John D. Schiff. Exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery, 1942. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
“New York in the forties … was almost like you were breathing the air of Surrealism.”
—Louise Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks, 1976, p. 88
In the summer of 1939 Nevelson moved into a three-room railroad apartment on East Twenty-First Street, where she lived with her son Mike, who would begin studying at New York University in September. In March 1940 she exhibited in a show with about fifty other sculptors at the New School for Social Research. The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times, and while Nevelson’s name was mentioned, her “color piece” was not considered a success.1
The contradictions in her life had not abated. In 1941 she was still presenting herself as the ex-wife of a well-to-do husband while simultaneously announcing her leftist sympathies: “I went to teas, luncheons, dinners, and I saw women making serfs of their servants and of the people who waited on them…. I saw the principle of what makes war beginning in the life around me, and it disgusted me.”2
During this time her brother, Nate Berliawsky, was sending her $225 a month to keep her from starving. Appalled that she was walking around in the winter with holes in her shoes and using layers of paper to keep her feet dry, he gave her money to buy boots. She spent the cash on art supplies. “I made many trips to New York to take her shopping, and she wouldn’t let me buy her anything. She would say, ‘Why not just give me the money.’ But I knew she would spend it on sculpture material. She loves clothes and didn’t have to go without, but she wanted to buy paint instead of clothes. She was a character. She liked to drink and would say, ‘Come with me to the bar and buy me a drink.’ ”3
By the summer of 1941 Minna Berliawsky was again ill. Nevelson had not participated in any exhibitions all year, and Mike, fed up with school and unemployment, had joined the Merchant Marine, leaving home for points unknown. The threat of United States involvement in the European war, now in its second year, hung in the air. The world situation could not have looked worse, and now, because of her son’s enlistment, it felt personal. In early September Nevelson impulsively—according to her—went to the gallery of the German-born dealer Karl Nierendorf, telling him that he must give her an exhibition.
Her published recollection explains her motivation, describing it as her reaction to a weekend spent with a wealthy, distant relative. The man’s high living and ready cash were intensely appealing yet totally at odds with her everyday life. Feeling professionally and financially desperate after lunching at the Plaza Hotel with him, “I said to myself, what’s the best gallery in New York? Well, I’m going in there and if I don’t get a show, I’ll shoot [the gallerist].”4
Nevelson didn’t have far to walk, since the “best” galleries in New York at the time were a few blocks away on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Nevelson had been studying the galleries and their owners for some time, and she had already calculated that Nierendorf—ambitious, canny, and skilled at achieving meteoric success for his artists in difficult times—would be the most likely to respond to her approach.
“Now Nierendorf … was the one who brought and introduced Paul Klee to this country. He had Picassos, he had all of those European artists…. So I went in there and I introduced myself. And he said: ‘What can I do for you?’ and I said, … ‘Well, you can come and see my work.’ ”5
This part of the story is a condensation of various versions, most of which note that she brought photographs of her work for the initial meeting. Her good looks and bold overture—she often claimed to have sat down on his desk, seductively crossing her legs—combined with his susceptibility to tall, handsome women, increased his interest in her work.
She may have known that Nierendorf had provided a monthly stipend for Paul Klee for ten years, and she certainly knew that he had successfully promoted Klee’s reputation to the point that the Swiss artist had become “as important as Picasso in the U.S.”6 Klee’s work had strong appeal for American artists and collectors because of his ability to create a private world, utilizing the essence of both Cubist and Surrealist styles.
Her ambition to achieve Picasso’s renown could have clinched Nevelson’s decision to approach Nierendorf. Furthermore Nierendorf’s conviction that spirituality lay at the heart of contemporary art would have been particularly appealing to her.
Nierendorf was perennially optimistic and about the age of her former husband. He even looked a bit like Charles Nevelson. She might also have noted some similarities between Nierendorf and her father, another charming European émigré. Short, a little stout, balding, but charming, scholarly, and highly cultivated, Nierendorf was friendly with musicians, architects, and theater people who came to the gallery after hours for informal recitals, lectures, and discussions. He radiated warmth, and one of his favorite sayings was: “It’s love that dominates the world.”7 His views on the connectedness of all art were in tune with Nevelson’s.
Nevelson guessed correctly that the dapper German-born bachelor would be open to a connection with an attractive Russian-born American, whose passion for modern art had taken her first to Munich and later to Paris. After her years of study with Miller and Nicolaïdes, and even her brief time with Hofmann, she was firmly embedded in a formalist tradition—Cubism and its derivatives—the same qualities that had interested Klee.
Her own limited education made Nevelson susceptible to the sound of scholarly talk. Nierendorf combined learned language with intense enthusiasm, which made his gallery seem more serious and less superficially sophisticated than other more prestigious establishments on Fifty-Seventh Street run by European dealers: Pierre Matisse, Valentine Dudensing, Paul Rosenberg, or the Francophile Julien Levy.8
Nierendorf had been hoping to attract some of the European Surrealists who had come to New York in the early 1940s, but they saw him as being in the “other” camp—representing German Expressionists, Kandinsky and Klee. They were correct. Though Nierendorf was occasionally able to include a few works by Max Ernst or Joan Miró in specific exhibitions, his stable was solidly un-Surreal. When Nevelson wanted to move in that direction, she showed elsewhere—as she did on two occasions in 1943.
Nierendorf went to Nevelson’s apartment on East Twenty-First Street the evening of the day they met (or very soon afterwards). As a result of that visit, he offered her a one-woman exhibition within a few weeks. According to her sister Lillian, “Nierendorf also bought one of Louise’s sculptures, which was quite a break for her, as it was the first time she had sold to a gallery.”9
The story Nevelson told her friends at the time may be closer to reality. According to Jan Gelb, an artist who had been friendly with Louise from the early 1930s:
She had shown some of her work to Nierendorf, and he was quite impressed with it, and he said he’d like to come and see some more. She said, “Surely.” And he came to her place, and he liked what he saw. He said, “Beautiful, beautiful. Do you have any more?”
And she said, “Yes a lot. It’s down in the cellar. Do you want to see them?”
