King (Royal Voyage installation), 1956. Photograph by Jeremiah Russell, courtesy of Pace Gallery
“I take full responsibility for what I’ve done and every time I say it I want to cry. That is true. And that is what gave me my strength and gave me my independence. And it gave me truly a great deal of sorrow. It’s a total price.”
—Louise Nevelson, Dawns + Dusks, 1976, p.137.
In 1954 Nevelson had her first solo show in eight years—at Lotte Jacobi’s Gallery on Fifty-Second Street. Jacobi was a gifted and successful photographer whom Nevelson had met through Karl Nierendorf. The exhibition at Jacobi’s Gallery was a mix of recent as well as older pieces, including fifteen of the etchings and aquatints she had done at Atelier 17 and six unpainted terra-cotta sculptures. Critics noted the “huge” size of some of the etchings and the fact that they were inspired by her experience in Guatemala. “Her interest in archeology and Pre-Columbian art is a part of her work as something experienced in nature rather than as a stylistic influence.”1 The critics recognized the obvious difference between an artist influenced by a popular style and one who had actually been in the jungle looking at the monumental stone sculpture left behind by the ancient civilizations.
Going backward to the “ancient, archaic” memories evoked in the Guatemalan jungle freed Nevelson to move forward and take another leap that would link her past with her present—the use of found wood—and the merging of past memories with present mood states. She was enough of a Surrealist to let herself float with her memories back and forth in time as she quickly and spontaneously worked her way through the new media.
To what degree the impending transformation of Nevelson’s style was a result of her new association with a supportive dealer, Colette Roberts, is difficult to establish with certainty but, as someone who understood her and supported her emotionally no matter where she went artistically, Roberts likely made possible the next steps in Nevelson’s development as an artist because she was unconditionally supportive and a gifted publicist, who, Nevelson hoped, could achieve for her what she had seen Nierendorf achieve for Paul Klee.2
At the time of the Jacobi exhibition Nevelson had been friendly with Colette Roberts for a year and had shown in three galleries that Colette Roberts had either directed or strongly influenced. Like Nevelson, Roberts was deeply interested in the spiritual aspects of art. She understood what Nevelson meant by the fourth dimension, but, as a good publicist, she renamed it “Nevelson’s Elsewhere.” She also knew intuitively to emphasize Nevelson’s direct experience of Pre-Columbian art. Looking at the ancient art of Central America in situ had become part of the artist’s story. It was even true.
Sometime in 1954 Nevelson had been informed by New York City of its intention to buy her property, tear down her building, and build a complex of apartments and shops called “Kips Bay.”3 That year Nevelson returned to wood as a medium for sculpture and selected cityscapes as a preeminent theme. As the buildings on her block were gradually emptied and an ultimatum from the city grew more likely every day, she procrastinated, seemingly paralyzed by indecision and the need to resolve with her family what provisions they were willing to make for her habitation, since the deed was in their name.4
The prospective destruction of her home was not the only separation she suffered in 1954. Johnny, who had been the strong man at her side for three years, was drinking again, which frightened her. “Too strong and out of control meant he had to go.”5 Johnny was by no means her last lover, but he was her last steady “boyfriend.” She asked her son Mike to move into the house. For years Mike had presented himself to his mother as an advisor and protector, now it was his moment to make good on the offer. He arrived in November 1954 and left three months later. For the next four years, as “every building around her was being torn down and the rest of the block was just a mass of rubble,”6 she lived and worked with the knowledge that her home was no longer a protection from the outside world.
When an artist pours her entire life into her work, the work can replace external reality. This was particularly true for Nevelson, whose dissatisfaction with the external world was sometimes particularly acute. The forced removal from her home contributed to her desperate need for a better world, one that she could entirely control.
Shortly after the series of etchings at Atelier 17—or perhaps even at the same time she was creating them—Nevelson had begun to work again with wood. Initially the wood pieces were those she found in her studio—leftovers from the 1944 Nierendorf show. Later she would use the scraps she and her friends found on the street. Two works that appear to be her first sculpture in wood in the 1950s are Winged City (also called Ancient City) and Bride of the Black Moon. Both were related to the etching series. In each sculpture, Nevelson used parts from Three Four Time, the most praised piece in the 1944 show.7 Two elements from the earlier sculpture—a circular tire shape and an upright ovoid knob with three balls now stained black—reappear in Winged City.8 9
Dido Smith, a ceramist who knew Nevelson well at the time, describes visiting Nevelson in 1954 when she had just completed Winged City: “She brought me upstairs and opened the door with a flourish, and turned on the light, and there was this particular piece. It was all black except for the underside of the wings which were red.”10
Winged City was seminal for Nevelson. It had its origins in her past work and was a source for much of her thinking about her future work. Nevelson wrote a prose poem that was originally attached to its base. At first glance the poem seems illogical, but a closer study reveals her early ideas about the fourth dimension.
