Dancer, 1938. Bronze. Photograph by John D. Schiff, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
“My life is an open book, but there is a subterranean life I don’t want to reveal to anyone. And why the hell should I?”
—Louise Nevelson, Katrine Ames, “Gothic Queen,” Newsweek, December 4, 1972
In 1964, in the first monograph on the artist, which quoted her extensively, Nevelson described the significance of movement in her work and her life: “I studied modern dance in 1930 and have never stopped since. I felt a body discipline was essential to harmonious creation and to help me solve the plastic problem, as I saw them both made of alternative equilibrium and tension.”1 The “plastic problem” to which Nevelson referred was the aesthetic relationship of objects in space. But it was not just this problem that she solved with dance. More crucially, dance helped her explore her self, and unlock her sexuality and her spirituality.
In the early 1930s, Nevelson was one of the many hopeful artists who populated downtown Manhattan. She ended the decade as one of the few singled out as especially gifted. Though she was still not making a living from her art (at that time almost no one did), she was making something of a name for herself as an artist.
During this time she was also searching for models and mentors. She found two—Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham—in the world of dance, which she saw as “a vital force … carrying America at that time.”2 For Nevelson, Duncan “was like a breath of fresh air … because … she brought this great, pioneering spirit into movement.” About her other heroine, she said, “Martha Graham, by the nature of her spirit, by the nature of her energy, by her presence and intensity, reflected our times. Graham … was a pioneer.”3
In the late 1920s and early 1930s dance in America had undergone a revolution. The pioneers of the modern movement had thrown off the fetters of both the balletic tradition and the exotic approach of Denishawn. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Helen Tamiris, and Edwin Strawbridge were developing and presenting to a small but wildly enthusiastic audience their new vision of dance with its freedom to explore and express the “drives, desires and reactions of alive human beings” unencumbered by decorative conventions.4
Some of the most ardent supporters of this new direction were the visual artists based in New York City, who had the greatest access to these new works. Graham had begun her independent dance company in the mid-1920s and presented her work regularly—thirty new pieces between 1926 and 1937. Nevelson went weekly to performances and knew all of Graham’s work.5 Her admiration for Graham was probably enhanced by the knowledge that the dancer had commissioned contemporary composers, such as Aaron Copland and Gian Carlo Menotti, to write the music and artists, sculptors even, like Isamu Noguchi, to design her sets.
Nevelson’s enthusiasm for modern dance inspired her to take up the study of the new art form herself, but it was not the mastery of technique that intrigued her. Rather it was the promise of freedom that modern dance held out to its devotees. Despite—or perhaps because of—her admiration for Graham, Nevelson chose as her teacher Ellen Kearns, a forty-something non-performing dancer and masseuse, someone who might now be called a dance therapist, whom she had met through Diego Rivera.6 This remarkable woman served as her next strong female role model and something of a maternal imago.7
[Ellen] was a good ten years older than I … everything about her physically was wrong for dance. She was fat … she didn’t have one part of the body that was beautiful. But basically she was such an innocent, such a unique person….
So I started and I studied dance with [her] several times a week, basically evenings…. And I question whether I’d have had the energy I have without [it]….
I studied with Ellen for a good twenty years or more…. There wasn’t a student that she didn’t bring to a higher consciousness. And she gave creative energy to anyone who touched her….
Ellen was one of the most unique people on earth.8
Through her study with Ellen Kearns, Nevelson found not only her energy and her higher consciousness but her true artistic vocation—sculpture. Ellen taught her to slow down, reach to her roots, reconnect with her center, move with her own inner rhythm, and find the confidence and courage she needed for her art.9
Developing the freedom she desired and the ability to move with complete spontaneity was the core reason Nevelson worked for so many years with Ellen Kearns. She also intuitively recognized the link between the way her body could move and her work in three dimensions. As she later explained to her son: “Dancing frees your mind and opens it to sculptural possibilities.”10
At least fifteen of the approximately thirty or forty sculptures she made between 1934, when she began to show her work, and 1941–42, when she exhibited at the Nierendorf Gallery, show figures in movement—in many instances the kind of movements Nevelson was doing with Ellen Kearns. Some of these sculptures portray Martha Graham in one of her characteristic highly expressive poses; others highlight the sexual features of the female figures. The handwritten titles include Flight, Position (1939) and Dancing Lady (1941).
Dancer (1938), like a number of the earliest sculptures, is focused on applying Cubism to work in three dimensions. Chunky, even a bit clunky as befit the times, the figure has traces of grace, gravity, and wit. The elegant position of the crossed arms is combined with her firmly upright overall stance. The dancer’s head turns the opposite way from her right thigh, leg, and foot, as though she were exercising at the barre. However, the simple cubic thickness of the right leg and thigh are counterpoised against the much more dynamic arms, slim torso, and tense contraction of the left leg.