He said, “Yes.” And so she started downstairs to the basement where more work was stored. She was walking in front of him. (He was a little man, and she’s quite tall.) He sort of patted her on the shoulder and said, “You know, you’re a fine artist. You really are a fine artist.” And she turned around and said to him, “Mr. Nierendorf, are you here on art business or fucking business?”—with that crisp New England voice that she can exaggerate when she wants to. He probably stumbled the rest of the way down.10
By 1941 none of the U.S. galleries could obtain works from Europe, and the more open-minded ones were on the lookout for American artists. Nierendorf had been working as an art dealer in Germany since 1920. From the time Hitler was elected in January 1933, the art world deteriorated so rapidly that, by 1934, Nierendorf was torn about whether he should stay in Germany or leave. The stress led to a heart attack and a six-month hospitalization. In May 1936 he set out for America and a few months later decided to stay. He quickly learned English, and in early 1937, he opened a gallery across the street from the new Museum of Modern Art. The arrival of the Nierendorf Gallery was noted in The New York Times, and most of its exhibitions were reviewed. A year later he moved the gallery to an equally prestigious location, 18 East Fifty-Seventh Street, which is where Nevelson met him.
Once the war began in Europe, Nierendorf could neither maintain his connections in Paris and Berlin nor receive deliveries of artwork. He then turned to American artists, albeit in a limited fashion. A few months before Louise Nevelson contacted him, Nierendorf had opened an exhibition, Masters and Vanguard of Modern Art, which included all the major players from the School of Paris and German Expressionists. The few Americans in the show were non-objective abstractionists.
There were additional reasons for Nevelson to have approached Nierendorf when she did. The Nazis were on their way to Moscow and Leningrad. The fighting was going badly for the Allies, and Roosevelt was preparing America for a more active role. Broad hints of a U.S. military draft were floated in the news. Nevelson’s son was nineteen, ready meat for a military call up. He had been at sea on the SS Carib Star since the end of May 1941 and seemed to be enjoying his new life sailing to and from the Caribbean, stopping occasionally in New York or Norfolk and proudly sending his mother ten dollars a week.
By the end of the summer, Mike Nevelson had found his sea legs and planned to attach himself to a better ship. He had also found his voice as a young man no longer emotionally dependent on his mother. In a remarkable letter dated August 29, 1941, a few days before his mother walked into Nierendorf’s gallery, he apologized for speaking so severely to her during a recent telephone call, “but I could not tolerate your infantile and hysterical attitude any longer. Your dramatic threat to commit suicide was as phony and pathetic as the feeble attempts of a ham actor. If you were in the hospital, it was probably to remove a bunion.” He then acknowledged that it is natural for her to want her “prodigal son [to] return from his wanderings and settle down to a humdrum life.” But after telling her that he has sent her fifty dollars in traveler’s checks, advising her not to throw this money away and warning her that he will be cutting down on her allowance so he can start saving, he states that, “you will have to learn to tolerate me and my new life. Nothing will force me to do other than I have planned. I would like to know that I still have a home to return to and a mother that I can sincerely confide in.”11 Mike Nevelson in the Merchant Marine, was staying at sea through most of the war, and often taking hazardous assignments.
It seems likely that her son’s declaration of independence had a beneficial effect. It appears to have pushed her to think more maturely and behave more responsibly. She recalled: “I certainly entertained suicide. But … I was a parent and I just couldn’t let anyone down. I certainly wanted to.”12 It is also noteworthy that, at the very moment her son was moving far away in frightening times, she was attaching herself to a distinguished older man—as a protector and a faithful supporter—a father figure. Nevelson’s ostentatiously independent behavior was often contingent upon her having found some kind of close supporter—a dealer, a servitor, a lover, or a very good friend.
In her autobiography, she expressed her concern about her son. “And Mike was in the war, at sea with the Merchant Marines. When he went to Egypt or Russia and it was secret, they couldn’t inform us, and for six months at a time I didn’t hear from him. It threw me into a great state of despair.”13
When it became obvious that Mike had committed himself (at least during the war) to a life at sea, Louise Nevelson moved in June 1942 to a cold-water flat at 92 East Tenth Street, in a building occupied mostly by artists at the center of what would soon be called the New York School. She lived there until the fall of 1944.
Nevelson’s relationship with Nierendorf quickly became intimate, though probably not for long, and for the next six years until his sudden death in 1947, he encouraged her and helped her financially. According to her recollection, he constantly praised her artistic talent.14 He lent her large sums of money and paid for her clothes for the openings of each of her five solo shows and two group shows. Twenty years after he died she told an interviewer how her “dedication and drive had prompted Nierendorf to predict, ‘Nevelson, you are going to have every wish of your creative life fulfilled. I know artists—that’s the way you are made.’ This prophecy was to be her talisman…. ‘Nierendorf was like a godfather, and his conviction gave me strength.’ ”15
This prediction, coming during the artist’s early forties, could have reminded her of Sholem Aleichem’s prophecy at her birth. It fits rather neatly into an increasingly neat life story. But when the narrative of Nevelson’s relationship to her first dealer is told by a more objective reporter, a more complicated picture emerges.
Some time around 1943 she “regally swept into Karl Nierendorf’s office and speared that rotund little man with a fierce, almost knightly, gesture in her visage, speaking down to him: ‘What do you mean by saying that you like my drawings better than my sculpture? … Oh well, half the time you people don’t know what the hell you’re talking about anyway….’ She changed the subject as if flying from one trapeze to another…. ‘And for Christ’s sakes, stop saying behind my back that I’m more interesting than my work.’ ”16
This exchange was described in his memoir by Jimmy Ernst, Max Ernst’s son and an ardent supporter and longtime friend of Nevelson. It reveals the bittersweet bargain that fate sometimes metes out for any talented person who is also attractive and alluring. Is it the talent or the charisma that brings success? If it is both, how can the person believe in or convince others of his or her giftedness? Beautiful women and wealthy men have a similar problem: Will anyone ever love them for themselves?
Nevelson was undoubtedly interesting to Nierendorf. They could talk on the phone for hours. Though they never had a full-fledged or lengthy affair (he supposedly wanted one and she supposedly did not), nevertheless they had an understanding. Just as he appealed to her as the ideal combination of sophisticated, romantic European who was also passionate about self-expression and spirituality, she appealed to him as the powerful, earthy, determined, and exciting American voice of the future. They were both ferociously ambitious and hardworking. He believed in her creativity and backed that belief with professional, emotional, and financial support.
Her first show at Nierendorf’s opened on September 22, 1941. The arrangements had been hurriedly made, and she requested another week to prepare. Nierendorf regretfully told her that invitations had already been mailed. He was, however, able to extend the exhibit and give a reception for his new artist and latest love interest on October 14.