Time is forever present. We live with the awareness of all past, present, & certainly project ourselves into the “Great Beyond,” breaking all time forever.
… I believe the first consciousness, the first human was aware of flight. All our heritage … expressed in literature, spiritual messages, mythology, the visual arts, has been winged … all going to just that one place. Some call that God.
Winged City is elevated on three spheres=worlds. 3 represents the 3 dimensional world which represents thinking … the fourth elevation is straight. 4 is the cube, the 4th dim[ension].
With this work and its accompanying enigmatic statement, Nevelson expressed that she lived with an ever-present awareness of the past and a need for flight to a distant place—an “elsewhere,” which she called the fourth dimension. Exhibiting this sculpture in 1955, poem attached, signaled that Nevelson was now unafraid to come out into the open with her unorthodox beliefs. What had made this possible?
By the time she was making sculpture in the 1950s Nevelson was familiar with both the spatial and the spiritual meanings of the fourth dimension discussed earlier. She sometimes merged them, speaking about a chair drawn by Cubists that could be seen from all sides—hyperspace—as well as the shadow that reflected the higher idealized realm down in the ordinary world. As she was working her way toward developing her famous walls of black boxes, she came to believe that she was using the formal element of shadow to connect the fourth with the third dimension.
Nevelson had begun to make the decisive move toward her signature style. In January 1955, she had her first solo exhibition at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery: Ancient Games, Ancient Places. Her first thematically titled exhibit since the 1943 Circus show, it included terra-cotta sculptures, wood sculpture, and etchings.11
The thematic section of the exhibit was built around Bride of the Black Moon, the other of the first two wood assemblages (with Winged City) made after her five-year excursion into tons of terra-cotta. The base and four furniture legs from Three Four Time are used as the setting for the carved figure, Bride of the Black Moon. Instead of the donut-shaped form that accompanied the four furniture legs in the earlier work there is now a single black sphere—a small masculine moon meant to accompany the bride who stands naked but crowned and veiled at the end of the platform. She is an archaically carved figure, primitive and almost faceless standing stoically for the ceremony. The four furniture legs have been given black ovoid heads and now seem to represent guests at the wedding.
When asked about the meaning of the exhibition’s title Ancient Games, Ancient Places decades later, Nevelson was explicitly non-explicit: “It’s known fourth-dimensionally. It gives me a private dimension. And that private dimension actually has more space. Everything’s unlimited in that place.”12 By equating “Ancient Places” with the fourth dimension, Nevelson was referring to “cosmic consciousness,” both as it was understood by writers on spirituality and as a vague place where she could not personally be pinned down in the here and now—and also perhaps as a not-quite-conscious reference to her own “ancient” past, the past of her childhood in Ukraine and the ancient places she inhabited there.
When asked to discuss her concept of the Bride, she was just as enigmatic. “I just thought that there was a whole thing. I was in the fourth dimension, and while I was there, it functioned.”13 Was the fourth dimension a means of escape from an unpleasant reality? Her own marriage had not been happy, and, as with other professional and personal disappointments she had experienced, she wasn’t very good at expressing her emotions in words. The repetition of brides and bridal pairs in her work, however, suggests that, like many creative people before her, she found a way to face her pain by allowing it to inform her art. With this exhibition she was also transforming a painful voyage to a village in a foreign land that had to be forgotten into evocative works of art.
Nevelson wrote another poem to be attached to the base of The Bride of the Black Moon:
A FAIRY TALE
The Bride
of the Black-Moon
goes to many continents
She plays games
She sees the Sphynx
Prometheus
Images she remembers from travels
She is soon to take another voyage
When you next visit her she will have seen
more, and more, and more …
And hopes to communicate to you
New seeing and new images.
The Bride of the Black Moon.14
Four geometric wood constructions painted entirely black represented the four continents visited by the Bride. Stuart Preston of The New York Times described these sculptures as “the mute fragments of some ideal scheme, now ruined but still inspiring in ruination.”15 They were Forgotten City, Black Majesty, That Silent Place—later also called Cloud City—and Nightscapes. Each one is an urban landscape with wood scraps positioned vertically and arranged like buildings seen at night from the city streets. Sanded and smoothed wood shapes are evocatively placed on bakelite bases, some tilting slightly as if in conversation with their neighbors. Each stately vertical element is complex, has been sawn, sanded, swiveled, and incised to give it individuality as both a shape and a force that can have a unique effect on its neighbors. The work is masterfully composed with just enough variation in the size, form, and placement of the elements that the eye never tires. As the city was tearing down buildings all around her, Nevelson was studying the profiles of the remaining structures, perhaps recalling and comparing them to the to-and-fro of the tall tilting masts of sailing ships nearby her childhood home in Rockland.
