Walter Sanders. Thirtieth Street Bathroom, 1958. LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
“But above and beyond all it is a Universal love affair for me, and I’m in love with art.”
—Louise Nevelson, speech given at Long Beach, July 25, 1954. (LN Papers; Box 5, f 29)
In 1957, the year before Moon Garden + One, Nevelson knew that she would have to move out of her house on Thirtieth Street. While owning a house had solved a number of practical problems for the prolific sculptor in the mid-1940s, it had also spoken to deeper needs that became apparent only when Nevelson was threatened with its loss. Nothing definitive had happened yet, but she worried about the dwindling amount of time she had left on Thirtieth Street. She dreaded having to move all her possessions and all of her work from a home she loved.
The year before she moved, Nevelson obsessively collected found-wood fragments and used them to make so many sculptures that she had to stack and arrange the separate pieces as compositions just to make working space. The house was filled to overflowing with more than nine hundred artworks. Her close friend and fellow sculptor Dorothy Dehner recalled spending the summer of 1956 taking photographs of the house and garden. “Her house was just crammed full of sculpture, lined with it, stacked with it all over. I couldn’t take photos of any separate pieces because there wasn’t enough room.”1
In January 1958 Nevelson put almost all of her furniture on the sidewalk to be carted off by the Salvation Army, keeping only a red refrigerator, a bed covered with an American Indian blanket, and a glass table with three chairs. She had emptied the large house that she had loved for thirteen years because, she claimed, “I needed the room … because I plan my shows as an ensemble, as one work. Everything has to fit together, to flow without effort, and I too must fit…. I never know my next move…. I just let it happen. When I let my inner vision guide my hands, there are no errors.”2
Two months before the opening of Moon Garden + One, Colette Roberts brought a group of French artists to Nevelson’s Thirtieth Street house, knowing that they would find its sculptural contents extraordinary. Georges Mathieu recalled his visit:
Imagine a nondescript three-story house of the New England style on a nondescript street…. You enter. You are in a Kafka-like world, the laws of which escape you. In the cellar, relics lie about, [urative and black…. On the first floor the relics are tabernacles. They cover the walls, carpet them. There is no place to live, no living room, no bedroom, no kitchen … no bed, no table…. Yet one finds thousands of closets; thousands of cupboards, chests, coffins, boxes; thousands of Nevelsons…. On the first floor, second floor, the third, the same accumulations, implacably superimposed, intertwined and piled, bewitching and overpowering.3
Mathieu bought one of those thousands of boxes from her studio. Roberts also brought art critic Michel Tapie from Paris and the artist and sculptor Pierre Soulages, who observed: “This is not only sculpture, it is a whole world that is opened to us.”4
The year 1958 was an annus mirabilis for Nevelson beginning with her breakthrough exhibition in January, Moon Garden + One. Although the theme of a garden at night was not uncommon in the art world, the show was startlingly new. New for Nevelson, and new for the art world. It was clear to viewers that they had entered “a whole world” and were not merely seeing an accumulation of separate sculptures.5
Moon Garden + One was made up of 116 boxes as well as some free-standing rounded or rectangular platforms on pedestals with wood collages on top. Each of the boxes was filled with wood pieces that Nevelson had been collecting for years—driftwood found on the beaches of Maine and Long Island; wood remnants from local lumberyards and antique stores; debris from demolished houses in her neighborhood as they were being flattened in readiness for Kips Bay, the new development. She had stained all the pieces matte black, because, as she said at the time, “Black creates harmony and doesn’t intrude on the emotions.”6 The monotone color masked the origins of each element as a bowling pin, piano leg, roof shingle, barrel top, and orange crate. She had cut, shaped, and partially assembled many of the wood fragments before placing them in or on the boxes.
Moon Garden + One, Sky Cathedral or Cathedral (Sky Installation), 1958. Photograph by Jeremiah Russell, courtesy of Pace Gallery
“When she was through installing Moon Garden + One,” Colette Roberts once said, “she stripped—well actually only her blouse—and she started to dance with Teddy, and it was really just like a dance in front of the ark … a ritual dance if there ever was one.”7 Both the artist and her right-hand man knew what they had accomplished. They had created something entirely new in the art world—an exhibition that completely surrounded the viewers as an environment.