Classes with Kearns were small—no more than ten (mostly) women. Nevelson also studied privately with Kearns, and of course, also persuaded her sister Lillian to attend some classes.11 Over time Nevelson became Ellen Kearns’s assistant and close personal friend.
Mary Farkas, a fellow student, described the classes:
The lessons would begin with a long sequence of floor work, stretching and quieting. Then slowly lifting up, vertebra by vertebra, ending in a grand opening spiral. The emphasis was on waiting or doing slow movements often self initiated that would encourage spontaneity.
Other exercises were done for complete relaxation, which you would do in a descending spiral to mood music. Or hanging over from the hips doing things that would eventually lead to jumping, running or leaping. Ellen would hold a person while they exercised and make continuous comments accompanied by meditative music. Ellen’s teaching also helped women to become more relaxed and sexually released.12
From Norina Matchabelli Nevelson had learned some of the rudiments of movement and presence. From Ellen Kearns she learned the entire alphabet and how to work poetically with her body. She recalled in 1967 that, as a young woman, “I took dancing too because I was tight and frightened and it gave me freedom. My whole way of living was geared to creativity.”13
The hallmark of all the teachers to whom Nevelson was attracted in the 1930s and 1940s was their devotion to spontaneity and originality—her ultimate gauge of whether a teacher or a situation could promote her growth. It likely grew out of her experience of relative freedom in childhood. “Freedom,” “uniqueness,” “spontaneity,” and “creativity” were the words she repeatedly used as high praise. They were words she had also heard from Krishnamurti in 1928 and the reason his teachings interested her for the rest of her life.
Nevelson felt that she had paid her dues to dutifulness and conventionality by spending nearly two decades of her life in the conservative town of Rockland and another ten years in the, to her, highly restrictive roles of wife and mother. By the time she definitively left her marriage in the early 1930s (probably 1933–34) she would never again let herself be bound by someone else’s ideas or someone else’s subject matter. Finally living entirely on her own, Louise Nevelson had become an ardent individualist on a mission to find the best way to express her creative talents. Her growing freedom and originality would become evident in the way she looked and in her artwork.
During the life-changing years of the 1930s, Nevelson developed some aspects of her self-presentation that remained constant throughout her life. She never stopped attending to her personal appearance—it was a mainstay that helped her stand upright, above the crowd, despite the many rejections an artist must inevitably face while building a career. She also never stopped using her good looks to live a liberated life. Nevelson’s personal appearance as a very attractive and sexy woman opened the door to behaviors that would have embarrassed and shocked her mother, as well as her former husband (now that they were no longer editing her wardrobe). It was the beginning of what some would label her promiscuous behavior. She saw it as her personal freedom to have as many and as many different kinds of lovers as she wanted. From then on it would be her choice to be with either a wealthy and successful or an impoverished but creative man.
Mary Farkas, her fellow Kearns student, saw the artist’s promiscuity as an attempt to find herself as a woman and noted that Nevelson’s sexual interests woke up at this time partially as a result of her study with Ellen Kearns. Thirty years later, Nevelson observed: “Isadora Duncan said that the absolute center is the solar plexus, but we studied that the center was in the sex organs.”14
The disparity throughout the 1930s between her elegant self-presentation as a wealthy divorcée and the actual facts of her straitened financial situation created confusion for the young artists who met her and distrusted her as a dilettantish society lady—a repeat of her experience at the Art Students League. “So the great contradiction … always made a problem for me,” she later declared.15
The people who knew her well—her family, some of her various lovers, even her fellow students at Ellen Kearns’s classes—were aware that she was living close to the edge. They recognized the desperation behind the bravado and were always impressed with her constancy to her lodestar—that she would eventually succeed as an artist and was therefore justified in doing anything to advance toward that goal. Her sisters were especially sympathetic to her inclination to use whatever money she got, from whatever source, to buy expensive finery when she had barely enough resources to pay for food and heat. They may have also remembered—as Nevelson certainly did—their own days of poverty during their early childhood.
Dressing well with flair was part of Nevelson’s aesthetic training. When she appeared at a meeting of impoverished downtown artists in one of her stunning outfits—large hat, bright colors, odd combinations of fabrics and finery, or the latest in elegance—everyone recognized her, some with envy, some with admiration.