These urban wood landscapes followed one of the themes she had established at Atelier 17 with her etchings as evidenced by the print, Ancient City (also known as Shadow City), which was the first of the many cities Nevelson would create in her lifetime.
Critics noted that the etchings on the walls, “as darkly inked as the sculpture,” are the “mysterious landscapes, draw[ing] the observer into an intricate, murky texture of forms trembling against a void.”16 Of course there was a sphinx in the exhibit, but even more important than the sphinx was the Great Beyond (which Nevelson depicted as both an etching and a terra-cotta sculpture) and the Goddess from the Great Beyond. An undated poem Nevelson wrote on the subject reveals the power of that concept.
THE GREAT BEYOND
The Great Beyond is calling me
The more I am aware of her
The more I am aware of there
The Great Beyond is calling me.17
Nevelson’s close friends knew that the Bride was an aspect of the artist—her other self. Dido Smith used to write to her, “Dear Bride of the Black Moon,” knowing that Nevelson accepted the idea.18 Notably, the “bride” of this remarkable exhibit is solitary and not paired with an adult male spouse. The sphinx in the poem can represent an aspect of her mother as silent, impassive, and enigmatic. The many etched royal couples on the wall of the exhibition lend support to such an interpretation. Through these symbolic equivalents, Nevelson revealed both her intense devotion to her mother and the painful childhood memories of her mother as often distant and emotionally unavailable. The artist’s longing for the Great Beyond and its feminine nature suggests Nevelson’s yearning for lost intimacy with the mother of her early childhood. Caught between devotion and disappointment Nevelson turned to a metaphysical fantasy of a fourth dimension or a Great Beyond to anchor herself in a safe and unassailable idealized realm.
Ancient Games, Ancient Places was followed a year later by The Royal Voyage of the King and Queen of the Sea. Stylistically and conceptually Royal Voyage was a continuation of Ancient Games, Ancient Places, insofar as both shows included a mix of black-stained terra-cottas and wood constructions with incised linear markings. As in the previous exhibit, the main female character—the queen—was Nevelson, and the voyage was to Great Beyonds.19
As the titles suggests, the narrative theme of Royal Voyage was a sea voyage made by a totemic king and queen to distant, mythical lands and undersea kingdoms. The two tall figures consisted of thin wood planks standing upright on narrow bases. The subtle variations in shape, surface, size, and perforations differentiated the king from his shorter consort, who faced him across the room. Despite their dominating silhouettes, up close the king and queen show themselves to be startlingly “primitive,” with their scars, cracks, and other imperfections.
Around the king were the “gifts”—black pieces in concrete or terra-cotta piled up on a metaphorical shore.20 Surrounding the queen were compositions of black wood or terra-cotta mounted on the same rectangular bases that Nevelson had used for her sculpted cityscapes the previous year.
The critics who reviewed this exhibit ignored the issue of iconography, that is, the queen’s identity or her possible relationship to the artist, as well as the meaning of the voyage. Instead, they focused on Nevelson’s formal achievements, “Miss Nevelson’s sculpture is always cadenced and witty, juxtaposing blocky rough-hewn forms in infinitely varied relationships.”21 Installation photos show the range of Nevelson’s inventiveness.
Another reviewer wrote “Personages at Sea carries forward the delicate interaction among the vertical parts of the previous year’s cityscapes.”22 A third reviewer called Nevelson “a highly accomplished sculptor conscious of working in a medium dominated by men. Yet without affectation, she competes with men in having accepted the mass (terra cotta and wood), hewn it and worked it. Painted it black and honored the monumental as small but sturdy uprights in groups looking oddly like Manhattan’s skyline…. Each work—like a fragile melody—must be experienced more than once to learn all its virtues.”23
Colette Roberts described The Royal Voyage as: “the first apparition of Nevelson’s going from studied relationship on a small scale to that of using the room as the framework for a whole, conceived as such.”24 She later explained in her book on Nevelson: “Beyond the object, Nevelson’s wood construction takes us to never-to-be-reached shores and planets. She invites us to a journey into an ‘elsewhere’ all her own.”25
Colette Roberts understood Nevelson’s travels at a profound level. She wrote: “No matter how fascinated by her various endeavors, Nevelson feels she needs to get in closer touch with some reality, still unknown to her. She then assumes traveling may help her in her quest.”26 Up to now the voyages taken by Nevelson’s sculpted creations had focused on arriving at royal realms, faraway continents, or Great Beyonds. The ambiguity of the concept of “voyage,” and its frequency in Nevelson’s imagery, points to its multiple meanings. Using her poetry and statements as guides for interpretation, the usual object of Nevelson’s voyage was a transcendent spiritual place of refuge.