In a feverish rush, Nevelson chose from pieces she had recently retrieved from the WPA. Many artists had thrown out works left over from the project, but she had had the foresight to keep hers. She spent several weeks cleaning and repainting the sculpture and mounting the line drawings to ready them for her first solo exhibition. “All my sculpture I had in my first show at Nierendorf in 1941 I did right on the project.”17
Though there was no press release, an article about the artist in the New York Post provided her with a chance to present herself—and present herself she did. First she summed up her belief: “Frankly I am ambitious. Art is a stream that flows on and on, making you do more and more.”18 Then she reflects on her current situation: “We have had hard times, but we have also had phenomenal good breaks.” Finally she tells an “I’ve-always-been-an-artist” story that will get revised and elaborated into legend.
“I can remember as a child in school, the first thing that interested me was a beautiful teacher who brought colored chalk into the classroom. And I remember being asked in class one day what I wanted to do. I said: ‘I will be an artist.’ Then I amended it, ‘No, I will be a sculptor. That’s harder.’ ”19
Critical reaction to Nevelson’s show was mostly positive, and, despite the lack of sales, both artist and dealer were delighted. Howard Devree in The New York Times wrote:
Modern indeed are the forms and rhythms employed by Louise Nevelson in her first exhibition, current at the Nierendorf Gallery. Having approached her work through the medium of drawing, the artist makes her line felt even when employing heavy low masses that at times are reminiscent of Mayan and certain Near Eastern work. This linear treatment does not prevent her, at times, from indulging in solid, massive, somewhat cubistic figure effects which are embellished with color and topped off with a wax finish. A cat (wood) with thumb-tack eyes seems a trivial inclusion among the more serious and massively architectural pieces, and the color is rather a dubious benefit to some of the pieces. But Miss Nevelson has originality and a rather personal approach to her real problems and has made an interesting start.20
Devree’s observation about “architectural pieces” is intriguingly prescient.
In the New York Herald Tribune a reviewer noted: “Miss Neverlson [sic] injects, about equally, wit and a feeling of the primitive in her work, which is stylized almost to the end of pure abstraction—but not quite…. [T]here is a dancing figure that symbolizes a zestful interest in movement. The work is well off the beaten track, a little mannered and cleverly done.”21
Emily Genauer of the New York World-Telegram recalled the artist’s polychrome abstract sculpture done mostly during her time on the WPA and observed that, “One has the feeling that the artist is really getting somewhere.” “Completely personal and original they [the works] give one something of the feeling one gets studying a Frank Lloyd Wright house. There are the same severity, the same feeling of intersecting planes, the same emphasis on mass, the same … horizontal feeling. For all their rigidity, however, they are full of the suggestion of flux and movement, as, one might say, a coiled spring. Color is used for stressing volume.”22 The most interesting remark in this welter of positive comments is the reference by Genauer to Nevelson’s architectural inclinations.
Either tongue-in-cheek or downright misogynistic, a reviewer in Cue observed: “We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns. See them by all means…. I suspect the artist is clowning—but with what excellent equipment, artistically.”23 This strange remark by an anonymous reviewer has received too much attention in the Nevelson literature (especially by feminists) and overshadows the otherwise consistently positive critical response to Nevelson’s first solo show.
It was evident at Nevelson’s second Nierendorf exhibit in October 1942 that her work had moved in several new stylistic directions simultaneously. The mix of animals and human figures continued, as did the alternation of wit and seriousness in both form and subject matter, which left Nevelson on her own among the three leading artistic camps: She was neither a Social Realist nor a committed Surrealist nor an abstract modernist.
No longer do the reviews mention polychromatic pieces. An installation shot, as well as accompanying photos of individual pieces, show works in plaster or tattistone, each painted white or a uniform dark color.24 Some of the works in the 1942 exhibition continue her trajectory of cubistic volumes cut and shaped with more freedom and allowing for open spaces. Now she put together anomalous parts where Mayan-style heads are placed in Picassoesque juxtaposition with cuboid volumes that could be other body parts. The other new trend is toward an ever-greater sense of movement, where the figures—or at least some of the limbs—seem to lift off the ground and head out into space.
In retrospect one can see why Nierendorf would have endorsed Nevelson’s work. He was confident about his own taste, and the reviewers’ responses to Nevelson’s first two exhibitions justified his support. The Art News critic observed that Nevelson was one of the two authentic personalities on the fall art scene.25 Howard Devree, writing in The New York Times, gives her his third positive review, stating that she “carries forward the experimental promise of earlier work.”26
The 1942 exhibition was important for Nevelson because it confirmed that she was not a flash in the pan. She was becoming known and respected in the New York art world, and this exhibition earned her some new fans, including the sculptor David Smith. At the same exhibition, she met Ralph Rosenborg, a young (fourteen years younger than Nevelson) and gifted painter. They became lovers immediately, and their mutual respect for each other’s art lasted many years. His work was sometimes compared to Paul Klee, and Nierendorf was for a time his dealer, supporting him with a monthly income.
Rosenborg, who had been exhibiting since the early 1930s, was an early member of Abstract American Artists and part of “The Ten”—a group that included Gottlieb, Bolotowsky, Schanker, and Rothko—though he never belonged to any association very long. He noted that their knowledge of what Matisse and Picasso were doing in Europe made them unique among American artists at that time.27 He was a painter’s painter but never became a commercial success. Highly respected by other artists, he was known as a maverick and a loner, and his reputation in the art world was always strained because of his outspokenness and militant independence.
“Rosenborg,” according to painter and cofounder of The Ten, Joseph Solman, “did not have a single close friend. He was high-strung, spirited and spoke with wild sincerity, like someone let out of a cave. He was mercurial—a man with sudden enthusiasms—a manic-depressive type. He was elated by Louise and she was sparked by his enthusiasm. They were together all the time.”28
Lillian Mildwoff noted: “He was very kind to her and full of admiration for Louise’s work. Louise loved his paintings, thought he was a most sensitive artist,”29 and spoke of him with the utmost respect. Lillian also recalled that Nevelson started working in wood through Ralph.