The attention fueled her “healthy narcissism,” which Freud had described as like the preening of a contented cat, which draws others by virtue of her confidence and self-assurance.16 In Louise Nevelson’s case, the preening would have a positive effect on her finances, since some of the many men she slept with during this period would give her spending money she might never admit to needing, as well as some of the luxuries she always craved. She developed a flagrant promiscuity, picking up taxi drivers and having sex with many different men.17 Sleeping around was not uncommon behavior in the New York art world of the time, and Nevelson pursued it with her usual vigor. “I could have played the role of the down-and-out artist,” she later said, “but I wanted to have fun … I think I fed on it. It was exciting…. I liked to swear and I liked to drink and have romances…. I was very sure of what I was doing. I believed in myself and I was utterly satisfied with what I believed in. I wasn’t going to let a soul on earth judge my life.”18
One friend reported that, “Louise tried to shock us at the time with her earthy behavior and vulgar and dramatic language”—most likely as an attempt to appear sophisticated,19 as well as a reaction against the polite, correct way she was supposed to speak as Mrs. Charles Nevelson. Nathaniel Kaz, an American sculptor who knew her well in the 1940s, disparagingly claimed that “she slept with anyone she was involved with and had a fucking room at her Thirtieth Street house.”20
One of Nevelson’s lovers from the time described her as “a strong personality who radiated beauty.” He recalled: “There was no one with whom she didn’t sleep. Anyone she met, she slept with.”21 Louise Nevelson could be a complicated lover. On the one hand, she could accept five dollars a week from Richard Kramer, one of the men who adored her, an impoverished émigré from Austria. On the other hand, she tried to persuade him that he too was an artist, encouraging him to write poetry when he was barely surviving by peddling shoelaces and underwear on the streets of New York.22
While Nevelson was closest to her mother and youngest sister, Lillian, and rarely mentioned her father, it was in her father’s philandering footsteps that his now-liberated daughter trod. Some of her many lovers from this period were not so generous in their retrospective assessment. For example, David Margolis, a young artist, bitterly recalled: “She was like an older sister to me [he was twenty-three; she was thirty-five]. Whatever she asked me to do, I gladly did for her. I helped her out with money a great deal…. She never paid back. In the years I knew her she had many boyfriends, but no intimacy. There was no love, just a façade.”23 And yet her sister Lillian, the person she saw most often at the time, saw her as “puritanical in a way…. You could count her serious boyfriends on one hand.”24 Nevelson herself described her amorous behavior as a kind of camouflage.
Alice Neel recalled that an attractive woman artist “had to have a double life.”25 At most, an attractive woman artist was supposed to look inconspicuous, like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose tailored black-and-white outfits became the model of sartorial appropriateness. Being the wife of the artist, photographer, and dealer Alfred Stieglitz gave O’Keeffe immunity that Nevelson never attained. Likewise, Frida Kahlo could wear her startling folkloric outfits. She was after all, a native-born Mexican. But more importantly, she was the wife of the world-famous Diego Rivera. By the time Louise Nevelson was trying to make it as an artist, she was divorced and determined to remain unattached. The protection she might have obtained from a husband or famous lover wasn’t worth the risk of once again being subordinate to a man.
Nevelson had seen and understood how Diego Rivera had managed the contradiction of being a man of the people and a bon vivant who entertained royalty, how he could have many lovers, high-class and low, and also be seen as heroic and worthy of adoration, how he could be devoted to his work and nevertheless enjoy his evenings out with pleasure. Yet when she tried to do likewise—being periodically attracted to celebrities and high-society types—she was scorned for not being true to the leftist ideals of the downtown art world. That is, she was criticized, once again, for not fitting into the identity her compatriots had defined for her. Rivera was a man in a man’s world, and, despite what she had learned from her parents about the equality of the sexes in America, it was simply not socially acceptable for women to act like men.