Like her dance teacher and longtime friend Ellen Kearns, and now her new dealer and close friend Colette Roberts, Nevelson was attracted to the idea of the fourth dimension as a kind of mystical transcendence, a reality beyond anything here on this earth. She often used voyages and flight as metaphors for her metaphysical beliefs. Could she at the same time be making references to her childhood history with its ocean voyage and flight from dangers? Remembering now in wood, in a realm where such memories could no longer hurt her?
Because the very concept of a voyage is so multilayered, it is worth remembering that it is also linked to the idea of death. The common phrases “one-way trip” and “the last journey” are typical examples.27 Nevelson, as a very intuitive person, would have been aware of that linkage without necessarily stating it—or even thinking consciously about it.
Colette Roberts had moved to a studio on East Twenty-Eighth Street “to be closer to Louise”28 and was, according to the Nevelson family, “very supportive of Louise, very sympathetic, visited her often and was a very positive person to have around.”29 The press releases Roberts put together for Nevelson’s exhibitions were masterful assemblages of critics’ laudatory comments. More important than her substantial assistance in building up Nevelson’s career was the moral, psychological, and spiritual support Roberts provided, help for which Nevelson had been waiting since Nierendorf’s death, and even longer. She was now producing some of the best and most daring work of her career and was beginning to forge her own unique style.
With Roberts helping her to find words for her thoughts and feelings, Nevelson learned to spell out her artistic creed. Sometime in 1956 she wrote an essay, “A Sculptor Speaks for His Time,” for The Christian Science Monitor. The essay was never published, but Nevelson kept at least three versions of it in her notebooks: “[A sculptor’s] imagery stems from the creative mind. Projected outward it becomes a meeting between the creator and the spectator it reaches. In the past sculptors’ works were commissioned, to fulfil religious or decorative purposes. Today the artist as every individual, feels himself more isolated, and must find his own subject matter and expression…. For this, he descends into his own consciousness and often his subconscious self, for t[he] images he projects.”30 Here, the artist herself is acknowledging how much she knew about and accepted her unconscious fantasies as well as her memories of the distant past as prime sources for her work, and especially for the symbolism behind the forms.
Encouraged by the excellent press that had greeted Royal Voyage and, more importantly, by the move of Grand Central Moderns to a much larger space, Nevelson’s work became larger during 1956. Meanwhile, she was preparing for her third solo show at the gallery, The Forest.
The show opened at Grand Central Moderns Gallery in January 1957. The installation photo does not do justice to the exhibition and the powerful works it contained.31 Maintaining the installation format from the previous year’s show, various sculptures representing aspects of The Forest stood in a broad circle around a group of nine pieces representing The Village.32 Five of these were in the now familiar horizontal format and were on or under a table in the center of the room. Four more, including a “seascape,” were on the floor around the table.
Forest Installation, 1957. Tender Being second from left. First Personage far right. Photograph © Geoffrey Clements
Nevelson’s associations to The Forest exhibition in general and to First Personage, The Wedding Bridge, and Black Wedding Cake in particular, recalled twenty years later, suggests their underlying meanings:
I got so involved in my work that I really was creating a novel, because I had myself being the bride … it was my autobiography in that sense…. The interesting thing, while I was filing and working away at it [First Personage] there was a knot where the mouth was supposed to be, just a plain knot, and I, being so concentrated, all of a sudden I saw this knot, mouth moving. And the whole thing was black by then and it frightened me. At that time I was so geared in that I … made … a black wedding cake. I’m always taking these trips, you see, and I suppose this trip I didn’t have a bridegroom, but I had a wedding cake. If you’re going without a bridegroom, naturally it’s going to be a black wedding cake. Then I made a bridge to cross over. The bridge was a single two-inch lath, but it was about six or seven feet long…. To change the texture of light I glued a one-half-inch-wide ribbon of black velvet to one edge of the lath. Anyway … I realized … it was impossible for a human to go on that bridge and that there are no black wedding cakes and that personage was sculpture. But they had all become realities … and I didn’t want those pieces around me, so I gave them all away as fast as I could. I couldn’t have lived with them being in the house. Now, of course, I’m divorced from them.33
First Personage, 1957. Painted wood, a) 94 × 37 1/16 × 11 ¼ in; b) 73 11/16 × 24 3/16 × 7 ¼ in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Berliawsky 57.23a-b
It is no coincidence that the village group directly confronts the monumentally sized First Personage, which Nevelson described to an interviewer as “this big thing,” which “is somewhere identified with myself.”34 The frontal carved slab presents a quiet exterior of repose, while the constructed spike-filled pole that peeps out from behind represents the “dynamics” of “a total being.35
In her interview with Arlene Jacobowitz (a curator at the Brooklyn Museum), after the work was in the museum’s collection, Nevelson articulated the importance of First Personage. “This piece was one of the very last pieces I did in what I call in the round. [Afterwards I realized] I wanted to be more secretive about my work, and I began more or less working in the enclosures. There’s something more private about [an enclosure] for me and gives me a better sense of security.”36
Nevelson’s response to the feelings this piece, as well as the entire exhibit, aroused in her—a desire for privacy and the need to shield her inner feelings—found expression in a stylistic development that followed almost immediately: the construction of walls behind which she could take refuge. Ironically, these walls are mostly made up of open boxes, which, like Nevelson, appear frank and outspoken, while keeping something hidden.