According to Nevelson: “He’s not a disciplined person in his emotional life, but in his work, he’s a beautiful craftsman. He came to my place on Tenth Street and helped me, showing me how to use tools for doweling and things in sculpture—the wooden things.”30
Rosenborg was famous among his artist friends for his meticulous technique and immaculate studio—unusual qualities for abstract action painters. Nevelson especially admired his cleanliness. “He worked like a doctor—immaculate,” said Lillian. “His brushes had to be the best; his paper, the best. He and Louise had a lot in common.”31 As Martika Sawin noted in Arts, “He lays great stress on his materials, … arraying them neatly beside a clean palette. Next to it stood several jars holding such an assortment of palette knives as one would have scarcely believed existed.”32
The respect Nevelson and Rosenborg had for each other as artists seems to have transcended the harsh words he would hurl at her when drunk. She respected not only the habits and tastes they both shared but also his celebrity.33 “I knew who he was,” Nevelson told an interviewer in 1976, “because he was very prominent then.”34 But Rosenberg’s gifts as a painter were unfortunately undermined by his alcoholism, irascible temper, and adolescent-like quest for independence, which kept him moving from gallery to gallery and often from state to state.
A month after her second solo show in 1942, Nierendorf included two of her sculptures in an exhibition called Unity in Diversity, which was both an exhibition and a “contest” to celebrate the opening of his newly relocated gallery at 53 East Fifty-Seventh Street. The show was made up of sixty works, primarily featuring well-known Europeans, such as Picasso, Max Ernst and Paul Klee, as well as “promising young talent uncovered in the U.S.”35 Nevelson was one of the very few Americans in the distinguished group, which also included Ralph Rosenborg, Alexander Calder, Edward Weston, and Loren MacIver.
After two years in a row (1941–1942) of well-reviewed work at a prestigious gallery, Nevelson’s confidence soared. This seemed to have freed her to launch herself in another new direction. By late 1942 she let loose and headed straight for Surrealism, while holding onto Nierendorf for ballast. And ballast he was for her. Over the next several years she explored and expanded as an artist more rapidly than ever. She responded to her friends’ enthusiasm for the new ideas swirling around them, and she carried the clownishness of Surrealist antics and raw spontaneity as far as possible in her forthcoming Circus exhibit at the new, offbeat Norlyst Gallery, organized by Jimmy Ernst. And then she turned to an abstract mode using her newfound medium of scrap wood, as could be seen in her show at Nierendorf in 1944, which contained many important completely abstract works. Some of her cubistic works from the late 1930s and early 1940s approached abstraction but hadn’t completely arrived there. Like her hero, Picasso, she had been reluctant to completely abandon representational imagery.
Nevelson had met Jimmy Ernst soon after he arrived from Europe in 1938—probably through Frederick Kiesler—and the young man was much taken with her. He admired her energy and talent, finding it to be similar to that of his mother, an unconventional, avant-garde Jewish art historian. Jimmy Ernst played a small but significant role in Nevelson’s life, as he was one of the few discerning people who consistently believed in her talent, even when she was doing work far out of the mainstream. Nevelson was much impressed with him. The young man (he was in his early twenties) had arrived from Europe a penniless immigrant speaking no English and soon became a cultural insider as the secretary and do-all of Peggy Guggenheim, his future mother-in-law.
In the fall of 1942, Nevelson’s mother became quite ill. The family realized it might be her last illness, and she was hospitalized in late January of 1943 in Massachusetts with lung cancer. It may have been an awareness of her mother’s approaching death that pushed Nevelson toward manic disinhibition and intense artistic activity. She began to work with scrap wood and produced her most unconventional work thus far—work that would culminate in the Circus show at the Norlyst Gallery six months later. During this time Nevelson was surrounded by innovative ideas and art. Schwitters, Cornell, along with the many European Surrealists and their American counterparts, were all on display in New York City. Her artist friends in the Tenth Street lofts were daring much and aiming high, and she was no less courageous than they. The affair with Ralph Rosenborg was hot and heavy at this time, which is not at all surprising. People who know that a deeply loved person is dying often feel compelled to seek a replacement. Nevelson’s relationship with Rosenborg lasted another six years, until 1948, when she passed him on to her sister Anita.
Since the mid-1920s Nevelson had been acutely aware of developments in the art world, always scouring galleries, museums, and periodicals for the latest news. Avant-garde New York artists had access to Surrealism well before the early 1940s, when the many European artists fleeing the war in Europe were landing in New York, pushing the local art world in new directions and changing the scene forever. Julien Levy mounted the first important Surrealist exhibition at his Fifty-Seventh Street gallery in January of 1932. And, throughout the 1930s, Levy continued to show major Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti. He discovered Joseph Cornell and included him in two group shows in 1932 and gave him his first one-man show in 1939 and his second in 1940.
During these years when Surrealism was arriving in New York, Nevelson was in the thick of it. She had always been forward looking, and Surrealism’s entrance to the local American art scene was like a shot of adrenalin. In particular, it reintroduced the flavor of Europe to an American art world, which had long been dominated by Social Realism and overtly political narratives. It also reminded American artists of their complex responsibility to society—to tell the truth and to be true to the inner life—to “serve the struggle for emancipation … and … freely seek to give artistic form to his interior world.”36
Nevelson’s relationship to Surrealism is complex. In some ways she was a natural Surrealist—fully at home with spontaneity and willing to acknowledge the power of the unconscious; fully willing to be unconventional, especially since the breakup of her marriage; inclined toward the spiritual, though there is no evidence of her interest in the kind of alchemical leanings of the core Surrealists. At the same time, however, she had allied herself with Karl Nierendorf and his stable of artists, which did not include any of the certified Surrealists.
Nevertheless, she would have absorbed Surrealist concepts in various ways, including through the works of Paul Klee, who had taken on some of the ideas of Surrealism without becoming one of that group. Most of all she would have been subject to its influence through the art-world events in New York of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The major Surrealist landmark during this period was the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, held midwinter 1936–37.37 This huge show caused controversy in the press and was well attended by the city’s avant-garde painters and sculptors. But it appeared at a time when the WPA was in full swing, and New York artists were just beginning to feel a sense of community and acceptance in their own land. The ironic and irreverent nature of Surrealism ran counter to the prevailing political mood of determined earnestness. It was not until the end of the project in 1939 that the influence of Surrealism began to take root in New York—when the young American artists began to meet the Europeans in person.38
European artists, both abstract and Surrealist, were arriving in ever-increasing numbers to escape the horrors of war in Europe—Matta, Tanguy, Ernst, Masson, Seligmann, and Breton. In the early 1940s the European Surrealists were masters of the scene, and European galleries such as Nierendorf and Buchholz tried unsuccessfully to include them into their rosters.39 By 1942 New York had replaced Paris as the center of the Surrealist movement. The Museum of Modern Art continued to mount major shows of Surrealist masters—Miró and Dalí in 1942—and a group of Surrealist periodicals burst upon the New York scene, View in 1940, and VVV and Dyn in 1942.