A few hours before the opening of Moon Garden + One, Edwin Barrie, the director and manager of Grand Central Galleries, came with his secretary to see the show. Roberts recalled the details:
I said, “Well, you know, I have a problem because she wants no light, and you can’t see a thing.” And he said, “I wonder if we couldn’t do it like in the theater with colored light.” And then he took his secretary’s blue scarf and put it in front of a lamp. And I said, “Well, you have it. I’m going to get blue lights.” So we changed the lamps and put as many blue lamps as we needed, and the whole thing was all right. But this was done at 11:00 am, and we opened in the afternoon.8
Nevelson readily accepted Barrie’s suggestion, agreeing that a spare number of blue lights would allow viewers to see her work the way she saw it. But it is worth examining why she would have wanted no light at all. Since the enveloping darkness made the actual pieces of Moon Garden + One almost impossible to make out, we can believe the artist when she said, years later, “It was not really for an audience. It was really for my visual eye. It was a feast—for myself.”9
She knew that an audience for her work was necessary, even desirable—her goal had long been to give her work as much exposure as possible—and yet she wanted to keep this exhibition to herself, unlit. This uncharacteristic longing for darkness was a desire for privacy with regard to particular buried fears and fantasies—especially those that had to do with death and sadness, which emerged as she was working on the exhibition.
In her press release for the Moon Garden + One, Colette Roberts pushed the idea of the viewer as “+ One,” knowing that Nevelson was ambivalent about the inclusion of others into her mysterious inner life. Only long after and in the midst of her continued success did Nevelson begin to claim that “+ One” was herself, which was both true and false. Nevelson needed to be the prime viewer of the work that represented her inner life but she also needed others to see her art.
Everything in the exhibition spoke to a sense of enclosure. One large gallery wall was almost completely covered with Sky Cathedral, which was composed of thirty-six boxes. Other walls were lined with, but not concealed by, vertically aligned boxes, some totemically tall and most with hinged doors, which were opened in varying degrees to allow a play of light and shadow. The stark bright lighting of the installation photographs obscures this startling effect in the individual works as well the overall exhibition. Those who weren’t there can only guess at the full effect of the installation.
The exhibition hit the art world like a bombshell. “Surely among the most dramatic exhibitions New York has witnessed in years, Moon Garden + One all but defies description,” wrote her longtime enthusiast, Emily Genauer.10 “On entering the gallery, one feels first a breathless, imageless stir…. This is a nether world Nevelson has conjured out of her enormous imagination, technical ingenuity and surging creativity…. The important thing is that as we allow it to envelop us we feel it, still, as a world we can enter along with the artist, a cave of the heart, a dark place of dreams and loneliness.”11
All the critics acknowledged the show’s extraordinary effects on viewers. Though Nevelson had used themes to organize some previous exhibitions she had never before so completely enveloped the viewers with her sculpture. The installation itself was a key factor in the creation of this first “environmental” exhibition. Some critics focused on the consistent use of black as macabre and frightening, painting the artist as a sorceress. Others, annoyed with the artist for making their lives difficult, complained: “Entering this tenebrous gallery, the visitor at first can barely distinguish the walls lined with boxes…. Endlessly varied, but always subordinate to the deliberate theatrical atmosphere staged by the artist.”12
Her future dealer and friend Arne Glimcher observed: “Nevelson sought to establish an unfamiliar landscape that would disorient the viewer and question the sufficiency of his perception…. This was a magic window that allowed the viewer to walk through into a private universe.”13
Whatever other reviewers saw or felt, Hilton Kramer, writing in Arts magazine, had an entirely original perspective: “What seems to occupy [Mrs. Nevelson] the most … is the impulse to project on a macrocosmic scale the artistic vision which is embodied in each given work…. The gallery space …. was entirely transformed into a continuous sculptural enclosure, dominated by an enormous wall-sculpture, which in itself represented a brilliant realization of everything toward which [she] has been aspiring in her recent efforts: neither a relief nor a construction to hang on the wall, but an actual wall, in the literal architectural sense, which was at the same time a work of sculpture.”14
Kramer noted Nevelson’s evolution from the free-standing works on pedestals to the walls, observing that she was using a new medium—light and shadow: “The Sky Cathedrals are her Collected Works…. (No photograph can even approximate their appearance or suggest the feelings they induce.) They are appalling and marvelous; utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the limits of sculpture and on the confusion of genres, yet profoundly exhilarating in the way they open an entire realm of possibility.” He compared Nevelson’s walls with the large paintings by Rothko, Pollock, Still, and Newman. These artists “have progressively emptied their image in order to enlarge it, she insists on proliferating more and more detail, arresting the eye with a brilliant or subtle ‘passage’ wherever its glance falls.”