The largest sculptures standing at the room’s periphery were quite beautiful. Like First Personage, Tender Being (six feet eight inches high and thirty-four inches wide) was carved out of pieces of wood of superior quality, collected from a nearby high-end furniture store.37 Powerful in its outline and elusive in its play of light and shadow, of curved and straight lines, it seems to have an inner life. With its endless complexity hinting at the play of muscles, tendons, and bones underneath the surface, it has the subtlety of a human hand. Yet it is not quite human. It has a similar combination of sharp and soft, sweet and sour, straight and curved, rough and smooth as can be seen in First Personage.
The grouping in the center of the room—The Village—included two sculptures, The Water Place, which Hilton Kramer singled out for illustration in his seminal review of the show, and The Landscape (also known as The Village or Structure View). Horizontally oriented like all her previous cityscapes, both works are made up of several registers, yet neither seems cluttered. The negative spaces created by intervals between the parts are perfectly syncopated with the complex play of light and shadow resulting from the angles of the top edges of each “scrap” of wood.
One of the compelling reasons to conclude that The Forest marked some inner consolidation of the death theme was the existence of a sculpture called Forest Christ. There are no photographs of the work, but Colette Roberts noted that it was both a hanging and a relief and one of Nevelson’s first pieces to be enclosed in a custom-made box, this marking a stylistic turning point.38 The image of the enclosed Christ figure is undeniably funereal and provides a natural link to the enclosed King II, found the following year in Moon Garden + One.
Structure View, 1956. Wood, 17 ½ × 35 ¼ × 17 ½ in. Photograph by Jeremiah Russell, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
The Forest was a major passageway on Nevelson’s voyage to her signature style and to a partial resolution of deeply denied feelings about sexuality, death, and her early childhood. Though she had been moving toward a full realization of the importance of shadow in her work, the exhibition seems to have consolidated her momentum.
Just before the exhibition opened, Nevelson removed two works, The Black Wedding Cake and The Wedding Bridge.39 The Wedding Bridge is a five-inch-wide rod, eight feet long with small wood blocks at either end representing clustered villages.40 It was originally intended as a way of cutting the space of the recently enlarged Grand Central Moderns gallery.41 During the installation it was placed between First Personage and the Village grouping. According to Nevelson’s later explanation, the piece was inspired by her imagined fear of falling from the bridge to certain death.
The degree of danger and suggestion of sexuality represented by First Personage is part of what frightened the artist. The Forest, with its evocation of sea and woodland, recalls the landscape of Nevelson’s childhood in Rockland, Maine, while the black wedding pieces may symbolize her failed marriage. The Wedding Bridge may have related to the story, told in her autobiography, describing her mother’s betrothal and how, because of the absence of an ice bridge that would have taken her away to her sister’s home across the River Dnieper, she had to marry the artist’s father and was unhappy with him.42 This tale about her mother’s past assumed such importance in her own memory that Nevelson once considered using it as the title of an exhibition, which would have been called “The Body of Water Never Froze—Direct Birth, Accidental Birth.”43
In The Wedding Bridge, the ice bridge, which would have provided an escape for her mother, was transformed into the long, narrow, black lath, with wood “villages” on either bank, separated by black velvet “water.” The relationship of The Wedding Bridge, The Black Wedding Cake, and First Personage starts to become clear. The fact that Nevelson was frightened by the moving mouth of First Personage (a self-representation as a bride), and then associated that fear with two more pieces symbolizing marriage (the black-painted Wedding Cake and Wedding Bridge), suggests that the knot (mouth) could also have been a symbol for the bride’s quivering trepidation, sexual fantasies, and anxieties about birth. A sudden coalescing of her frightening fantasies about marriage and maternity impelled her to remove the sculptural reminders.
