SEVEN

DEATH AND RESTORATION

1946 – 1953

“I’d rather work twenty-four hours a day in my studio … than do anything I know. Because this is living. It’s like pure water…. The essence of living is in doing, and in doing, I have made my world, and it’s a much better world than I ever saw outside.”

—Louise Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks, 1976, p.70.

On April 15, 1946, “Bronzes by Nevelson” opened at the Nierendorf Gallery. It would be her last exhibition there. She exhibited plaster figures, bronze sculptures, and her usual line drawings, which go practically unmentioned in reviews. Disappointed with the tepid reaction to her exhibitions of wood sculptures in 1943 and 1944, Nevelson had decided to change the medium. She prepared the clay sculptures, scratched them with wood grain and then, using money sent by her son, had them cast in bronze.¹ They were received with little enthusiasm. “Her chunky cubic animals of striated bronze have a hypnotic, primitive quality. Beady little eyes follow the spectator about the gallery, but Nevelson’s beasts are not dangerous. They squat on their stands, bide their time, and stare.”²

In one sense, these sculptures represented a step backwards—uncontroversial subjects presented with wit—Animal Playing Ball, War-Horse, Two-Faced Cat, The Golden Calf, and her perennial Ducks. The show also included one of her polychrome plaster figures, a type of work she had done a decade earlier. But by edging her blocky cubistic style toward greater abstraction, she was also moving forward. A reviewer noted: “More experimental, and probably more important are Nevelson’s plaster figure pieces. Often consisting of two separate pieces, the space is treated as cubically as are the long curved arms and legs.”³ In any event, the show proved to be no more successful than her previous exhibit. Nothing sold.

In May 1946, two days after “Bronzes by Nevelson” closed, Karl Nierendorf left for what was intended to be a short trip to Europe.⁴ Though he had become an American citizen, he had been asked by the American military to help restore works of art to their original owners. He and Nevelson never met again.

Nierendorf had been gone nearly seven months and his absence weighed on Nevelson. On November 25, 1946, she finally received a letter from him. Nierendorf apologized for his silence, explaining that he had been in bad health—partly because he was traveling in the ruins of Germany—and had written nobody. He expressed his wish to return to New York but observed that there were many people in tragic circumstances who needed to get to New York before him. The main reason for his gloomy letter was to request that Nevelson return the one thousand dollars he had loaned her when she bought her Thirtieth Street home. In his usual tactful style he asked, “How is your life and your work?” And added, “You surely have developed new ideas and forms to surprise the art world.”⁵ Signing off with loving words, he made one last plea for her to pay her debt. She did.

Nierendorf had given Nevelson the money on short notice when she needed it. His generous and instantaneous response had surprised her. When he handed her the check, he told her she would succeed as an artist. She was shocked and said, “ ‘Mr. Nierendorf, what makes you say that?’ ‘Well … I know Picasso and Matisse. I know all the great artists, and I know how they move.’ ”⁶

While this conversation may be apocryphal, Nevelson internalized his support for the rest of her life. She recalled the German dealer as the mainstay in her mind during a difficult time in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The memory of his strong backing during the early 1940s shored up her self-esteem throughout the long years when she was unable to make a name for herself or sell her work.

It was another ten months before Nierendorf returned to New York, laden with paintings and drawings by Paul Klee, which he had obtained in Switzerland. Though everyone knew he had a heart condition, it was an unexpected shock for her to learn that Nierendorf died of a heart attack on October 29, 1947, the night before they were to meet for the first time in eighteen months. He had been back almost a month before their scheduled appointment. With his death, her hopes for success crashed.

Though Nevelson had sometimes been flippant about Nierendorf and his backing when they worked together, once he was gone, she fell apart—the proverbial third strike after the deaths of her mother in 1943 and her father in 1946. It was as though he had provided the internal props holding her up for six crucial years. She would not find such support again for almost a decade.

Nierendorf was not the love of her life, and at best only an occasional sexual partner during their six-year relationship. But when he died she surrendered to despair, taking to her bed for three or four days at a time, sleeping and barely moving.

Along with her son, Mike, her brother, Nate, had been keeping Louise afloat financially for years. She told him how much Nierendorf’s financial backing had meant to her career and on that basis persuaded Nate to maintain his monthly allowance to her as a legitimate investment. Was not one of the leading New York dealers protecting his interest by giving her shows almost every year? Even after he bought her the house on Thirtieth Street, Nate continued to send her $225 per month—and later said he would have sent her more if she hadn’t gotten drunk so often.⁷ Nate believed that “she was doing very well with Nierendorf alive, that he gave her encouragement and inspiration. When he died, she lost that and everything collapsed. She stayed drunk and despondent and barely able to work for a couple of years.”⁸

When Nevelson’s mother died in March 1943, she did not go to the funeral. She was on the crest of her Surrealist high and was busy preparing for two exhibitions. When her father died almost four years later, in October 1946, she attended neither his funeral nor his burial in the cemetery in Rockland, which he had built for his family. While her longstanding ambivalence toward her father made mourning all but impossible, his death caused the impact of the loss of her mother to resonate, like a chiming bell whose deeper, darker tones become nearly deafening.⁹ Even the birth of her first granddaughter, Neith, in July 1946 did not attenuate her sadness, though she had rushed to the hospital to see her grandchild even before the baby’s mother had seen her.¹⁰

The mourning Louise Nevelson did not complete at the time of her father’s death would haunt her for at least a decade. It would only begin to find artistic expression in 1953 with etchings memorializing both parents as royal figures and, more fully in 1958, when the skeletal remains of King II appeared in a tall coffin-shaped box leaning against the wall of her breakthrough exhibition, Moon Garden + One.