Nevelson’s stylish self-presentation, combined with her ferocious ambition and self-confidence, contributed to her reputation as a prima donna. Many of the artists who knew her during the ’30s—particularly the men—distrusted her and her work. They saw her, as Robert Cronbach, a fellow artist, put it, as “always trying to get into the Sculptors Guild without great success…. Other sculptors liked her work but not enough to vote her in.”26
Though she toiled just as hard as her fellow male artists during the difficult years of the 1930s, Nevelson was not invited to join any of the cliques—like “The Ten”—that eventually formalized themselves into artist groups, with power to exhibit.27 Looking backwards at the years of exclusion, Nevelson felt that she had been treated unfairly. However, it is just as likely that she walked away from some opportunities for inclusion, given the evidence that, when she decided to be a crowd joiner in the 1950s, there were few groups she was not a part of, much less ones in which she did not have a leadership role.28
It would make sense, then, that Nevelson herself determined that she should go solo in whichever direction her fancy took her. That was a family tradition. After all, her father had made it on his own in a foreign land, away from his brothers and the other Jewish families in Rockland. As her sister Anita claimed, “I think we’re loners. I like to be alone, and I think Louise does also. We’re not club people.”29 The same held true for politics. Like most of the downtown artists she attended some political meetings, stood on some picket lines, had the requisite leftist tendencies but was not a committed activist. She remained aloof from the strife surrounding her and, except for meetings about art, did not participate in most of the demonstrations that characterized the period and the place (such as the many marches and protests against Fascism in Europe or unbridled capitalism in America).30 Why should she want to be part of a group that would have tried to impose its moral, aesthetic, or any other standard on her newly liberated self? Why divert to the political sphere the energy and finances she husbanded solely for her work? It was diversion enough that she had to deal with day-to-day survival and the responsibilities of parenting a teenage son—not to mention the physical impositions the new materials and new sculptural techniques forced upon her.
In April 1934 Nevelson moved into a small studio at 51 West Tenth Street, a well-known building of artists’ studios where there was good light but no central heating. Here she continued painting and drawing. Some time that year—or perhaps the previous year—she began to sculpt. She might have felt rudderless during this period if she hadn’t had the constant support in New York City of her sister Lillian and her brother-in-law Ben Mildwoff, a young commercial artist whose home had become a meeting place for their artist friends. It was there that Louise met the rising young sculptor Chaim Gross, who invited her to attend his classes at the Educational Alliance.31 Nevelson’s and Gross’s accounts differ markedly about the length of time she studied with him—varying from two months to two years32—but Gross recalls that her talent in sculpture was evident from her first evening in his class.
His low fees and well-known generosity toward students certainly appealed to Nevelson, but she had other reasons for wanting Gross as a teacher. He was considered one of the major young talents on the New York art scene. His chunky, somewhat cubistic wood work was characteristic of the “modern” style of American sculpture in the mid-1930s, and he had had two solo exhibitions by 1935 and had been in several group shows. He had also received a Tiffany fellowship. He had greatly promoted the art of wood carving,33 and his work in this medium was increasingly illustrated in art magazines.34
In any event, Nevelson discovered in his classes that she was a natural-born sculptor, immediately at home with three-dimensional work. Gross recalls telling her that she was very talented and would be a great artist.35 With his instruction, Nevelson developed rapidly enough as a sculptor to exhibit at the newly established Gallery Secession in 193436—the same year she began studying with Gross—and again in May 1935 at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sculpture: A Group Exhibition by Young Sculptors. For that exhibit she submitted a plaster, Two Figures, and described herself as “self taught.”37
Nevelson’s transition from student to professional would, however, occur over a period of several years, which coincided with her participation in the WPA—or Works Progress Administration—the most ambitious of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA hired over eight million unemployed Americans to work on public projects, building or repairing infrastructure around the country.
The visual arts arm of the WPA was the Federal Art Project, and its goal was to employ out-of-work artists who would teach, make art for public buildings, or do art research. The WPA paid them about twenty-five dollars a week (then a living wage) for about twenty-five hours of work and, when possible, arranged for exhibitions of their paintings and sculpture. It provided jobs to approximately five thousand artists and lifted the boats of all creative people in the United States, especially those in New York City.
Of the many young people trying to catch the brass ring, only a few who worked or exhibited alongside Nevelson became world famous and helped establish New York as the new center of modern art. Those few included Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Alice Neel, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Most of the others have vanished into obscurity.