When discussing The Forest exhibition and, particularly, her resistance to work again in the round, Nevelson suddenly began to recall her guilt and discomfort about having a child. “I was too young…. I had a Cesarean because I couldn’t face it … and having a stranger project his hands—up there … the whole thing. It killed me. Anyway my son went into the war. And that was when I wanted to kill myself. I saw nothing but blackness…. Well, you can black out for many reasons.”44
One of the many reasons for a person to black out is intense discomfort in the face of the body’s raw physicality. Birth was not a safe or happy subject for Louise Nevelson. She knew her mother had been born through a metal hoop at the behest of her superstitious grandmother’s rabbi. She knew that for millennia, including the 19th and early part of the 20th century, many women died in childbirth along with their newborn babies. She also knew that because of her mother’s reluctance to give birth to more children, Minna Berliawsky stopped having sex with her husband when Louise was six years old. In fact, she was well aware that marriage and death were also unsafe subjects for her. “Is there anything in the extreme between a wedding and death?” she asked an interviewer in 1977.45
Nevelson had descended into her unconscious for some of the images in this exhibition, and one of the triggers for her fantasies could well have been her son’s recent second marriage and being a new father to his second daughter, Louise’s second grandchild. In December 1955 he had married again, this time to a woman from the Midwest, who had lived a sheltered life with religious Lutheran parents. Florence Klettke was ten years younger than Mike. By October 1956 they had Elspeth, the first of their two daughters. From then on Mike’s letters invariably sounded the note of blissful domesticity, with Flo always in the background cooking, gardening, and caring for their daughter. Throughout the months Nevelson was preparing the show, Mike’s letters to his mother were a mix of happy talk about his wife and newborn daughter and hopeful but somewhat resigned words about his own struggle with poverty and the wished-for artistic success that continually eluded him. The momentous events in Mike’s life, together with the doubt and disappointment they stirred up in him, seemed to reverberate in the work Nevelson was doing at the time.
Nevelson was working on First Personage when Mike came to stay with her in December 1956 to settle some of his business affairs. He left abruptly, without going to see her work in a group show at the Whitney Museum. As a postscript to a letter he wrote on his return home, Mike congratulates his mother about her “great success at the Whitney Exposition” and expresses his regret that he was “too upset in NY to be able to visit the show.”46
In his very next letter, written only six days after her solo show opened, Mike tells her of his uncle Nate’s proud display in his hotel of the latest Arts Magazine with Hilton Kramer’s fulsome praise for The Forest. His response: “As far as I can see, this was one of the most sensitive appraisals of your art, and this review … certainly places you in the top echelon of international art. As a result of this, you should really be jumping this year on more projects. Best wishes to you.”47 He ends on an optimistic note. “Actually I am in very high spirits and we are very comfortable here. Take care of yourself.”
Within the next month, Mike sent greetings laced with advice: “I suppose after all the excitement of the exhibition, that now you have a little letdown, both physical and emotional, which is bound to be. Sometimes we wonder if you would be better off married to some man who could give you a sense of security, somebody personally interested in you. Of course, one might say, if that is what you wanted, that is what you would have.” Nevelson’s son’s mixed feelings about her success and single state could have seemed rather out-of-touch with her actual condition. Louise Nevelson was in fact relieved to be single and consequently able to focus entirely on her art. But her son was acting in good faith, working hard—as a Nevelson man—to protect his mother.
An older and yet more painful set of memories is most likely also embedded in The Forest exhibition, which was such a turning point in Nevelson’s artistic development. Nevelson’s mother had been had been born in a small village on the Dneiper River called Shusnecky. In 1902 Minna Berliawsky—took her son Nathan and oldest daughter Louise back to her parents’ home and stayed there until they left for America three years later.
Between 1903 and 1905 more than sixty towns and six hundred villages in the Ukraine were beset by a series of brutal anti-Semitic pogroms, some occurring either in or very near the village of Shusnecky. Louise, née Leah Berliawsky, would have been three and a half to five and a half years old during that time period.