Until late 1942 Nevelson’s association to Surrealism was like that of many other New York artists—ambivalent. She distrusted it at first, finding it too literary. According to Jimmy Ernst: “She did not seem very impressed by any awed talk about ‘biomorphic space’ or quotations from André Breton’s latest discourse.”40 But as she learned more about it, she found certain of its ideas useful and even sympathetic.
If Nevelson had not shown much interest in Surrealism before fall 1942, she couldn’t miss the two major events that celebrated its existence in New York in 1942 and 1943. The first was the First Papers of Surrealism, organized by Breton and Duchamp and held at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion on Madison Avenue in October and November of 1942. The exhibition was almost entirely devoted to the European masters of the movement, particularly the eminent émigrés. The installation was designed by Marcel Duchamp and was a newsworthy sensation. It consisted of five miles of twine hung in the mansion’s huge ballroom, creating a crisscrossing network of lines meant to obscure the mansion’s ornate interior. On opening night, a group of children were invited to play ball, skip rope, and play hopscotch among the bewildered guests.41
A week later, Peggy Guggenheim opened Art of the Century Gallery in a formerly dilapidated loft space that Frederick Kiesler had transformed into an extraordinary environment.42 Unframed paintings, projected away from curved walls on wooden brackets, were the major feature in the Surrealist gallery. In other rooms a slowly revolving wheel with seven Klees was activated by an electric eye, and Duchamp’s Valise could be seen through a peephole. Numerous ingenious devices and lighting techniques were used to enhance the gallery visitor’s active role in experiencing art.43
Kiesler’s magical spaces created instant acclaim both for him and for Peggy Guggenheim’s collection. Though meant to be an inclusive survey that accomodated the full range of modernism, including Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Balla, the European Surrealists were heavily featured. Also given prominence were the particular interests of Max Ernst (by then Peggy Guggenheim’s husband) and Jimmy Ernst—children’s drawings, primitive paintings, and contemporary Native American art. It was clear to every American artist on the scene that their European colleagues knew exactly how to get the attention and the press visibility they had lost when the WPA closed down.
It was also the first major exhibition in which American artists—including William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, Kay Sage, and Laurence Vail—were invited to show alongside their European confreres. Nevelson knew all of them and must have watched the unfolding of the new scene with a mixture of eagerness and concern.
The incident that most clearly signals the beginning of Nevelson’s public enthusiasm for Surrealism was her “discovery” of “Joe Milone’s Shoe Shine Box” in December of 1942. The local shoe-shine man in her neighborhood had made an extravagantly decorated box and stand entirely for his own pleasure. After finding the box, Nevelson immediately called her new acquaintance, Dorothy Miller, at the Museum of Modern Art. Within a half hour she had transported Milone and the extraordinary piece of folk art—in a taxi she could ill afford—to the museum. Since she appeared with it shortly before Christmas, Alfred Barr, MoMA’s Director, agreed to put it on display for the holiday season, proclaiming it to be “a superbly useless object without price”44 that was “festive as a Christmas tree, jubilant as a circus wagon.”45 The originally humble object had been elaborately bedecked with hanging geegaws and colorful stones covering every surface. With careful craftsmanship the untrained Italian had produced a remarkably original work, combining the uncombinable elements with a hand as deft as any of the most sophisticated Surrealists. Nevelson’s ability to spot an aesthetic object in an unexpected place would characterize much of her future work.
The New York Times, Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, as well as Corriere d’America, Newsweek, Time Magazine, and the Surrealist journal VVV covered the story.46 Joe Milone, his shoe-shine box, and Louise Nevelson received much publicity.
In an “exclusive” interview with a reporter from Corriere d’America (which included a photograph of the attractive artist but not the shoebox), Nevelson expressed her conception of and enthusiasm for Surrealism. She called the box “an epic, a landmark,” and “the most beautiful object in the world”: “It could only have been created by a man such as Joe Milone whose simplicity, pureness and integrity, combined with the sensitive inner feelings of the man’s soul and heart, inspired him to build out of nothing … this superbly elegant work of art.” Nevelson observed: “[I]t [is] impossible to analyze or to define the symbolism…. He had developed no mental picture of the finished product as is done by sophisticates.”47
Nevelson was clearly infected by the art-world fever, but her enthusiasm had old roots. She had found specific qualities that she had always valued in the now-popular movement: creative spontaneity, humble materials, and an innocent purity in the heart and soul of the creator. Her ideas about the pure innocence of Joe Milone are a bit like nineteenth-century ideas of the “noble savage.” Given her antipathy for the hyper-intellectualism and super-sophistication of the Nevelson family into which she had married, she had personal reasons for finding value in unsophisticated naïveté.
The year that followed her discovery of Joe Milone and his stupendous box was exceptionally productive for Nevelson. Her next show, in January 1943, was Peggy Guggenheim’s “Exhibition by 31 Women,” the art for which had been selected by a jury that included Miss Guggenheim, André Breton, Max Ernst, James Johnson Sweeney, and Marcel Duchamp. Except for Nevelson and Frida Kahlo, most of the women were relatively unknown. The Sun’s reviewer, Henry McBride, snidely stated that it is entirely logical that there were many good women Surrealists since, “Surrealism is about 70% hysterics, 20% literature, 5% good painting and 5% just saying ‘boo’ to the innocent public.”48
The New York Times reviewed the show and facetiously observed that Nevelson’s “ ‘Column’ (you would call it sculpture, I guess) … can be dismantled at will and put together again.”49 Another reviewer noted that the wooden column had a “dadaistic character, a three-dimensional Schwitters.”50 Column sounds like one of Nevelson’s works from the late 1950s, but there are no photographs to bear this out. In an interview decades later, Nevelson said that for Column she used “the natural wood but with a little face painted on it.”51
Nevelson’s contribution to the Museum of Modern Art’s 1943 Arts in Therapy exhibit was a vaguely horse-shaped child’s wooden seat. The show also included pieces by such notables as Alexander Calder and André Masson.
In March 1943 Minna Berliawsky died, after a six-month decline in her health. At precisely this moment, Nevelson showed more daring work than she would for many years. People do not always react in expected ways to the loss of a loved one, and Nevelson was no exception. Though she stated many times, “I adored my mother. As a matter of fact I dedicated my life to her,” Nevelson did not attend her mother’s funeral. “She died, so to speak, and I’ve never given it a thought.”52 Nevertheless, as became clear later, she was deeply affected.