Nevelson’s drinking had increased during the war and was encouraged by her constant companionship with Ralph Rosenborg. Like Ralph and her father, Louise had begun to use alcohol as a way of staving off negative feelings. Friends of the couple recall that he was most often “in his usual state of collapse and inebriation off in a corner somewhere.”¹¹ Nevelson “drank to get drunk,” to become insensible.¹² Unlike Ralph, she would emerge from her hangovers the next day feeling cleansed and relieved. “Ralph was a good person, sensitive,” Nate recalled. “He often came to Rockland with Louise. But he was an alcoholic and wasn’t strong enough to break his habit.”¹³

Ralph was special, one of the few men who made a mark on Louise Nevelson. “No one on earth has the touch of Ralph Rosenborg,” she recalled.¹⁴ No other lover was in tune with her in so many aspects of her life and work. Ralph had been there to catch her when she fell from her perch on the Surrealist tree. During their six years together, Ralph accompanied Nevelson everywhere, but, as her brother observed, “She was too strong for a boyfriend, too proud a woman. She’d take them and leave them. Neither boyfriends nor money meant anything to her. While she may have wanted certain things from either, she could also do without.”¹⁵ Mike Nevelson, perhaps seeing Ralph as a competitor for his mother’s attention, noted, decades later: “He was like a surrogate son for her…. She can’t stand someone who can do something better than she. She has trouble relating to men…. She doesn’t know how to treat men, only malleable types.”¹⁶ Having a younger, “malleable”—even though irascible and often drunk—man in her bed and studio had always been balanced by the knowledge that she had an older, fatherly figure looking out for her. But after the death of her father and Nierendorf, Nevelson did no work. Throughout the winter she was stalled, and when spring came in 1948 she had an operation, a partial hysterectomy due to fibroid tumors. Following a two-week hospitalization she came back to her house but was too weak and depressed to start working again. Nevelson eventually felt weighed down by Ralph’s neediness and reliance on her for financial help.

Months passed after her surgery with little change, and she no longer had Ralph’s company, having unloaded him onto her sister Anita during a visit to Maine earlier that year. She had done this before with other boyfriends and usually regretted it. But Anita didn’t complain because she had fond hopes of becoming the sole support of a “great artist.” In the summer of 1948, however, even Anita had lost patience with Ralph, who had “cost her a fortune” and wasn’t painting much.¹⁷

Despite her sadness and confusion during this time, Nevelson could still impress art-world friends with her vitality and forcefulness. Her electric presence and rugged constitution kept her looking ageless and attractive despite the damage she was doing to her body with alcohol. Fellow sculptor Sidney Geist remembered: “She was outgoing, very straightforward, holding nothing back and with a very physical laugh and easy way of talking. When I first met her in the nightclub of her brother’s hotel, she was in the pink of health and looked like one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”¹⁸ Even women were impressed. Thirty years later Anna Walinska, a fellow artist and close friend during the 1950s, recalled: “I first saw Louise in the late 1940s at some meetings of the Artists Union. I was struck by her. She was always quite a beautiful woman, her hair hanging down to her shoulders, wearing big Greta Garbo hats. She had a beautiful presence. She still does.”¹⁹

In July 1948, Anita, who was solvent as usual, offered to finance a three-month trip to Europe (her first) with Louise. The two sisters took off immediately and had “a wonderful time,” going from museums to churches and back to museums, with Louise constantly instructing her sister about the art-historical details of every monument they visited. “We walked and walked, she wore me out.”²⁰ First London, then Paris, where Anita recalled Louise starting a conversation with Alberto Giacometti at a café.

Then the sisters went by train to Italy, where they visited Venice, Florence, and Rome. Finally they went by boat to Naples and Sicily. Louise continued to gather visual impressions—never sketching, just looking at everything and storing it away in her memory. On the boat, Anita remembers, “Louise had the captain, and I had the first mate. Then Louise wanted to get back. If she isn’t sculpting or painting she feels she’s losing ground.”²¹ Anita returned to Rockland to work with Nate at the hotel. And Louise returned to New York. Several months of travel had worked their magic, and she felt restored and eager to carry on with her life as an artist.²²

Friends suggested that the Sculpture Center (formerly known as the Clay Club) would be an ideal place for her to work, since it provided both technical help and manual labor—something she needed after her recovery from surgery, and especially since Ralph was no longer around to assist her. A sculptor friend had said: “You don’t feel so good. Come over, and we’ll lift your clay for you and things.”²³ Spending time there also helped Nevelson get back into the art-world atmosphere. “I had a woman’s operation, and I didn’t know whether I had cancer or not. I didn’t want to be alone in my studio.”²⁴

Located on West Eighth Street, in the center of Greenwich Village, the Sculpture Center was more than a place for sculptors to work—it also provided the opportunity to show their work. For members, there was no jury, only a guaranteed exhibition space. In the hard times, when few artists and almost no sculptors could support themselves, these perks had tremendous appeal.²⁵

When Nevelson began to work at the Sculpture Center in the fall of 1948, it was known for its open studio, methodological discipline, and the technical and practical help it provided. It served older sculptors who wanted to learn new techniques as well as young artists fresh out of art school. From its beginnings, clay and carving were the main focus, and José de Creeft was the master carver in residence. In addition, one of the directors, Sahl Swarz, had started a metal-working workshop, where he introduced Theodore Rozjac to welding.

Always willing to try something new, Nevelson made a few stone sculptures in the Center’s garden, “[I did] the stone pieces, because I could stay in that back yard,” she explained, “and, because you nurse a stone for two or three months, I didn’t have to think. You see I was trying not to think too much. I wanted to recuperate.”²⁶ She carved the popular animal subjects she had produced for a decade. Each is a pared-down abstracted shape designed to capture the essence of the creature but never quite rising above her Inuit sources of inspiration. Bird, in Tennessee marble, was exhibited in 1951 after the Sculpture Center moved to East Sixty-Ninth Street. The piece with its simple, subtle silhouettes and flat surfaces shows the strong influence of José de Creeft, her old acquaintance John Flannagan, and Isamu Noguchi, whose studio was next door to the Sculpture Center.