Nevelson never spoke publicly about her memories of her early years in Shusnecky. I interviewed Nevelson in 1977 about The Village as one of the groupings in The Forest exhibition, and she categorically denied that she had ever made such a work. Even after being shown a photograph of The Village in Art News as well as the name of The Village in the gallery’s list of works in the show, Nevelson repeatedly (seven times) denied that she had ever done a work called The Village and had “never used the word ‘village’ in a title. No, I’m sorry to tell you I don’t believe it.”48
Nevelson’s intense protest over a relatively minor point suggests that her repudiation was an unconscious effort on her part to mask and deny something significant. The entire exhibit was a personal watershed for the artist. A village—Shusnecky—was the physical environment in which many of the important events of her early childhood took place, and in the exhibit, where her memories, fantasies, and feelings found expression in architectural forms, these heretofore “forgotten” memories came threateningly close to consciousness. In The Forest Nevelson had created symbolic equivalents of her life story—the romantic and sexual history of her mother and herself, as well as the deeply repressed memories of the dangers connected to the actual village of her early childhood.
To suddenly, and at the last minute, remove two works from an important installation, and two decades later, to forcefully deny an indisputable fact—that she had ever made a sculpture titled The Village—are anomalies that make no aesthetic sense, but they make psychological sense. Louise Nevelson, née Berliawsky, had to not know about the bridge and the wedding cake just as she had to not know about the village of her past.
This exhibition marked the beginning of Nevelson’s need to enclose her work and protect herself from the anxieties that often accompany memories that are too traumatic. Enclosing her subsequent work in boxes was accompanied by a new emphasis on shadow, a formal development that embodies the psychological shifts taking place within her. As we will see in the next chapter, Nevelson’s next exhibition Moon Garden + One contained an entire wall made up of more than a hundred boxes, and she wanted it to be experienced in near-total darkness. The artist herself had to remain in the dark about her own history while she simultaneously voyaged to the great beyond.
Again, reviewers of The Forest focused on the formal. Dore Ashton was the only reviewer to note the metaphorical use of forest imagery for human presences.49 Hilton Kramer wrote a lengthy laudatory review of the exhibit in Arts magazine: “These blocky forms have taken on a more architectural character, abandoning their descriptive functions to participate in a purer abstract conception of sculpture as a mysterious orchestration of light and shadow, or rather—to put first things first—sculpture as a plastic embodiment of pure shadow to which light is admitted in a subtle and fugitive way.”50 His words—“architecture” and “shadow”—soon became the trademark terms of Nevelson’s conceptual vocabulary.
Kramer goes on to say:
And while the creative process here is an additive one, the finished whole—both in imagery and effect—is artistically larger than the sum of its parts…. [A]ll these works are characterized by an intense and sensitive awareness of sculptural detail: all edges, corners and planes, all cracks which may be expected to emit light, every shadow which one mass may be expected to cast on another—this consciousness pervades the whole conception, and indeed supplies exactly the element of sensibility which the architectural components require as a sculptural leavening. Without grasping the presence of that consciousness and entering into it in some degree, I suspect any viewer would find Mrs. Nevelson’s art merely eccentric. One must really enter the shadows here before one can see.51
Intuitively, the critic had penetrated the depths of Nevelson’s work and inner life.
Kramer had not only roundly praised Nevelson’s work in his insightful review, he had also named her and framed her. In identifying her concern with the play of light and shadow, which had been evident already in her etchings done at Atelier 17 in 1953, Kramer had given her the words and concepts she needed to see for herself—and thereby explain to the world—what she was already doing with forms. In his review of The Forest, he saw that her sense of composition—which was embedded in her lifelong fervor for putting diverse pieces of wood together in just the right way—could be called architectural. Kramer’s focus on the architectural aspects of Nevelson’s work struck a respondent chord. In a few years Nevelson would be calling herself an architect of shadows (1964) and connecting it with her understanding of the fourth dimension.
When she was interviewed by Dorothy Seckler for the Oral History Program at the Smithsonian in 1965, she said: “I think that the shadow … is the fourth dimension. That shadow I make forms out of is just not a fleeting shadow, but it has as much form as a Cubistic form.”52 She also made clear: “I didn’t want to make sculpture and I didn’t want to make form as such…. I want something else entirely…. It’s almost like you are an architect that’s building through shadow and light and dark…. You don’t want to make buildings for people; you are—in another dimension…. But it’s a very real world.53
Had the penny dropped, and everything Nevelson had heard and read up to then about the fourth dimension fallen into place? And did shadow have another meaning for Nevelson—the more mundane but frightening role as a symbol of death and darkness? Beginning with her next and breakthrough exhibition, Moon Garden + One, Nevelson would ever after have to control exactly how her works should be lit or whether they should be left in shadow.
In September 1957, Sidney Baldwin, a columnist from Peoria, Illinois, wrote about his lunch with Louise Nevelson at her brother’s hotel in Rockland, Maine, during the summer of 1957. Nate Berliawsky had been telling him about his sister for years and he already admired her work.
