major interest, at the time she met Louise she was studying painting and was able to introduce her to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo when they arrived in New York in the spring of 1933. Rivera, who had known Eaton from her time in Mexico and his time in San Francisco, had invited Marjorie Eaton to lunch, and she brought Louise along.70
Rivera was very impressed by the attractive young woman. “He saw her greatness” is the way Eaton recalled that first meeting.71 After Marjorie explained about the difficult time Louise was having finding a place to live and work, Diego invited both women to move into a first-floor studio in a building he had just rented on West Thirteenth Street. The transition from married life may have been eased at first by the invitation to share digs with Marjorie Eaton. “Marjorie was one of those people who would always do what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it, and how she wanted to do it.”72 She was a model for Louise’s future independence.
Whenever Diego and Frida would go out to dinner in Chinatown they would pass by and invite the two young women to join them. Rivera also invited both women to assist him on the murals he was working on during the summer and fall of 1933 for the New Workers School.73 The two women were not only artistic assistants for Rivera, but they also served as hostesses for the couple, whose English was limited.
When she shared the studio with Marjorie in 1933, Nevelson was painting with such fervent concentration that she ignored the seasons. Eaton recalled: “She was impervious to hot or cold; she didn’t know seasons…. She was so strong. She got up early, having been out most of the night with beaus. She’d sleep a while and start early in the morning.”74 Marjorie Eaton and Louise Nevelson remained close for the rest of their lives, and Eaton remembered numerous telephone conversations and meetings with her friend after she herself moved back to California. “Louise was always talking and trying to analyze whether she had done the right thing by leaving her husband and sending her son away.75 Eaton told Glimcher: “I was impressed by her independence and her ability to remove herself from a destructive situation.”76
Mike Nevelson, in the meantime, was growing up. After his mother had begun to live completely on her own in late 1933, he lived eighty percent of his time with his grandparents in Maine and about twenty percent with his mother in New York. They had settled into a somewhat comfortable but unconventional relationship, which Marjorie Eaton much admired: “They were like pals, brother and sister. She didn’t push him down. They would have fun together. Staying with her was like a haven for him. She never dominated him—not at all like a typical Jewish mother.”77
A letter from thirteen-year-old Mike in Rockland demonstrates how torn he felt—being passed back and forth between his parents—and how much he was suing to be his mother’s pal.
I don’t really wish to go to camp as I am bigger now and would enjoy myself more in the city [with you]…. My father is coming up but he won’t influence on me. He’ll probably want me to go back with him but I won’t go because I’ll probably get sick listening to him “gab.” I will write to you at a later date when I’m coming to live with you (and if the old buzzard doesn’t like that he can lump it.) Nevelson doesn’t deserve any “sympathy.” He didn’t give you any when you lived in a cellar! Then, I didn’t know much, (I admit) and I was influenced by him to do as he did. But now I realize how he abused you and I am set to defend you.
Hoping for the Best your son and Best Friend,
P.S. If we can’t make the two ends meet, grandmother will send about $20 monthly to help, she said.
P.P.S. Keep going as usual and we will talk things over when I get back.78
As the most famous Mexican artist of the time—and the leader of the Mexican Renaissance—Rivera had been invited to paint a large mural for the entrance to the RCA building in Rockefeller Center in New York, which he began in March 1933. In keeping with Rivera’s political beliefs, the work included a portrait of the fiercely anticapitalist Lenin. When Nelson Rockefeller asked him to remove it and Rivera refused, the artist was dismissed. To avoid a lawsuit, however, Rivera was paid in full.79 The mural was first covered and later destroyed. The scandal that ensued gave the Communist cause unprecedented publicity, and the murals themselves became the rallying point for the WPA mural projects a few years later.