Nevelson claimed that she worked on stone only when she was “a little exhausted creatively.” When she felt in full power, she preferred terra-cotta because “it gives flight and does not retard or restrict … the quick response of the clay to each idea; it permits a simplicity of approach.”²⁷

Beginning in late 1948 through 1953, Nevelson used the newly designed kiln at the Sculpture Center to produce several hundred terra-cotta sculptures. She explained, “I have been called prolific—certainly it would have been impossible to have created the same amount of sculpture using stone or wood.”²⁸ She also liked its durability—“More lasting even than bronze, … terra cottas have come down to us little changed from when they emerged from some ancient kiln.” Clay is “immediately responsive to the creative impulse…. You can cut away or add on at will.”²⁹ Clay was a godsend to the intuitively guided artist who considered herself to be a Surrealist who worked with abstract forms.³⁰

The clay was relatively cheap to buy, and Nevelson always seemed to have enough money (provided by her siblings) to have her pieces fired or to persuade someone to do the technical work on spec. The clay she used at the Center was very porous, with large amounts of grog (pulverized bits of fired clay), which allowed her to make both solid and hollow pieces. Initially she left the works unpainted³¹ but later painted them black.³²

Dido Smith, Nevelson’s friend and fellow sculptor, described her working method in an article (1954) for Ceramic Age: Nevelson started with a rectangular loaf of unwedged clay, building up a mass by adding bits of clay or shaping it by pounding with a wooden block. She then carved it, cutting with a curved steel plaster tool, or a brass-modeling tool. She used a serrated kitchen knife for scratching the surface, a sharp-edged kitchen knife for cutting and incising designs once the clay had hardened and, finally, a spoon for hollowing out forms.

She experiments with different, and unconventional, patinas—oil paints or stains, wax, even a white crayon—to emphasize the incised lines she invariably draws on the forms. She believes there should be no limitation in either working or finishing the material…. She doesn’t make small models or drawings as a guide, but has quite a definite idea of what she is going to make—a mental image…. [A] subtle interplay … exists between the material and the artist, … [who] seeks to let the character of the clay guide and work with her. Through her training she has become perceptive enough that when she sees a surprise, she grasps and crystallizes it.³³

Nevelson’s terra-cotta works from 1948–54, including Maternity, Cow Form, Mother and Child, and Mountain Woman, pick up almost precisely where she had left off in 1942, before her comedic surrealistic work at the Norlyst Gallery in 1943 and her abstract wood sculptures in 1944 at Nierendorf. She was returning to the limited range of themes—animals and figures—and the cubistic pre-Columbian style—with a large dash of Paul Klee—that she had exhibited in 1941 and 1942. She moved forward with the terra-cottas by playing line against mass but abandoning movement and work that involved multiple pieces. Her recent trip with Anita had reconnected her to the European artistic tradition. It had also reawakened her confidence in her own talent and taste and sharpened her eye.

When she made animal forms, her taste for elegance was in ascendance; when the work was entitled “ancient” or “royal,” it was most likely to look primitivistic. Consider the superbly refined work Cow Form I.

Cow Form, 1950. Terra Cotta, 12 in. Photograph by Jeremiah Russell, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Nevelson and the photographer sensed precisely how to show off the startling shift of light and dark in the cow’s horns and head, where the frontal bone of the head is perpendicularly joined with the curving horns. The lightness and vitality of the animal’s turning head is masterfully played off against the bulky bovine body whose shape seems simple but is made up of subtle merging contours. Nevelson understood the animal form—and got the postures just right. Not for nothing had she studied the works of Inuit soapstone sculptors since the 1930s.³⁴ The terra-cottas are more formally sophisticated and evocative than the work of her contemporaries and the cast-stone and plaster work she had shown at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1942.

The other types of terra-cotta from these transitional years are the primitivistic “ancient” pieces that could come straight out of late Klee, in both form and content. Nevelson’s combinations are clever, sometimes witty and often eloquent—as in Mother and Child, where the forlorn child looks out at the world through empty dark-holed eyes, while the mother seems partially hidden and glum but disengaged, her two eyes varying in shape and form. That the mother’s curving arm is one with, and becomes, the child’s head is both psychologically revealing and formally persuasive. The child is a phallic representation of his rectangular, clunky mother, and he faces outwards, thus seeming so much more alone. She both sees and doesn’t see her very own extension into the world.

Mother and Child, 1948. Terra-cotta, 10 ½ × 12 ½ × 10 ½ in. Walker Art Center. Photograph by Jeremiah Russell, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

About six years before Nevelson made this sculpture she mused about her relationship with her son in a notebook written in April and May 1942, during one of Mike’s rare visits to New York while he was in the Merchant Marine. Clearly struggling with her ambivalence about motherhood, she wrote: “Feeling for him brought out the universal anguish of loneliness, of no future. Fear, loneliness arrests … universal motherhood gilt [sic] complex.” And later: “We were too concentrated on each other, overlapped, too close, not enough outside interests … Mike trying to find self and always found mother. Must find self.”³⁵ Little wonder that many of Nevelson’s terra-cottas contained so much expression.

While the terra-cottas from this period range back and forth between a deliberately clunky primitivism and an exquisitely sensitive elegance—very much like the combination of crude and well crafted that would later become her signature in wood sculpture—few of them are outstanding, and none is fully original. Nevelson is still a long way from knowing how to harness the full power of that synthesis.

Sahl Swarz, one of the directors of the Sculpture Center, recalled that Nevelson’s clay sculptures made no impact and weren’t taken very seriously by her fellow artists.³⁶ She was perceived as enormously ambitious but in no way slated for success. When her work in wood appeared five years later at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery, her old friends at the Sculpture Center were amazed.

It is difficult to exactly date the works done between 1948 and 1953. Nevelson had favorites that would appear in exhibitions with different names and different dates, repainted or cast in new materials. For example, in 1953, for her first group exhibition at Grand Central Moderns, the new but already prestigious gallery directed by Colette Roberts, River Woman and Mountain Woman were both shown in terra-cotta, though they were eventually cast in aluminum.

What is evident about the majority of these terra-cottas is the artist’s ingenuity and energetic experimentation. The same characteristics that often won Nevelson good reviews for the plaster and bronze sculpture in the 1940s can be seen in many of the terra-cottas of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Their clever formal passages—tried once and never again exactly the same way—are frequently spiced with sardonic humor. For example, Maternity Figure Within a Figure (ca. 1950) combines the elegant and archaic. The smooth silhouettes of the mother’s large torso reduce her to a single function as the large indented head of a child takes up most of the room in her body. His head with its contented look faces sideways while hers—a bit smaller in size and more sorrowful, faces away from him.

Nevelson eventually eliminated most of these terra-cottas from her official oeuvre, but in producing so many pieces, she learned how to play with three-dimensional forms in many variations. A few years later, some of the same formal elements—the play of light and dark, curved and straight, large and small, elegant and crude—would appear in her work with found wood.