The government program, which not only saved but created a generation of American artists, had stipulated that women be treated equally with men. That unprecedented step went far toward equalizing the playing field, which, for centuries, had privileged men. Forty percent of the painters, illustrators, and designers on the WPA were women, though the male-oriented bias continued with regard to sculpture, as only men were deemed strong enough to handle the manual labor.38
The first five years of the WPA were the golden age for thousands of American sculptors, particularly those in New York City. And the technical innovations and stylistic experimentation of this period ended the long period of stagnation under which American sculpture had been languishing. Special demonstrations of new sculptural techniques—put on at WPA project workshops or at venues sponsored by the Artists’ Union—were held frequently.39 It was at one such government workshop on West Thirty-Ninth Street, run by Louis Basky, a sculptor, that Nevelson claims to have learned the techniques of sculpture as part of her training in the WPA.40 Basky ran a foundry and provided much of the technical expertise and labor for sculptors in the 1930s and early 1940s.41 He fired clay pieces, did plaster castings and, along with his apprentice, Alexander Tatti, developed new techniques and aggregates for casting in both plaster and metal. Many of Nevelson’s works from the late 1930s on were made or cast in “tattistone,” an aggregate of marble dust, color, stone chips, and hardening agents, which was invented by Tatti.42
Lacking the prestige needed to be placed on the WPA’s list of fine artists, Nevelson was initially hired as an art teacher. Her first job, in March 1935, was as a teacher of mural painting at the Flatbush Boys’ Club.43 One of her last assignments was teaching painting three days a week, four hours a day, at the Contemporary Art Center housed in the 92nd Street YMHA. The ease with which an artist on the project might switch media or even categories, such as painter-teacher-sculptor, had to do with the informality of the arrangements made by supervisors.44
Announcements in the local press informed people about the upcoming free classes at the Boys’ Club and introduced the distinguished teacher: “Miss Nevelson is in charge. She has studied in France and Germany as well as the United States and enjoyed the advantage of working with Diego Rivera, the noted Mexican artist.”45 In June, she wrote an article for Flatbush Magazine, illustrated by the children’s drawings and a photograph of herself. The attractive young teacher expressed her enthusiasm for teaching and her views on creativity: “I joined the Flatbush Boys’ Club staff a few months ago, so, for the first time in my life I took a job, and since then I have a continuous flow of artistic material…. I won’t call it teaching to let children express themselves in a natural way…. After all color and form [are] what the world consists of, and to me they are as alive as I am.”46
Tales of the glorious past abound in the recollections of those who were leftist intellectuals or artists in the downtown circle where Nevelson thrived in the 1930s. The WPA brought everyone together. Most people helped each other, and the easy camaraderie was infectious. All faced a common enemy—the philistines and anti-intellectuals of the exploiting class—but for once the creative men and women had the government on their side.47 They were enthusiastic and hopeful about the future.
Dorothy Dehner, the wife of David Smith and Nevelson’s lifelong friend, recalled that, because of the WPA, “A whole generation of artists got their entire training in America.” They might have been inspired by French artists, but “they didn’t have to go to France in order to be artists.”48 Years later, Nevelson observed that, “Without the WPA New York would not be the number one art center today.”49
One of the thousands of young unknown artists involved in the WPA was Lillian Mildwoff, who showed her work next to her sister’s watercolors in 1936 at an exhibition put on by the Municipal Arts Committee. “We were all poor,” she remembers. “Louise would bring the food over to my house. I had the wine, and we would have dinner. I was the only one working because I was a college graduate and I was able to get a job at Macy’s for eighteen dollars a week. Everyone was generous. The artists would go to the cafeteria and get salads and then we’d make something out of that. Now if you struggle, you struggle alone. At that time, you had a group to struggle with you. If one person was in trouble, all of us were in trouble.”50
To become part of the ever-growing group of artists working for the WPA, one had to declare poverty and the total absence of family support. Contrary to Nevelson’s later assertions that she only joined the WPA in its last year of existence, her employment record notes that she was a participant from its inception in 1935 until the massive layoffs in 1939.51 She later claimed that she was reluctant to expose her family to the fact that she was on relief. But she was willing, like most young aspiring artists, to make a false claim in order to get government support.
In June 1936 Nevelson exhibited twelve drawings and five small polychrome plaster sculptures, including images of ducks and dancers, in the First Annual Competitive Exhibition sponsored by the American Artists’ Congress held at the A.C.A. Gallery on West Eighth Street.52 Competing in a pool of 175 artists—most of whom had never had a one-person exhibition—Nevelson was among the four prizewinners selected for a further competition and an exhibition to be held that September. Her works were especially praised by both Genauer and Devree, art critics working respectively in the New York World-Telegram and New York Times.
A few months later Louise Nevelson and her sister Lillian Mildwoff exhibited paintings in the Tenth Exhibiton of the Municipal Art Committee in July 1936—a remarkable example of how persuasive Louise Nevelson could be when it came to encouraging people close to her to engage in their own creative pursuits.53
A year later, the American Artists’ Congress again winnowed the field of hundreds of eager young artists who submitted their work in a competition that would culminate in a one-person show. Nevelson made the first cut. While she was not selected as the winner, she was one of only five sculptors mentioned by a critic reviewing the exhibition. Her “polychromatic abstraction” was cited along with the three other representational artists whose subjects were either heavy-handed social realism (“factory workers, a gaunt refugee and a newsboy”) or an inoffensive and timely topic (a “gently caressed dancer”).54
In July 1938 she exhibited with other WPA artist-teachers in a show of over a hundred works at the Federal Art Gallery on West Fifty-Seventh Street. The reviewer observed that Nevelson was among the few familiar names.55 Six months later her sculpture was included, along with the work of eighty other artists, in “The First Union Sculpture Show” at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In all of these exhibitions, Nevelson had been selected by juries of distinguished artists, highly praised by some critics, and at least mentioned by others. She had good reason to feel pleased and confirmed in her sense of her own talent.56
Richard Kramer recalled: “She was convinced that she would become a great artist, and if you tried to tell her she wouldn’t, she would have laughed at you. She didn’t need any encouragement.”57 Her conviction and determination propelled her forward, and her energetic efforts got her the press any ambitious artist would have hoped to get. In this regard she embraced a closely held belief for generations of her father’s family: that persistence and talent would inevitably lead to success.