Thomas Hess, writing in Art News was less kind: “Louise Nevelson’s recent exhibition is another example of the abstract artist making his world. Hers is more theatrical and artificial, or sculpturesque, than the environments of Rothko, Pollock or Reinhardt, but perhaps, because of this, it is more easily seen as a place where art and nature become indistinguishable from each other.”15 Despite his ambivalence, Hess’s inclusion of a photograph of Sky Cathedral with the label “Art as environment” set the stage for her future renown as the first American sculptor to create environmental art. Equally important, like Kramer, Hess noted the parallel between Nevelson’s sculpted walls and the large paintings of the New York School painters.
Kramer and Hess set in motion the two views of Nevelson that would dominate the art press for years. She responded to both. Kramer’s view of her work addressed the private and profound—the sculptor seeking to bring her vision of an ideal fourth dimension into the everyday world of galleries, museums, and homes. Hess’s focus on Nevelson’s dramatic side appealed to her exhibitionism. As someone who had studied “dramatics” she gleefully accepted the sobriquet “theatrical.”
The March 24, 1958, issue of Life magazine showed her crouching behind her sculpture, wearing a peaked witch’s hat, illustrating the shadowy scene. The article, titled “Weird Woodwork of Lunar World,” began: “Like a sorceress in her den, Louise Nevelson is peering out from an eerie world of her own making,” thus expressing the spooky aspect of her work that appealed to some journalists.16
The illustrated article in Time magazine showed the artist looking more conventional17 but noted that “The Moon Garden + One [is] one of the most unusual exhibitions of sculpture in many a moon.”18 Not to be outdone in using colorful language, the writer noted: “In a misty, mystic haze of blue light stands a forest of eerie, black wooden shapes.”19
When Nevelson and Roberts discussed the work of this period, they were open about the artist’s conviction that her sculpture was primarily about bringing the fourth dimension—or “elsewhere”—into the here-and-now of the third dimension.20 That idea has usually gotten lost in the welter of formal analysis of her art. Nevertheless, as time passed, Nevelson was able to make references to the spiritual element of her work when she discussed its formal elements, such as color. In an extended riff on why she used black, the artist proclaimed: “People have identified … black with death or finish. Well, it may be that in the third dimension black is considered so. [But] It’s a myth really.”21 She noted that, “In convention, alchemy means transformation of something into gold. Well I think that’s exactly what I’ve done with [black].”22 Given the somewhat conservative nature of the art world during the time in which she was working out her own style, Nevelson may have felt conflicted, wanting to keep an essential element of her identity private, yet also wanting to acknowledge the spirituality that guided much of her art. She was initially wary about telling interviewers about her ideas of the fourth dimension, though by the mid-1960s she evidently felt free enough to do so.
For the rest of her life Nevelson would shift from one self-presentation to the other—attention-getting in public, profound in private—often using the former to hide the latter, since being known as interested in spirituality might make her feel like an outsider, as she did growing up in Rockland. Her closeness to Mark Rothko was founded on their similar inclinations to place spirituality at the center of their art, though both rarely acknowledged that important issue at the time.