In the early 1950s Nevelson had been on the art scene for over two decades. During the WPA years, and then with Nierendorf’s support, she had played a lone hand. And it had worked—but only up to a point. Her last participation in the art world while she was still represented by Nierendorf was the Whitney Annual in March 1947 to which she contributed a work in plaster, Earth Woman, in the chunky cubistic style of the early 1940s. With Nierendorf’s death, her exhibition history nearly came to a halt. Later that year her only other contribution was to an art exhibition benefiting the scholarship fund of the Downtown Community School. Beyond that, the sole public mention of the artist was by a gossip columnist, her friend and distant relative, Lee Leary, who noted her presence at the racetrack with prominent socialites.³⁷

After she began to work at the Sculpture Center, Nevelson had decided that artists with big ambitions could no longer afford the luxury of a carefully winnowed number of select pieces. She made a conscious decision that would change her future work and future reputation: If she worked quickly and steadily, as she had with her drawings in the 1930s, some works would turn out very well and some would simply be steps along the way. But in the end she would have an enormous amount of art to exhibit, to sell, to study, and to make her name.

Other artists who knew her at this time were respectful and even astounded at her productivity. “She got that house full of these clay sculptures,” painter Jan Gelb recalled, “mostly short chunky heads. I wasn’t impressed by them—but by the number of them she was producing. Just dozens and dozens and dozens. She would fill a room with them, then put them aside and start another room—à la Picasso. I respect a worker, and I knew she would get to a place where her work would be her own work.”³⁸

Nevelson filled every available storage space as though replacing the missing people in her life and her multiple disappointments with masses of three-dimensional objects. Nevelson’s close friend and fellow artist, Anna Walinska, recalled: “There was a time Louise said simply and frankly, ‘I’ll flood the market with my work until they know I’m here.’ And she did just that.”³⁹ In 1950 she was in one group show. In 1951 she was in seven; ten in 1952; seventeen in 1953; and in 1954 at least nineteen (she had two one-person exhibitions and was part of seventeen others). “No matter how many pieces she was asked to provide, she always had enough. So she was always well represented. The cumulative effect built her reputation.”⁴⁰ Sidney Geist, a sculptor who wrote reviews of group exhibitions in 1953, always praised her as best in show. “She was a little whirlwind of her own,” he recalled, “trying to make it here and there.”^{41 42}

The prolific outpouring of productive sculpting also confirmed the artist’s faith in action and movement. “I’m a woman of great action,” she said in the late 1970s. “When I’m active I feel alive.”⁴³ And: “I just do my work…. I like to work. I always did. I think there is such a thing as energy—creation overflowing. In my studio I’m as happy as a cow in her stall. My studio is the only place where everything is all right.”⁴⁴ She had grasped this significant piece of self-knowledge in the early thirties when she produced “hundreds” of drawings.

And so began her ascendance through accumulation. Two of the few exhibitions in which her work appeared at the end of the 1940s were the annual art auction of the ACA gallery in February 1948 and the annual Sculpture Center exhibition in 1949. All she had to do to be included in these two shows was to be a member of both groups. By the beginning of 1950 she had exhibited in numerous shows and gotten good reviews. But she had sold almost no work. The male artists who had once been her peers were now gaining major success, and she was not.

In June 1951, Nevelson’s son sent his mother an intriguing letter. Empathizing with her disappointment and dissatisfaction about her place in the art world, he wrote that he “was disappointed that Devree in The New York Times did not mention your sculpture in the new gallery last Sunday. I know that your work is sound and exciting. Why do you think the critics make such a purposeful effort to give you the silent treatment?”⁴⁵

Two years later Mike wrote: “I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t credit you as chairman of the Sculptor’s Guild show, but I’m beginning to agree with you that the critics and the galleries have nothing to do with ART.”⁴⁶ A few weeks later Mike wrote again to his mother—a prophetic letter that surely reflected the entire family’s hopes and expectations: “I keep seeing your name mentioned in every art magazine. Wonderful! I feel sure that you are arriving slow and steady and in a few years will be universally hailed as the ‘Grande Dame’ of American sculpture…. I’m sure that suddenly your work will become the rage and collectors will fight for your things. I predict that in the year 1959, you will sell more than $30,000 worth of sculpture.”⁴⁷ Despite his grand and grandiose dreams—and his own straitened circumstances—Mike was still sending money to his mother in June 1953.

In May 1950, Nevelson and her sister Anita visited Mexico—another trip financed by Anita. After meeting in Mexico City with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the two sisters traveled to the principal Mayan sites in the Yucatán—Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. On their return to Mexico City they saw the ruins of Mitla and Monte Albán, near Oaxaca.

A few months after her return from Mexico, Nevelson went to the Museum of Natural History with the elderly Max Weber, a father figure in her art-world family, someone who was one of her direct links to Picasso and Matisse. Weber had been on the jury that had awarded her a prize fifteen years earlier and had remained a staunch friend and supporter. Together they visited the new Hall of Mexican and Central American Archeology, where the museum’s fifty-year-old collection of art and artifacts had recently been refurbished.

Included in this collection were two thirty-foot replicas of Mayan stelae from from Quiriguá,⁴⁸ a small ceremonial center in Guatemala, near Copán. Nevelson had found the museum’s monumental Mayan pieces overwhelming and decided she must immediately visit Guatemala to see the originals. Such sudden, apparently spontaneous decisions are usually triggered by a powerful emotional experience, which may or may not be conscious.

Standing beneath the two thirty-foot Mayan stelae from Quiriguá in the museum’s confined space, Nevelson could have felt small and even overwhelmed. Did looking up at the monumental sculpture evoke memories from childhood of looking up at her tall and stately parents, as they paraded down the tree-lined road on their way to Rockland’s main street? Memories which were so compelling that she had to make another trip to Central America right away?⁴⁹

Shortly after their visit to the museum, Weber wrote to her:

It was grand, refreshing and reassuring to see the great Mexican Primitives at the Museum of Natural History. I wish I too could be a primitive. But … Primitivism can be only once…. It is indeed compensation enough to be privileged to understand their art—the ecstasy, exaltation, austerity they embodied in their sculpture…. It would be wonderful if we could recapture or discover their original spiritual conception and a key to their plastic values and processes. Their art is as fresh and as pure as the oozing water of a deeply imbedded spring or well.