One month after her mother’s death, she had two simultaneous exhibits, facing opposite directions.53 Her show at the Nierendorf Gallery, Nevelson: Drawings, was a link to her past, showing works in the style of Matisse and Picasso, which she had learned from Nicolaïdes. The other exhibition, The Circus: The Clown Is the Center of His World, at the Norlyst Gallery, was a leap into her future.
Louise Nevelson and Jimmy Ernst recounted the circumstances surrounding these two shows quite differently. Nevelson said that, having first arranged the presentation of her daring new sculpture at Norlyst, she asked Nierendorf for a more conservative drawing exhibition as a balance.54 Ernst recalled that, though Nierendorf considered himself open-minded, he would not exhibit her new sculpture made from wood found in scrap heaps, and he only reluctantly agreed to show her drawings. As for his reaction to the new work being presented at the Norlyst gallery, Ernst quoted Nierendorf as saying: “ ‘I don’t care if you show those … sculptures. There is nothing to them … refugees from a lumber yard. I’m interested only in her drawings … and there isn’t much you can say for them either.’ ”55 Nevertheless, Nevelson’s drawings at Nierendorf were well reviewed in Art Digest and Art News.56
Nevelson participated in the first public exhibition held at the Norlyst Gallery on unfashionable West Fifty-Sixth Street, run by Elenor Lust and Jimmy Ernst, in March 1943, along with a range of artists—many of whom were barely known but would soon constitute the core of the New York School—Rothko, Gottlieb, Will Barnet, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell.57 Nevelson was represented by a work called Napoleon made from scrap wood—probably one of her first works in that medium.
The Circus show at the Norlyst Gallery, which opened a month later in April 1943, was organized around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century circus posters. Ernst and Nevelson placed her new wood sculptures together, organizing them into three groups: The Circus, The Menagerie, and The Crowd Outside. Ernst’s press release claimed that the purpose of the show was to provide the spectator with an aesthetic experience that was also psychologically profound. He wrote: “The Clown Is the Center of His World is such a profound psychological experience that I cannot see how anyone can fail to be moved by its majestic conception as monumental sculpture, by the personal tragedy of each one’s loneliness, and by the dignity of human endeavor.”58
The title of the circus show could have been derived from Nevelson’s study of “metaphysics” with her dance teacher Ellen Kearns, who taught that all people are at the center of their own world and that the world is merely a projection.59 Already in this, her first thematically titled exhibit, following her mother’s death, Nevelson was aiming to create a world of her own. The title piece, The Clown Is the Center of His World, was an assemblage of wooden parts built up to form a pedestal-table surface on which the artist had placed a plaster clown’s head surmounted by a large cutout and painted tin sign of a key, scissors, and saw. This incongruous combination is preserved in a postcard and stands apart from the other pieces in the show.60
Fortunately, at least seventeen photographs of the show exist, illustrating twenty-four works—almost the entire exhibit—enough to show how far and fast Nevelson could move forward artistically when she felt supported. Retrospectively this exhibition reveals how very much she was on track to her future signature style.
Sometimes the simplicity of the pieces was their most surprising quality—in combining corroded metal pipes with a large chunk of wood and a wheel to create the absolutely convincing image of a Tightrope Walker—Nevelson’s deft formalist gifts are visible.
Among the more than two dozen wood figures were performers and creatures not always associated with the circus: The Ferocious Bull, The Wondrous Fishes and Balancing Seals, The Thin Man, The Lonely Child, The Forsaken Man, and The Riders of the Temple of Life. Jimmy Ernst recalled The Ferocious Bull, which he had seen in Nevelson’s studio the previous year, as the best and most memorable piece in the show and as the probable reason for Nevelson’s inclusion.61 Sparingly assembled and evocative, it recalls Picasso’s bicycle seat and handlebars Bull’s Head, which was executed in Paris a year earlier. The body of Nevelson’s bull was a bed’s headboard that recalls a bison’s bulky body and brutish head. The creature’s horns and front legs are a simple chair back. The tail, hanging loosely from the end of the headboard, was movable, recalling the typically twitching tails of animals that the artist would have seen many times in rural Maine.
Nevelson’s ideas of movable parts and rolling sculpture were in tune with the times. Equally modern, and significant in light of her later development, was her decision to cover the floor of the gallery with three inches of marbles and sand, simulating the sawdust-covered ground of an actual circus, which obliged the viewer to experience the exhibit as a unified environment.
Nevelson may have had reason to hope that her leap into the unusual would be accepted with the same seriousness that had been accorded the European Surrealists, and she must have been pleased that the reviewer for Art Digest described her “entrancing animals made of all kinds of scrap material, … distinctly a new art form.”62 And, according to the Art News critic, Nevelson was easily as inventive as her European Surrealist mentors. “Nevelson’s clowns, trapeze artists, and animals are constructed of odd broken bits of bedsteads, mirrors, and even lighted bulbs. These curious contraptions, some noisy others mobile, were designed as art objects.”63
Ferocious Bull, 1942. Wood and metal, approximately 44 × 66 × 24 in. No longer extant. Photograph by John D. Schiff, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
Even though The New York Times reviewer, Edward Alden Jewell, gave her the unusual distinction of reviewing the exhibition twice—it turned out to be a double punch rather than a negative followed by an apologetic positive. In his first review he found her drawings at Nierendorf derivative of Picasso and Matisse, and the small sculptural pieces in the same show “inexpressive, crude, dull.” He capped the bad news by observing that her “queer contraptions” at Norlyst’s Circus “might also mark the onset of the ‘Silly Season.’ ”64 In the second review, five days later, Jewell referred to Nevelson’s “sculptural three-ringer” as made up of “very queer objects … chiefly of wood roughly hammered together and often equipped with assorted gadgets calculated to assist in creating a bizarre soupçon of verisimilitude.”65
Obviously most of the critics missed what Jimmy Ernst had seen in The Circus exhibition—“each piece [as] a majestic conception the live scale of which had retained the dignity of the creature or the loneliness of the clown child.”66 Nevelson’s disappointment, after the exhibit closed with no work sold, was such that she destroyed the pieces and did not attempt anything so audacious for another eleven years.