Rivera used the Rockefeller money to paint a set of twenty-one murals on portable panels and promised to give them to whoever offered the best public space. The series was entitled Portrait of America, and it told, Rivera said, “a story of American revolutionary traditions and tendencies, in general the struggle of labor against capital from colonial times to the present day.”80 Rivera did the work, which covered seven hundred square feet of wall space, over a six-month period at the New Workers School at 51 West Fourteenth Street. The school was open all day, and “Artists, art students and interested others” were invited to watch the work.81 The press reported the artist’s progress. When the murals were completed, there was a three-day grand opening with lectures by Rivera.82
Though Eaton and Nevelson were invited to participate in the project, it is not clear how much actual work Nevelson did. David Margolis, who had worked with the Mexican artist on the RCA mural recalled: “Louise was a beautiful creature…. She used to come around and watch the painting. She didn’t help—the physical work was for the men—she was just watching and making friends with all of us.”83 Most likely she was one of the many assistants who helped with the technical and research aspects of the projects. Nevelson later claimed to have mixed paint and applied washes. She also claimed to have hated doing the menial work but needed the money.84 Her sister Lillian recalled that Rivera was the only artist for whom Nevelson ever worked and that she did it in order “to learn.” Lillian added that her sister loved both Rivera and Frida Kahlo and that they remained lifelong friends. Marjorie Eaton remembered: “He really loved Louise and took her to a trading post in the village where he would buy her jewelry, which she would then pass along to Frida.”85 Perhaps in return for his generosity, she gave Rivera one of two portraits she had made of him.86
Rivera’s contretemps with the Rockefeller family was the talk of the day. At the center of the tumult was the man—liberated, ebullient, generous, possessed of enormous energy and zest, and totally devoted to “Art.” Like most people who met him, Nevelson adored Rivera: “I only tell you that objectively he was one of the most unique men in the world…. He was brilliant but not too analytical … and he wasn’t bound by anything.”87 Having lived for a few months in the same building with Rivera, she saw firsthand how a successful artist could be lionized by elite society. And through him, Nevelson met and made friends with such artists and musicians as Lion Feuchtwanger, John Flannagan, Boris Margo, and Ernst Bloch.
However much she liked him personally, neither Rivera’s subject matter nor his fresco technique appealed to Nevelson. “There was grandeur there, honest thinking and generosity,” she said, “but his feeling for illustration prevailed and I had to seek my own way of communicating.”88 Nonetheless, at a critical moment in her life she had found another artist with whom she could identify—someone whose lifestyle and personality she admired tremendously.
Rivera’s admirers saw him as the leader of a new Renaissance in mural painting—with an importance equal to Giotto’s. For the young and fervently leftist community, Rivera was a rallying point for both the Communist cause and artistic and intellectual freedom. Though it is never mentioned, Frida Kahlo’s elaborate and dramatic public persona would not have gone unnoticed by fashion-conscious Nevelson.
This brief but dynamic episode while Frida and Diego were in New York City had many repercussions. First of all, she never again faltered in her decision to be an artist. Second, her taste for pre-Columbian and Indian art was probably intensified by both the presence of Rivera and Kahlo in her daily life and the two-month-long exhibition of Aztec, Mayan, and Inca Art at MoMA in the summer of 1933 (American Sources of Modern Art). Third, following one of Rivera’s favorite maxims—that bad art was more educational than good art—she learned to look at everything. And finally, though eschewing his devotion to politics, she admired and adopted his social egalitarianism.89 Nevelson recalled: Rivera and Kahlo’s house was “always open in the evening, and anyone who wanted to would come. They were very serious about people; they didn’t make distinctions…. Princesses and Queens, one lady richer than God. And workmen, laborers … all were treated like one body of people.”90 Rivera was a great storyteller, an inventor of fantastic tales—it’s tempting to think Nevelson may have learned that from him as well.91
After the public showing of the completed mural at the New Workers School, Rivera and Kahlo left for Mexico in December 1933.92 Marjorie Eaton had already returned to Mexico via Taos in the late summer of that year, leaving Louise Nevelson alone in the West Thirteenth Street studio. For the first time in her life she was truly on her own as an artist and as a woman, and she plunged fully into the world of struggling painters and sculptors in New York. Her sisters recalled that, “It was the hardest time for her as an artist. Until then, she had been taken care of.”93
For the next four years Nevelson would continue to stay somewhat connected to her husband, helping out with the cleaning, laundry, and childcare even though they lived separately through most of this period. But she would never again allow her personal life to interfere with her “destiny.”
At the end of 1937, finally convinced that his wife would never return to him, Charles Nevelson left for Galveston, Texas, where he joined his brother, Harry, and never returned to live in New York. Charles and Louise were officially divorced in 1941. Too proud to ask for alimony, and also aware that her husband had no money to give her, Nevelson managed to get by any way she could during the difficult years of the 1930s. She started by hocking her diamond jewelry.94 Her brother, Nate, with his flourishing hotel, was her principal financial mainstay. In return, she gave him her paintings and started work on a mural for the hotel.95 The paintings show how much she had learned from Miller and, perhaps, even from Hofmann.