All we can do is to aspire to do our own best in the environment and civilization in which we were destined to live.⁵⁰

The note from Weber, the man who had written eloquently in 1910 about the fourth dimension, added even more impetus to Nevelson’s plans to make the trip to the barely accessible site of Quiriguá.⁵¹ She had no trouble persuading her sister Anita to come along.

Turning fifty may have heightened the tension she was feeling in 1950. Watching her friends and colleagues make it in the art world brought her competitive juices to a boil. When Nevelson went off to Mexico with her sister “to see art,” when she recognized herself in the spiritual sculptors and architects of Mexico, when she reconstructed in her imagination the mood and aims of the ancient architects, she identified her own aspiration: to create a larger spiritual experience for herself and for viewers of her work.

The two sisters set off on their second Central American adventure in the winter of 1950–51. Arriving in Puerto Barrios on a freighter, they discovered that there were not enough tourists to warrant the usual train trip to the ruins a few miles away. Nevelson, insistent that Quiriguá was the only reason for their trip to Guatemala, persuaded the officials to arrange for a private train to carry the two women into the jungle. Having conceded so much to the two American tourists, the United Fruit Company, which owned the land on which the Mayan ruins were standing, also provided the women with a fully stocked house and servants for as long as they wanted to remain at the magnificent site. Anita recalled: “We lived like queens, we had a pool, maids, all for nothing.”⁵²

Being treated like royalty touched a chord in the middle-aged artist, just as standing beneath the towering Mayan sculptures in the Natural History Museum had catapulted her into the jungle darkness. The full artistic effects of the feelings and memories stirred during this particular trip to Guatemala would only become clear two years later in the series of etchings that Nevelson produced in a mad dash—thirty etching plates in thirty days.

The first effect of the two trips to Central America was the shift in her thinking about the concept of “primitive,” which had often been applied to her work and which she had up to then seen as a mixture of ancient, raw, unpolished, and unsophisticated. Her spontaneous response to Joe Milone’s shoebox in 1942 was an earlier instance of her admiration for purity and the “primitive.” What now had made her realize that the Native Americans of North and Central America should not be seen as outcasts but, rather, as heirs to an ancient high civilization?

“I think [the pyramids in Mexico] are so superior to the Egyptians’,” she later said. “The sculpture, the power, and the organization was overwhelming…. In the past they would talk about primitive countries. But when you see their sundials and the way everything was done, truly, we are the primitive country. And we are. Because when you go to any of those sacred places, say to Yucatán, and see the sacred land that they had for their priests, it was roped off…. No one else was permitted to go on this sacred land. A larger spiritual experience would be possible then, in that arrangement. A planned arrangement.”⁵³

And: “In Mexico … the pyramids … have the dimensions of gravity and of weight, … and they are magnificent, palatial buildings with these great carvings…. Anyone who might say, ‘That’s a primitive race,’ really makes me laugh, because they were so highly developed. From what they’ve left for us to see, you recognize the high development and their high art.”⁵⁴

As a result of her trips to Mexico and Guatemala, visiting with Rivera and Kahlo, and seeing the stunning pre-Columbian archeological sites, Nevelson gained a new way of experiencing herself, her talent, and her personal history. Since neither of her parents had hewn to the formal aspects of their religious background, Louise had been largely cut off from the ceremony and ritual of Judaism as well as from any strong connection with an ancient heritage. This was one of the key reasons she had been searching among so many diverse spiritual traditions for a bond with a heritage that could give her both spiritual succor and a sense of identity. Visiting Central America connected her past with her present and offered her a way to move forward into the future. While her artwork had often suggested her admiration for pre-Columbian art, she had not yet forged a conscious personal connection between her past hunger for a personal heritage and the discovery that an answer had been inside her all along. Going to the Yucatán jungle altered her awareness.

In the jungle darkness of Central America she discovered what would be her way to achieve grandeur. Railing against the notion that civilizations like those she found in Central America were primitive, she realized that by reversing the conventional view of high and low she could stand at the apex of civilization and be celebrated. As Nevelson explained to Colette Roberts, the woman who became her next dealer: “[Yucatán] was a world of forms that at once I felt was mine, a world where East and West met, a world of Geometry and Magic.”⁵⁵ The phrase “at once” refers to Nevelson’s characteristic way of learning: sudden, intuitive, and imperative. “That art can stand up to any art on earth…. I identify with Mexican art. The understructure there, and the understructure of my being are related. The order and the power there are supreme.”⁵⁶ This was one of Nevelson’s life-changing discoveries. High and low were suddenly and conclusively reversed. Before her trips to Mexico and Guatemala, Nevelson had not found a unique or original way of making sculpture. She was sitting on top of several older traditions—European modernism, which included Cubism and Surrealism, and American primitivism. But she was still beholden to others and not truly original.

The idea that the Mayan priests could seclude themselves in a measured space in order to tap into their spiritual depth fit perfectly with Nevelson’s methods. Her sacred space was her studio. The unexpected grandeur of the Mexican pyramids, the sense of having come home to something both exotic and familiar, neither European nor North American combined with the spirituality of the pre-Columbian cultures, their sacred spaces, and their awesome scale. Through her two trips to Central America, Louise Nevelson had finally found her missing identity and her proud heritage, which represented everything mainstream culture did not.

Also thanks to these travels, she refound her erotic self—in the form of a flaming new love affair with “Johnny,” a handsome longshoreman she met on the cruise ship on which she and Anita returned to the United States. Nevelson had been without a steady man in her life for several years, and subsequently living with Johnny for three years put to rest her fear of aging and sexlessness that followed her surgery. He was from another world. Tough. Just out of prison for having pulled a gun on a policeman who had shot him in the stomach. Intelligent but not educated, he had great respect for her, was always polite and easy to manipulate. For Louise, he was an uncut diamond in proletarian clothes—her kind of Diego, with a big heart and a big body.