While Nevelson never became part of the Surrealist inner circle—invited to exhibit with Picasso, Giacometti, and Max Ernst—the atmosphere of Surrealism had a liberating effect on her, and she recalled: “in the forties … it was almost like you were breathing the air of Surrealism.”67 Several of its tenets became hers. She worked quickly, for example, and assumed that speed would help her follow her intuitive and unconscious aesthetic choices. She also took her dreams seriously. For now, she had one of the best art dealers in New York backing her. And, though she had not yet achieved renown as an artist, she felt convinced that fame would eventually be hers.
But what of the larger world around her? She was certainly worried for her son and frightened by unfolding world events. During the summer of 1943, the Allies defeated the Germans in Africa, but the Warsaw Ghetto had risen up and its fifty-six thousand inhabitants had been killed by the Nazi SS. Himmler had ordered the liquidation of all Jewish ghettos in occupied Europe. Stalin’s Red Army had beaten back German forces in Russia, but four thousand Polish officers were found in a mass grave, likely victims of Stalin’s death squads several years earlier. Though the war news was beginning to look more optimistic, as the Americans and British began to advance up the Italian peninsula, the military situation remained perilous.
In one of his rare letters to his mother while he was serving in the military, dated June 20, 1943, Mike Nevelson gave her total access to his bank account, “with the understanding that you will withdraw only that money which is necessary for the payment of your rent and food bills. Financial backing for your exhibitions and artists materials and entertainment will have to come from other sources.”68 He warned her that the agreement would end when the war was over and that he would then take all of his remaining savings and use them for his own education. He referred to the hardships he was enduring—the heat, the noise, the sweating away of his life in the inferno-like engine rooms in the bowels of ships. He contrasted his ongoing misery with her bohemian lifestyle, for which he had great respect and love but, at that moment, not much sympathy. He called the money he had saved since 1941 “blood money” he had earned “at great personal hardship and risk.”
It is not clear whether her son’s occasional letters from the war front sobered his mother or whether the art world’s lukewarm response to her Surrealist work persuaded her to change direction. But her next exhibition at Nierendorf, in November 1943, was an exhibition of her paintings, A Sculptor’s Portraits in Paint, and there was nothing Surrealist about it. Along with two portraits of Diego Rivera, it was comprised of portraits of her friends, relatives, or household helpers.
She had one more exhibit of wood sculpture at the Nierendorf Gallery, Sculpture Montages, in the fall of 1944, which included some abstract constructions. Perhaps in response to the critics’ remarks about the roughly hammered style of the 1943 Circus Show, Nevelson’s carefully constructed pieces now looked more like the work of a lyric abstractionist.69 Finely sanded and smoothed pieces of wood were joined more subtly with dowels and recessed nails. Some had evocative titles such as Before There Was a World, Ancient City, Man and His Creation, and Whale and Bird. Other titles were the artist’s time-tested favorites: Cat, Duck, Circus, and Moons.
Most of the reviewers were not kind. “The montages, which are compositions made up of odd bits—driftwood, bric-a-brac, things like that—have a kind of conglomerate look and are far from representing Miss Nevelson’s best work,” wrote Robert M. Coates for The New Yorker.70 Devree at The New York Times was ambivalent: “Just when one thinks she is merely indulging in amusing foolery one comes upon a combination of these wooden planes, balls, parts of chair legs and decoy ducks which really seems to mean something, as in the case of ‘Three-Four Time,’ with its suggestion of parts of musical instruments, and ‘Ancient City,’ with its reminiscence of the Near East. For the most part, however, I suspect that Miss Nevelson’s errant humor is indulged in these three-dimensional contraptions.”71
The reviewer from Cue observed that these works were “3-dimensional abstractions of bold conception, but I fear, only transitory worth.”72 Only from Emily Genauer did the artist receive fulsome praise. Like Devree, Genauer admired Three Four Time: The “machine carved motifs … here, used wrong side up … marvelously suggest, in their repetitions, the string section of the orchestra.”73 It was only the second time Nevelson had taken found objects and—by upending some, slightly reshaping others, and making unexpected combinations—claimed them as her own. Some of the works suggest—yet again—she was onto something new. However, Klee’s influence was always lurking in the background. How could it not be—since on the bottom of every exhibition notice Nierendorf put the words: “Permanent Exhibition of Paul Klee’s Work.”
In Three Four Time Nevelson’s compositional refinement consisted of sanding the machine-carved, antique-looking chair leg parts and then carefully placing the other abstract wood elements in precarious but balanced relationship to one another. Three balls vertically suspended above an ovoid shape are set against the four leg parts to mark the rhythm of the piece.
Three Four Time, 1944. Wood, approximately 24 × 36 × 18 in. No longer extant. Photograph by John D. Schiff, courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute
Nevelson had learned her lessons about forceful compositions. When she pared down the constructions to three or four elements, as in Time and Space or Three Four Time—the only two works that received a positive response from critics—they became bold and complex, with a vitality and plastic interest she combined with a touch of elegance.74 In many of the works from the 1944 exhibit, we see echoes of Giacometti’s platform sculptures from the 1930s, especially Palace at 4 A.M., which had been on view at MoMA since 1932.
The influence of Surrealism first appeared in the development of her wood sculpture in the early 1940s. Its influence reappeared forcefully when she returned to work in wood over a decade later and continued right up to the end of her life. Though she always emphasized the primacy of Cubism in her work, Surrealism was also very important. Cubism gave Nevelson the key to her compositional structure. Surrealism validated for her a spontaneous and playful approach to art making. Working quickly, she learned to trust her unconscious to help her make deft aesthetic decisions. It would be the integrated combination of both artistic isms that eventually led to her signature style.
In 1945, as she began planning for her next show for Nierendorf, Nevelson may have felt that she needed to reestablish her formalist credentials and show her more serious side to the art world. In a set of works in bronze she again took up themes of animals but this time with greater restraint resulting in greater sophistication.75 As she said in 1976: “I wasn’t always going forward. I drew back after having experimented a bit. I took a walk on Fifth Avenue, and then I came back and took a walk on Broadway. I didn’t leave anything, I just did a little experimenting until I really hit the black.”76
In the midst of preparation for this show, she moved into a house on East Thirtieth Street near Second Avenue. Her family had bought it for her to provide her with stable living and working quarters after fifteen years of unsettled residence in at least six different places. Before Minna Berliawsky had become critically ill in 1942, she had traveled to New York to visit her daughter. She was appalled by Nevelson’s living conditions in a cold, dark walk-up. She went back to Rockland and told her son to go to New York and buy his sister a house.