She is not young, already has a grandchild, but she gives the impression of a youth—very appealing, slender, vivacious and buoyant. She sat down at our table and then began an hour of stimulating talk which none of us will ever forget. She is to have a show in January [Moon Garden + One at Grand Central Moderns]…. She has just developed a new mode of expression and was eager to explain it…. This new form came about because she found a young carpenter in New York who could and would follow her directions. He has made a series of “shadow boxes” much longer than they are wide—in which she had developed a series of designs—some in wood. They are new and so adaptable to the modern scheme of decoration that they are selling almost before they are finished, and she is as excited as anyone would be who after half a lifetime of sitting in the shadows, now feels the full force of the sun.
It was a wonderful hour. We forgot to eat. It is a world none of us knew, and Louise Nevelson has the ability to make her hearers a part of her own emotion. She has a brownstone in New York, which is full of her work—she dispensed with furniture, sleeps on a cot, and lives alone. She told us of the years of uncertainty, of her lack of knowledge, of her need to live alone and to work alone and the difficulty of making people understand that need.
And when success came and her sculpture began to be in demand, when another person would have been supremely contented, she confessed that she was still frightened, still uncertain, still wondering what was the matter. Do other people feel this way? Will life ever be calm?54
It is perhaps the first contemporary account of Nevelson’s use of boxes.55 A few months after Hilton Kramer’s rave review of The Forest, someone was making shadow boxes for her.
Multiple stories have been written about how Nevelson started using boxes to house precious found objects, to contain her compositions or “to provide a slow admission of light on an enclosed relief.”56 Colette Roberts recalled that Nevelson had received some cases of whiskey in 1957 and their crisscross separations started her on the idea of enclosures.57 According to other versions, Nevelson found rug boxes on the street and, liking their look, began to use them. Or, her brother-in-law, Ben Mildwoff, gave her boxes from his glass factory. Or, her assistant, Teddy Haseltine, was doing work in small Cornell-type boxes, and she learned from him.
Years later, Nevelson claimed that she first used the boxes for storage and protection, but soon discovered that they could be used to reinforce, emphasize and build upon the shadows. The boxes gave her new understanding of how she could use shadow as form and how shadow could represent the fourth dimension. They also gave her a way of controlling shadows, and the forms they created, and every thing they might mean to her, whether she was conscious of all those meanings or not.
All these versions probably contain kernels of truth. Like any momentous discovery the origin is multi-determined. No matter how it began, the diverse stories underline the fact that, by the summer of 1957, Nevelson was arranging to have shadow boxes at her disposal to use any way she liked. Eventually, doors were added. “Moon Garden + One was on its way.”58
During the summer of 1957 Nevelson had been bragging to Baldwin, the columnist she met in Maine, about her increasing income and indirectly telling him and her brother that she liked living alone—despite the pressure she was getting from Nate and Mike about her need for a husband or companion.59 By this time she had invited Teddy Haseltine to live in one of the small rooms on the fourth floor of her house. Teddy had been introduced to Nevelson the previous year by his then partner, Donald Mavros, a sculptor and ceramist whom Nevelson knew. Teddy was an attractive young man, gamin, rather a lost soul, spiritual, spirited, penniless, essentially homeless, and totally devoted to Louise Nevelson. His willingness to be her gofer, cook, companion, and helper whenever she needed him fit her needs much better than most of his predecessors.
She and Teddy were both devoted to spiritual exploration and went together to hear Krishnamurti speak whenever he was in New York. Teddy had a good eye and became exceptionally adept at picking up wood scraps for her, staining and selecting them out of myriad baskets of variously shaped pieces and nailing them exactly into the places she wanted them to be—the perfect studio assistant. Less than perfect were his problems with alcohol, drugs, and boyfriends.
Teddy’s immaturity allowed Nevelson to be a beneficent maternal presence. She could provide him with structure, discipline, and pocket money. She was not bossy with her assistants, rather she tended to be uplifting and encouraging: “She makes everybody feel great who works with her.”60 Colette Roberts recalled Teddy: “He was actually quite a gifted fellow himself, an artist at heart, and so he catered to Louise the right way.”61 When they were home alone in the evening, after she had been working hard all day, they would either start dancing or she would sit and write some poetry or she would sew some little thing.62
Having Teddy up the stairs and Roberts down the street, and both one hundred percent supportive of her and her work, gave Nevelson the security she had been seeking since she had left Maine to marry Charles Nevelson. Then, towards the end of the year Diego Rivera died in Mexico City. Another of Nevelson’s most significant father figures was gone. According to reports in The New York Times, he was mourned by two thousand people who attended his burial.63 A few months later, in January 1958, her breakthrough exhibition, Moon Garden + One, would celebrate the way Louise Nevelson transformed death and loss into great art.