Like anyone who lived in her Thirtieth Street house, Johnny took care of many of the tasks that required a workman’s skills—building a fireplace, for example. Perhaps he even helped with some of her artwork when brute strength was called for.⁵⁷ He also accompanied her to some social events. Nevelson had always been able to persuade men to do her bidding. (According to Lillian, Louise “always had a good husky male around.”⁵⁸) When she needed her sculpture cast in plaster, for example, she got her brother-in-law’s younger brother, Morris Mildwoff, to do the job. When she lived on Tenth Street, her son Mike recalled, the janitor of the building—a middle-aged bachelor—showed her how to work with wood dowels. Involved now with Johnny, a younger man (by ten to fifteen years) and far below her in social status, Nevelson felt both emboldened and beleaguered.

Jeremiah Russell. Louise Nevelson with Johnny, Thirtieth Street House, 1954. Photography courtesy of Pace Gallery

Her son badgered her about her health, in particular her gagging cough, which, according to Mike, was so repulsive that “a beautiful woman like you should be ashamed … to be seen and heard in such an unpleasant way…. How can you expect to keep a man around the house when you hang over the sink, spitting and making ugly nauseating noises as if you were strangling, suffocating and puking all at the same time?”⁵⁹ Here—in her twenty-nine-year-old son’s harsh criticism with its dollop of praise—is the mixture of humiliation and grandiosity that so often characterized Nevelson’s sense of herself.

In September 1952, Nevelson began to do some work at Atelier 17, a graphics workshop on Eighth Street.⁶⁰ There she learned the fundamentals of printmaking from Leo Katz, “that wonderful German man,” who shared her spiritual approach to life and art and was considered a Jewish seer—“very metaphysical.”⁶¹ Nevelson’s delight about the role of serendipity, which was part of her experience as a Surrealist, made her eager to work with etchings. She later explained to Roberts: “I found to my great delight that the first thing … you throw a little more acid in the acid bath and put your plate in, and all of a sudden it begins to pick up and before you know it something is happening independent of you which thrilled me because my eye was being introduced to things I hadn’t anticipated…. You can call it chance … but the artist knows what chance is, because you seek what you want and can correct what you don’t want.”⁶²

According to her autobiography Nevelson told one of the instructors:

“Grippi, I can’t stand those tools, and I don’t want to learn that thing. I’m not a dentist.” He said, “You come and I will show you things where you don’t need to use these tools.” … And lightning struck me twice. He gave me two things that were the key to what I needed. One was a can opener, and the other was material, all kinds of material, lace particularly. And the first thing I did, I put it in acid and where I scratched the acid ate into it and gave me what I loved. It corroded. And so I thought, “Oh, this is marvelous, it’s quick and direct.”⁶³

She told the same story to Jan Gelb, a longtime artist friend. Gelb noted: “She didn’t work there for very long, and when she did, she’d fly in, she’d work like hell, and she’d fly out.”⁶⁴

Nevelson recalled that she “made thirty plates in probably three months. And I did the printing all myself. It was rather hard physical labor …. but I did like it and it was fascinating.”⁶⁵ (In fact, she had the help of Ted Haseltine, a young man who would reappear in her life, turning the wheel of the press for her prints.⁶⁶) In any event, she gave a whirlwind performance. Working with novel methods and materials, and being able to produce unique results within an age-old technique soon led to a major change of style and sparked a sense of fresh possibilities for her sculpture as well.

Minna Citron, another fellow artist and friend, recalled Nevelson’s seemingly slapdash working methods:

She arrived from her house with a bag of lovely old embroideries and laces and put a coating on a plate and put it on the etching press—and then just threw these things on top—we were all being taught to be very careful—very academic in our approach. She had her granddaughter Neith in her lap while working on the plates, talking all the time and wearing very low cut dresses. [She would] run the press and come out with something that looked like a hodgepodge. In the end she got a series of quite nice etchings.⁶⁷

The series of etchings, done between fall 1952 and fall 1954 at the Atelier 17, includes seventeen images of majestic or divine figures, including Majesty, Royalty, King and Queen, The West Queen, Flower Queen, Moon Goddess, and Goddess from the Great Beyond. From Nevelson’s handwritten lists of unused titles for her exhibition of these etchings come several more provocative captions: Royal Family, Royalty from the Archeological Family, Her Majesty, The Ancient Queen, and From the Land of Magnificent Ruins.⁶⁸ The preponderance of eleven queenly figures and six paired royal figures heralds her arrival at a significant iconographic theme. It is a common psychological truism that royal figures, especially kings and queens, symbolize parental figures. Such psychological theorizing was commonplace in the 1940s and ’50s and well known to artists. Nevelson had occasionally used the word queen and royal in the titles of some of her terra-cottas but it was not until the series of etchings done in the early 1950s that these became predominant.⁶⁹ As we have seen, Nevelson had often felt the inspirational force of pre-Columbian art, but only with the titles of these etchings did her work specifically reference the pre-Columbian civilizations with which she now openly identified.⁷⁰

The ruins in Quiriguá are situated on the Motagua River, in the midst of thirty acres of rain forest set aside as an archeological zone. The ever-present mist at Quiriguá makes the encroachment of the jungle a constant problem and sets a constant mood.⁷¹ Nevelson’s etchings convey both the mist and jungle closeness. The meandering lines and heavily inked surfaces, which partially obscure the etched images, are like the trailing vegetation and moist air that veil the ancient stone carvings.

The nine stelae that dominate the site were carved in red-brown sandstone. Each stela has a figure of a ruler carved in low relief on the front and one of the major gods in the Mayan pantheon associated with that ruler on the back, with the heads set in deep relief near the top. Some of the towering eighth-century stelae look remarkably like huge carved coffins standing upright, high above the native populations that adored them. The heads, always in high relief, overpower the flatter royal insignia and hieroglyphics that make up the remainder of the carvings. The powerful impression made by the tall rectangular stelae with their mixture of high- and low-relief carving and especially their frontal focus would become visible in Nevelson’s columnar wood sculpture a few years later.