Between December 1935 and June 1939, the WPA had sponsored forty exhibitions, and Nevelson had participated in at least seven of them. She had been selected by juries for honors and had won notice by the press, even the lofty New York Times. Then it was over. In July 1939, along with seventy-five percent of the artists on the WPA in New York, Louise Nevelson received her pink slip from the government.58
What was it about Nevelson’s work that won her attention from juries and critics? The artist’s earliest sculptures that can be identified and dated with certainty are the four pieces that were photographed for the WPA archives in 1939 and 1940—Girl Reading, Mother and Child, Two Head Composition, and Cat. That they were photographed strongly suggests that Nevelson was, at some time, in the Sculpture Division of the WPA.59 All are polychrome plaster pieces, which have been squared off—or rather cubed off—in a compositionally interesting and, in some instances, compelling way. At least so they seemed to Howard Devree at The New York Times, who stated that “Miss Nevelson caricatures duck and dancer in water-colored plaster and reveals strength.”60
Emily Genauer, then a young critic at the New York World-Telegram, misidentified the plasters, which she describes as “small wooden sculptures conceived abstractly and … coated with multicolored paints.” Nevelson applies color “as though she were working on a canvas instead of in the round. She uses it plastically and structurally, to emphasize some planes and de-emphasize others, to increase the volume of a certain section as it stands in relationship to another.”61
The chunky works were figurative, often representations of women, sometimes specifically self-portraits. They were forceful and many displayed an originality that was unexpected from a newcomer.
Mother and Child, dated 1934, has a pyramidal solidity much like the works of Henry Moore and the pre-Columbian pieces that Nevelson would have been seen in New York museums. Her originality was visible in the cubed-off forms of the plaster, which are piled on one another in a more dynamically vital way than they seem at first glance. When one considers what cannot be seen in the black-and-white photo—the color variations of each face—it’s easy to understand why critics selected Nevelson’s early “cubistic” work for praise. This seemingly stolid chunky sculpture hinted at Nevelson’s future mastery in subtle composition. Anti-formalist social realism was so much in the air in the New York art world at the time that Nevelson’s early experiments seem daring by comparison with the work of other successful sculptors, such as Aaron Goodelman.
Girl Reading, also dating from the WPA period, is a polychrome plaster with planes outlined by broad dark lines. This work conveys a sense of the rhythmic fluidity Nevelson was learning from Ellen Kearns through the masterful management of large rounded shapes: The thighs make a platform for the arms and torso, which are moving back and forth in a kind of rocking rhythm as they comfortably support the expressively painted head and heavy chunk of hair at the top of the sculpture. A viewer can kinesthetically identify with the girl’s position while wondering how on earth she maintains her balance at the bottom of the steps, which are her feet.
It seems that most of the early pieces were reworked, either painted over or cast with a patina, so that the color, and the resulting “cubist” effect noted in reviews from this period is largely lost. About these works, the artist noted, “I painted each plane a different primary color so that the form would be as clear a line as architecture.”62 Nevelson’s words are consistent with her belief that color and form were both vital and equal in importance. As time passed and the fashion for monochrome sculpture predominated in the art world, Nevelson gave up the use of color in her sculpture. She would not return to it for another fifty years.
By painting each major surface plane a different primary color, Nevelson was working with the vocabulary of synthetic Cubism, but her way of adapting what she saw differed greatly from the European inheritors of the Cubist tradition in sculpture. Instead of restructuring the object by reassembling planes in complex juxtaposition, Nevelson took some surface planes and flattened them, thereby reducing the structure of the figures to a relatively small number of cuboid shapes. In the process, she set up some powerful planar tensions. This “misreading” and simplification of Cubist sculpture was common in American sculpture in the mid-to-late 1930s.