As Nate told the story: “I had an old-fashioned Jewish mother, who was shocked and depressed when she visited Louise’s fifth-floor loft, which had no bath or toilet facilities and home-made furniture.”77 It took another few years before Nate was feeling sufficiently prosperous, but in 1945 he kept the promise he had made to his mother. In the meantime, while the careers of her friends and younger colleagues were churning, Nevelson had reached the point where she wanted more security—at least in her living circumstances.
Ralph Rosenborg actually found the house, a run-down, four-story, seventy-year-old brownstone down the street from Ralph’s studio on Thirtieth Street and Lexington Avenue. They never lived together, but she liked having him nearby. Anita and Nate both contributed the money for the purchase and made sure the title was in Anita’s name, rather than Louise’s since they knew their sister’s inclination to turn any asset into either art supplies or fancy clothes.78 Nierendorf loaned Nevelson one thousand dollars, and friends and other members of the family also contributed to the down payment and renovation costs as well as ongoing expenses like the mortgage and utility bills. Ralph did most of the reconstruction that made the house livable. “Ralph … could do anything,” Nevelson said. “If a ceiling had to be moved two inches or a wall extended or some structural change had to be made he would do it in minute. I had walls taken out and expanded the place.”79
Like many brownstones in the area, the house was narrow and deep, with a full basement and a large backyard. It also had touches of elegance—seven marble fireplaces, a grand double parlor with parquet floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and beautiful molding on all the lower floors. The plan, determined by her brother and sister, was that the top two floors would provide rental income on which Nevelson could live. The third floor was her living space, shared with whomever was helping her at the time. The formerly elegant salon-parlor was turned into a space for displaying her art, her collection of paintings by Louis Eilshemius, an idiosyncratic American artist, along with her assortment of American Indian artifacts and other works of “primitive” art. The large room would eventually be the scene of her busy involvement in the group activities of the art world during the 1950s. The garden, basement, and first floor were for working and living.
Nevelson had wanted a house in New York as long as she could remember. She told a close friend that she had been disappointed because her husband would not buy one for her and that she wouldn’t have divorced him if he had done so. “You can leave a man, but you can’t leave a house—because every little corner is part of you.”80
While owning the house solved practical problems it also spoke to a deeper need, which only became apparent when Nevelson was threatened with its loss in the late 1950s. She especially needed a home in 1945, as the security provided by bricks and mortar would have seemed substantial while she watched the career advancement she so desired, and about which had felt so certain only a year earlier, seem to slip away.
The helper who soon moved into the second-floor apartment was “Joey, a wonderful old Italian man,” who was crippled, needed a home, and helped her for years.81 He shopped, cooked, and did everything that needed to be done—“washing her dishes and looking after her like a mother”—so she could work without interruption. While Joey was always at Nevelson’s disposal, she treated him as an equal, conversing with him, educating him, even trying to get him to be “creative.” Nevelson comically demonstrated her attitude toward domestic activities, including cooking and gardening, when she “stuck all her kitchen utensils in the ground like tulips or flowers, eggbeaters, pancake turners, and the like and laid them out in rows,” to create a backyard garden.82
Jeremiah Russell. Thirtieth Street House, Parlor Floor, ca. 1956 – 57. Photograph courtesy of Martha Jackson Gallery
Nevelson had an account at the corner restaurant and bar, from which she phoned in orders for whatever she needed, usually in quantity. That way she never had to go shopping, which she considered a waste of her energy.83
Once safely housed, she maintained a simple life. She had two gray sweatshirts and pants that she wore all the time; Joey would wash one while she wore the other. She slept in them for a few hours every night, then showered and went out to get the paper, which she would read, sitting on the front stoop, watching the sunrise over the East River. It had always been her custom to read the paper every day (like her father). Though she was not a “reader” of books, she was keenly aware of what was going on in the world—especially the art world.
Nevelson’s maturation as a sculptor occurred within the context of several stylistic currents. Like other American artists of her generation, she had first to absorb the lessons of the contemporary modern masters before she could build a world that would be entirely her own. What she had found in Surrealism’s mirror was already at work in her earliest aesthetic efforts and lifestyle—her ramshackle way of putting together incongruous fabrics and articles of clothing, her resistance to planning ahead, and her enthusiasm for spontaneous gestures. Her admiration for the powerful simplicity of Mondrian and Brancusi is evident, but her personal sense of humor and daring—which she had been practicing in her clothing for three decades—showed hints of the powerful work she would do only a dozen years later when she returned to her natural medium—found wood. She paid no attention to Surrealism’s spiritual message. She found what she wanted to find in Joe Milone’s shoeboxes. What she saw as his “purity” was actually pure Louise. Ditto his desire to find beauty.
Despite her jump into Surrealism’s antics, Nevelson was not ready to synthesize its message—or what was useful to her in its many messages—with her powerful formalist inclinations. She was still early in her trajectory of finding herself stylistically, and she had to build a foundation before she could take the next step. She might have recognized that both Picasso and Klee—her two major sources of inspiration at that point—had been much further along in their careers and artistic paths when they were in their forties, and she may have gotten discouraged, but she never dreamed of giving up. As she told her sister Anita: “It will take ten years at least. I’ll be over fifty.”84
Whenever asked about the early to mid-1940s, Nevelson tended to blur over the disappointments she experienced. She recalled the “fun parties” at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery and recalled that Guggenheim was thinking of renting a floor or two of her Thirtieth Street house. She retroactively shortened the three years she lived on East Tenth Street—where Abstract Expressionism had been burgeoning nearby—to a few months. She also condensed the time between her mother’s death in March 1943 and the purchase of the Thirtieth Street house in March 1945 to a few months. This is understandable, since it was her mother’s wish that Nate and Anita—or anyone else in the family who was solvent—buy her a home. More likely, she eliminated that time period from her memory, squashing all those years into a few months, because of the pain of humiliation and loss. Other artists, not she, were being celebrated, and her mother was dead.
She had just done some of her most original work ever, and she knew it. When she swerved away from the rawness of found wood toward the more refined style of work in wood with sculpture montages at Nierendorf’s gallery, she knew she was on to something. But she was not yet in the winners’ circle. Her boyfriend was thirteen years younger than she and not much more successful. And though she did not know that at the time, her son—if and when he made it home from the war—was not planning to stay in New York City. There was more loss and more pain to come.