In the guidebook on the ruins that Nevelson and her sister carried with them, the author, archeologist Sylvanus Morley, states that, “The Maya inscriptions … tell no story of kingly conquest, recount no deeds of imperial achievement; they neither praise nor exalt, glorify nor aggrandize.”⁷² This argues strongly for the idea that Nevelson’s depiction of royal figures was a product of how she imagined them, which blended well with the then-popular mythological themes of ancient civilizations ruled by heroic kings and queens. Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore, and Max Ernst were models whose work she knew very well and all of them had portrayed kings and queens. By the 1970s archeologists had become aware that the figures depicted on the front of the stelae were indeed rulers of Quiriguá.⁷³

Anita’s recollection that the two women “lived like queens” at the jungle compound suggests why Nevelson could so easily have imagined herself as queen of this jungle realm. Taller than all the native population and even towering over her sister, she may have identified momentarily with these regal images in stone. Many of Nevelson’s friends thought of her as “regal”: Helena Simkhovitch, for example, to whom she was very close during the 1950s, noted that “Louise was a rare creature, regal.”⁷⁴ Sidney Geist recalled her as “a Queen who ran an establishment—a presiding presence at her house.”⁷⁵ Even her son noted that his mother, like her mother Minna, “thought of herself as an empress but that another side of her was naïve and very insecure.”⁷⁶

Some of the etched figures in her prints show a strong similarity to photographs of Nevelson at the time. In comparing a photograph of Nevelson and her sister in Mexico with the etching West Queen, the overall squarish shape of the head and body of Louise Nevelson in the photograph and the image of the West Queen show resemblances, as do the full cupid’s-bow mouths. Nor is it coincidental that the West Queen is associated with black—Nevelson’s favorite color.⁷⁷ In Mayan lore, west as a direction was associated with death.

Royalty, or Portraits, 1952–54. Etching on paper, 20 × 26 ¾ in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Louise Nevelson

A second interpretation supports the first. Nevelson identified with both her mother and her father in their respective roles of beautiful woman and empire builder. Seeing them as the royal couple allowed her to imagine herself as a queen.⁷⁸ The most iconographically telling print in the group of etchings is Royalty, or Portraits. Louise’s curly-headed father Isaac stands next to his unhappy wife Minna. Who else could this couple represent? In one state, dark tears flow down her face. In another state, her shadowed eyes are somber, sorrowful, and inward-looking, while her husband’s open-eyed glance draws the viewer in.

There are five more royal couples, kings with curly hair and big-breasted women with facial features much like the artist’s own. Another powerful image is the etching Face in the Moon, or Moon Lady, or Moon Goddess. Here the plate, which is dominated by layers of many heavily inked laces, includes a barely visible female face in the upper right-hand corner. The lunar lady so high up in the sky is hiding, just as the moon so often hides behind clouds at night. The most striking, even startling, images in this series of etchings are several artist’s proofs of Moon Goddess I and II, which did not end up in the authorized version.⁷⁹ More than merely aloof, these mysteriously distant and divine females disappear into the inky darkness, which is what Minna Berliawsky seemed to have frequently done as far as her children were concerned. But however distant and frequently unavailable she may have been, Nevelson also adored her mother and placed her high on a pedestal, often describing her as “a woman who should have been in a palace.”⁸⁰

When the women depicted in the etchings are robust and seem emotionally present, they most likely represent Louise. When they are aloof and hard to see or reach, I propose that they are the missing mother of Louise’s childhood, the weeping and often unavailable wife of gregarious Isaac. But given that most daughters are prone to identify with their mothers, I also hypothesize that the females in this often neglected series are symbolic stand-ins for both her mother and herself, just as the royal figures she depicted could represent herself or her parents.

The iconography of the etchings signals a consolidation of Nevelson’s sense of her self, her family, and her future as the long-wished-for star and queen or empress of the art world. The trips to Central America precipitated that consolidation and were the beginning of her recovery after the multiple losses that preceded it.

After completing the Guatemala etchings in the fall of 1954, Nevelson changed from being a loner to being a joiner, not because her personality had been transformed, but because she finally understood that if she were ever to achieve her ultimate goal—becoming as celebrated as her acknowledged artistic hero, Pablo Picasso—she and her work must be seen as often as possible. She showed her work anywhere and everywhere with as many pieces as allowed.⁸¹ Even if no one liked her work, she was convinced that it was more important to have it seen than to wait for just the right offer from just the right gallery. As she explained in her autobiography, Dawns +Dusks: “I showed anywhere I was asked and I don’t even want to mention names of the places I’ve showed…. I remember a critic asked me, ‘How the hell did you dare to show at so and such a place?’ And I said, ‘They asked me.’ It was just as direct as that. My feeling is, show wherever you can. I’ve always said it to everyone.”⁸²

At the same time, she joined every organization that would have her. A close friend and observer recalled: “She belonged to ten to twelve groups at a time, even when it was very difficult for her to pay dues.” She worked willingly and hard for these groups and was often made an officer because of her lack of interest in gaining political clout. As a neutral voice she steered clear of the vituperation that one camp within an organization often heaped upon the opposing camp. Her whirlwind efforts to be recognized extended to a variety of social and professional activities, and she would appear, invited or not, at openings and parties connected to the art world. “She had people at her house all the time…. It might be a party for the Sculptors Guild or a way to have people over to see her work.”⁸³ By hosting parties for artist groups and offering her house as a meeting place to organizations like the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and the Four O’Clock Forum,⁸⁴ she somewhat offset the nearly total exclusionary mode of the male-dominated art world of the 1950s, which banned women from being on panels, giving radio interviews, and more. Despite her appearance of unassailable confidence, she continued to worry throughout this period. Would she be able to sustain herself? Would her family’s support be sufficient? Would her anxieties trigger a nervous breakdown?⁸⁵

For the most part, women artists were sympathetic. Male colleagues generally saw her differently—as an attractive, ambitious woman, who was not so impressive as an artist and whom they were unwilling to include in their club—even to the point of black-balling her. Sculptor Phillip Pavia attributed this to her personality, blind to the long-standing prejudice against women artists. “She was not much with our group. We all knew her. But she wanted to do it on her own, and she did it on her own. She was standoffish. She prides herself that she was always around with us—and in a way, she was—but she had a way of being by herself.”⁸⁶ A typically male statement about Nevelson’s attempt to join the Sculptors Guild offers: “She was trying to get into the Sculptors Guild but without great success. She was not well known at the time. Other sculptors liked her work but not enough to vote her in. She had to fight for a long time.”⁸⁷