Nevelson’s search for a formal vocabulary was always couched in her discussion of the importance of Cubism. Sometimes her ideas about Cubism link up with her ideas on metaphysics, but they always lead back to her admiration for Picasso: “Picasso found the cube—that’s wisdom tripled. I love Picasso. It doesn’t matter whether or not he studied metaphysics; he was born into this wisdom…. The cube was like my grandfather. I was born with this objective form in me.”63
It was Picasso’s exceptional capacity as a master of composition that she particularly hoped to achieve. In what she considered a courageous act, Picasso had broken with the norm in order to participate in the invention of Cubism, and for her, this outstripped his many other contributions to art:
Now three dimensions is physical, the world of reality, so-called. But I think the Cubists went beyond. Take something like a chair or a cube. You can only see three sides…. We assume that a fourth side must be there or it wouldn’t stand up. Our eye can never take in that dimension, but the mind does. It’s not what you see, it’s what you are assuming to finish what you are seeing that is, for lack of a better definition, the fourth dimension. Cubism gave us that assumption.64
Titanic as he was for European artists, Picasso loomed even larger to the American art world. He had changed the image of a modern artist through his prodigious capacity for invention and production. Nevelson perceived him as a kindred spirit: “Picasso and I work on the same wavelength. I think it’s in us.”65 She saw herself as a master of the horizontal and vertical in sculpture, with a talent akin to Picasso’s gift as a Cubist painter.
The freedom Nevelson exhibited in her earliest sculptural work—the range of ways in which she chopped up, put back together and painted planes with different colors—echoed her understanding of Picasso’s Cubism, both analytic and synthetic. While her planar divisions tended to be larger and fewer than Picasso’s work from the early and mid-1930s—closer to the primitive or pre-Columbian sources that inspired both of them—there are striking parallels. In her intuitive way, Nevelson understood Picasso’s grasp of the freedom of primitive art in combination with the sophisticated break with pure representation he had learned from Cézanne. She saw how this allowed him to move rapidly through the various stages of analytic and then synthetic Cubism.
During the 1930s and early 1940s, Nevelson’s most formative years, Geometric Abstraction, an offshoot of Cubism, vied with Surrealism for position as the most advanced style on the New York scene. Nevelson was part of the modernist group in New York, and her sources, like other American modernists, were coming from Europe. Cubist work of the Paris school, as well as Constructivist works, De Stijl, and Neo-Plastic pieces,66 all could be seen in New York during the 1930s and early 1940s at the Museum of Modern Art, Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art at New York University, and Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Art. In addition, a number of small galleries, usually run by European dealers, kept the most important and often the latest works of abstract art on view.67
As was true with Surrealism, the arrival in New York in this period of major abstract artists such as Mondrian, Léger, and Lipschitz spurred great interest among New York painters and sculptors.
From the mid-1930s through the early 1940s, Nevelson was experimenting both socially and artistically. She had moved many times between 1934 and 1939, living first on York Avenue, then West Tenth Street, then Bleecker Street, then on East Fifteenth Street. By the summer of 1939 she had moved into a three-room “railroad” flat at 311 East Twenty-First Street. During this turbulent time, her son, Mike, spent one year (1935–36) at the Peekskill Military Academy, which he initially liked but was very glad to leave in order to stay with his mother while attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. While he preferred staying in New York, his presence created awkwardness for his sexually liberated and hard-working mother, and she sent him away much more often than he wanted. In the end, he opted to finish high school in Rockland, “where I can support myself and graduate with little effort.”68 He knew that in the summer he would see more of her, since she often came for long visits to her parents’ home.
Mike’s letters to her from Rockland alternate between claiming to be just fine—working for his uncle Nate at the Thorndike Hotel, swimming, boating with friends, dating local girls, and riding his motorcycle—and wanting to come to New York as soon as possible. Similarly, he fluctuated between writing to his mother as if she were a pal, “Dear Lou,” or “Dear Mother,” thanking her for a gift or money.
Taking care of her son was a difficult subject for Nevelson, who had to face her ambivalence about being a mother while being an artist.69 Her youngest sister Lillian, by then a mother herself, tried to help by paying for Louise’s appointment with a psychoanalyst—“one of the best doctors in the village.” “She was going thorough a lot of hell and she came out of his office saying, ‘He just told me that I know too much.’ ” Unsure whether her sister had actually been told that or whether the doctor had concluded that she was too resistant or simply didn’t want help, Lillian only knew that Nevelson never went back for another session.70
The third Berliawsky sister, Anita, had also left her husband but chose to stay in Rockland, working for her brother at his hotel and taking care of her son George. Minna Berliawsky was disappointed with the unsuccessful marriages of her two older daughters, but she was usually the person at whose home they dropped off their sons, leaving her to care for them.71
Though Louise Nevelson had some exceptionally rewarding experiences during the 1930s—having her sculpture exhibited and well reviewed, winning honorable mention for her neophyte work, even being part of the community of professional artists on the WPA—it was also a very difficult time, psychologically. She tells of a particular moment of depression in her autobiography, which she identified as different from the despair she had felt on her second trip to Paris: Paris “was a bit of reality, and disappointment. But this was total death.”72
Her recollection begins with a description of a young man, “very quiet and very intelligent and very gentle,” who headed a dental clinic she attended. He showed interest in her and asked if he could visit. She put him off until the summer when her son would be away in Maine. “I was really looking forward to it, because I had great respect for him and his abilities. Certainly I wasn’t thinking of anything too serious.” When she called him and invited him over, she was amazed that, instead of the “fine relationship” she had expected, he threw her on the couch with the obvious intention of attacking her sexually. But nothing happened because he saw in her eyes how utterly shocked she was. He got angry and left. Stunned by the incident, she lay paralyzed on her bed and listened to the sound of her cat attacking a bird. “I couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t confront it. I knew what was happening. I knew that the cat had attacked the bird. I was alone, and I thought, I can’t take it. I’m going to leave this place.” So she got up, and set off to see the last performance of Sherwood Anderson’s play High Tor, starring Burgess Meredith, which, she had noted in that day’s New York Times, was about a ship that sank with all its passengers aboard. “Well that’s all I needed,” she recalled in her autobiography decades later. “And it took me back into death and metaphysics, and I thought, Did I have to attract that? … It meant that I was attracting the bird with the cat, and I came here and there was death.”73
Nevelson had just been through a period of promiscuity. She could have felt that her lively interest in sexuality was responsible for the attack, that she had invited it. “Drowned. The ship went down … I was in a terrible state … I saw graveyards…. There was death, … I saw fire. And I’d go to bed every night like that.”74
The same day as she saw the play, June 5, 1937, the front page of the Times had carried the headline, “Germans Execute Hirsch, U.S. Citizen.”75 Despite repeated American appeals for clemency, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish man who was accused of taking part in a bombing plot against Julius Streicher, “the Reich’s leading Jew hater,” was guillotined. Hitler had signed the order for the death of the young man, who, though he had never lived in the U.S., was an American citizen.
Nevelson knew that Fascism was on the rise in Germany and Italy and that, at the request of Spanish General Francisco Franco, German and Italian planes had been dropping incendiary bombs during the previous six weeks, killing thousands of innocent civilians in Basque towns—the most notable being the nearly total destruction of Guernica, an ancient Basque city, on April 26, 1937.
Since 1920 she had lived in New York, a city where her friends and colleagues included creative artists and intellectuals, many of whom were Jews. Hitler’s takeover in 1933 and his immediate introduction of anti-Jewish policies throughout Germany were reminiscent of what had happened in the Russian Empire under the czars. It was happening all over again in Germany and Austria. “I saw graveyards…. There was death … I saw fire.”76
The paralysis and depression Nevelson describes that summer day was made up of many elements: her memory of High Tor; her memory of being attacked by a seemingly gentle man; her memory of a bird being overpowered and killed by a cat; and, perhaps most important, the death of an American Jew in Germany—all of these undergirded by traumatic childhood experiences and memories. How could she not carry silent scars of these early memories in Shusneky, which had permanently traumatized her mother?
In 1937 she could not yet know the full horrors of the Holocaust to come—how her vision of fire and cemeteries and death would become the world’s vision. But when in 1976, in the pages of her autobiography, she reported her memory of a huge cat in the process of destroying its birdlike victim, she could have retrospectively elided her memory of the time with the knowledge of horrors that were at that time still to come. Regardless, that summer Louise Nevelson knew enough to be very frightened about the future.
After the end of the WPA, poverty was again playing a role in Nevelson’s life. It had marked her earliest childhood, and being confronted again with its gnawing dangers in her late thirties, after having lived high off the hog during her early twenties, was discouraging. Even though checks from her brother arrived regularly, it was never enough. She always needed more for her art. She consistently solicited financial aid from her family, friends, and lovers to cover these expenses and often didn’t repay them until long afterward.
There was no way her family would have abandoned Louise, “the artistic one.” But their help could only go so far. By the end of the thirties it was a combination of the restricted circumstances for artists and the chilling danger for Jews that weighed heavily on Louise Nevelson. She would have to find her own way to make it past the depression and danger that faced her and the rest of the Western world.