Nevelson was often accused by male artists of sleeping her way around the art world as a way of getting ahead, while their promiscuous behavior was considered a credential for success. One disappointed suitor had this to say about her: “She was one of the two most stunning-looking women in the art world and she slept with anyone she was involved with.”⁸⁸

As photographer Pedro Guerrero later reminisced, “In the two hours we spent at the restaurant, she revealed more about herself than many people do in a lifetime. Men often came up to her, she related, and asked ‘Louise, do you remember me?’ To which she would reply, ‘Did I sleep with you?’ If the answer was no, she would say, ‘Then why should I remember you?’ She was serious, funny, and ironic.⁸⁹

Finally by 1955 she had an exclusive gallery connection with Colette Roberts, a network of contacts, a reputation as “a well-known and talented sculptress … a sculptor’s sculptor,”⁹⁰ and notebooks full of press clippings. But she still wasn’t the star she wanted to be, much less the originator of a new style. In 1953 she had begun teaching sculpture at the Great Neck Public School’s Adult Education Program, working with children and their parents in the afternoon and a group of adults in the evening. She had taught once before, in 1935, as the only way to get the WPA stipend she desperately needed. Now she was teaching as a way to meet people in a prosperous suburban area to whom she could sell her work and who could help her make connections to wealthy collectors. In addition, her earnings provided some income and it was her only certain means of making money. By 1960, when she stopped teaching, she had become sufficiently successful to believe she could support herself by her art alone.

The early 1950s were years during which mainstream American culture was being eulogized like never before. Joseph McCarthy was waging his anti-Communist crusade, unleashing a right-wing mania that spread like wildfire, destroying or damaging the lives and careers of many artists and creative people Nevelson admired. The United States was at war with Communist Korea, and Americans lived in fear of nuclear attacks. On November 9, 1952, a review of a book on secret Soviet spies appeared in The New York Times.⁹¹ The book’s author, Guenther Reinhardt, discussed the “typical case of Karl Nierendorf, the late art dealer,” accusing him of having been “a member of the ‘Bolshevik Brain Trust’ in Germany since 1918.” Reinhardt claimed that, while in Germany in 1946 “on a Communist mission,” Nierendorf was responsible for the murder of three U.S. Army investigators. He also maintained that Nierendorf had not died of heart failure when he returned to New York in 1947 but was “actually murdered by Soviet agents.” The Times reviewer, John Lichtblau, dismissed these claims, observing that the author’s favorite targets for slander by innuendo were “refugees from Nazism,” which Nierendorf certainly had been. A month later, the author rejected the reviewer’s accusations but said that he was unable to provide documentation for some of his accusations because of their secret nature.⁹²

Even if Nevelson had missed Lichtblau’s review, a letter from her son would have brought it to her attention. Mike Nevelson writes: “Recently I read an expose in The New York Times to the effect that the government had disclosed that Karl Nierendorf, the late art dealer, was a Soviet agent and payoff man for Russian apparatus in this country—how fantastic!”⁹³

Whether such an accusation was true or not, its mention in the newspaper of record could have suggested to the sometimes naïve artist that her “spiritual godfather” was no saint. Coincidently, her relationship with Colette Roberts, her next dealer and new close friend, began at precisely that moment.⁹⁴

The women had met in 1952 when Nevelson showed work at the Argent Galleries, representing the National Association of Women Artists. Colette Roberts had been the director there from 1947 to 1949. By 1952 Roberts had taken over the leadership of Grand Central Moderns Gallery and invited Nevelson to show in the Guest Sculptor’s Show, which ran for three weeks in January 1953. Nevelson had received a notice of the exhibit with Roberts’s scribbled question, “Dear Louise, Would you be interested?” from Byron Browne, a painter friend of hers who was already on the gallery roster. Two of Nevelson’s sculptures, Mountain Woman and River Woman, were included in that exhibition in January 1953. The reviewer for the Herald Tribune refers to Nevelson’s aluminum-cast sculpture River Woman as “primitivism reminiscent of archaic Aztec forms.”⁹⁵

Letters from Colette Roberts to “Miss Louise Nevelson” later that month make clear that their relationship was only just beginning. But it was enough of a beginning to hearten Nevelson and encourage her to explore a connection with a new art dealer. Nevelson would have been intrigued as well as impressed by the fact that Colette Roberts was related to the Rothschild family in France. Over the next two years the two became very close friends. They shared a taste for fashion, quality, and hedonism. They enjoyed their affairs and the freedom now available to divorcées. Their previous husbands had both been Americans and each woman had an adult son. Nevelson had been on the lookout for a new dealer and, under Colette Robert’s sophisticated tutelage, she felt free to take chances and move in new directions. Roberts was also ready for a change. Born with a heart murmur, the French gallerist knew she wouldn’t live to an old age and was not wasting any time.⁹⁶

In January 1953, with her inclusion in the group exhibition at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery, Louise Nevelson emerged from the shadows. Only a month later Archaic Figure with Star on Her Head (ca.1948) appeared in a small exhibition of sculptures from the National Association of Women Artists at the Argent Galleries. (Now suddenly the words “archaic” and “ancient” appear frequently in titles of her work, whether the works themselves were new or previously done.) This bronze, which had probably been included in Nevelson’s 1946 Nierendorf show, was evidently one of the artist’s favorite works, as it had also appeared in the 1951 exhibition at Riverside Museum.⁹⁷ The sculpture was shown under various titles, including Self Portrait, and Nevelson’s own big-breasted, chunky figure with an aspirational star plunked on the top of her head is recognizable. Nevelson might have felt “archaic” and bordering on “ancient” going into her fifties, but she had the energy of a novice and the presence of a veritable star.

Nevelson’s friendship and professional collaboration with Colette Roberts and her participation in the group show at her gallery must have seemed “destined,” as it had coincided with the artist’s passionate and rapid exploration of a new medium, etching. Thanks to what would soon become total support by her new dealer, it was certainly the beginning of a new stage in her career and the development of a unique style.

In a way similar to the results of her overuse of alcohol to purge painful feelings, the cumulative traumata of the 1940s were dislodged and overcome by Nevelson’s huge production of terra-cottas and her several trips to exotic Central America, both of which cleared the way for her new beginning as an artist and a woman.