In their reviews of the exhibit, critics mentioned lost cultures and nether worlds, but made no attempt to specify a personal meaning for the artist. It was not a fashionable style in art criticism, which gave Nevelson cover. Whether or not she knew what unconscious fantasies lay behind her work, she certainly was not ready to reveal such personal meanings to the general public.
The thematic complexity of the exhibition is suggested by the presence of royal figures, King II, and the Court. While Nevelson resisted specific associations to Christianity, her use of titles like Cathedral and Heavenly Gate suggest a reference to a churchyard cemetery, a common sight in New England. Evidence for such an association is also provided by the placement of certain pieces in the show. Sky Cathedral (or Cathedral in the Sky) is made up of numerous units of different sizes, which resemble the many-niched church altars found throughout Catholic Europe and Latin America, and particularly noticeable in Mexico, where these places of worship still tower over most other buildings. In the space adjoining Nevelson’s Cathedral, Heavenly Gate separates the vertical boxes from the facing wall, thus evoking a churchyard cemetery next to the church itself. Nevelson’s Moon Garden existed in both a symbolic and a specific locale and could be understood as a sacred cemetery visited after dark.
But most significant for the establishment of a plausible iconography for this exhibit is the presence of a half-open funereal box enclosing a thin semi-figural relief entitled King II. This piece sets the tone of the show.23 Building from the hypothesis that the king and queen represent parental figures, this somewhat chilling sculpture appears here as a father interred.
Knowing about the family cemetery’s existence in Rockland and the artist’s awareness that she hadn’t attended the funeral of either of her parents funerals in the 1940s could have summoned up images of the place and the ceremonies she had avoided. Nine years before she embarked on the creation of her own tenebrous universe, Nevelson had experienced the jungle darkness of a moonlit visit to the Mayan ruins in Quiriguá, where she would have seen “Stela C,” which so strongly suggests a coffin.
The huge size and awe-inspiring spectral quality of the Mayan sculptures, with their vacantly staring gazes, reinforces the association to funereal figures. I have already proposed that, in the etching series from 1953, these large stone figures had evoked parental imagery. It is a short step to perceiving them as entombed ancestors: for the Mayans, as revered ancients or deities, and for Nevelson, as recently deceased parents and parental figures.
Nevelson’s use of black as the predominant color for her work began during or just after her series of etchings, the imagery of which was clearly related to her trip to Quiriguá. She must have recognized a personal affinity for this color, as she sketched her own features on the West Queen—“west” being the direction in Mayan mythology associated with black. While Nevelson claimed it was a mistake (“a myth, really”) to link black with “death or finish,” in Western civilization black is the color associated with death, and the terms “shade” and “shadow” connote the spirits of the deceased. Thus, a sculptor who calls herself the architect of shadows almost automatically connects herself with such imagery. The etching Shadow City (also called Ancient City) carried intimations of both cemetery and ghost town.24 The rectangular structures placed in two rows across a horizontal format can be read either as buildings or headstones in a cemetery.
Alfred Maudslay. Stela C, South Face. Biologia Centrali-Americana (London: R.H. Porter and Dulau & Co, 1889–1902). Courtesy of Biodiversity Heritage Library. Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries.
Yet once again, Nevelson was denying something that had powerful personal meaning for her. Black was not symbolic of death, she claimed. But she also said in her autobiography that, “there was something in me drawing me to the black. I actually think that my trademark and what I like best is the dark, the dusk.”25 Another aspect of Nevelson’s affinity for black, the color of perpetual mourning, is her association of darkness with the concept of merging. An undated two-line poem in her papers expressed this succinctly:
Daylight has form
Darkness is oneness.26
These words can evoke both transcendental yearnings and the child’s wish to be united with the original source of warmth and safety—the mother. Another telling remark was Nevelson’s response to a question about her feelings for her mother: “If my mother told me to jump out the window, I would jump. She was the closest thing in my life.”27 Nevelson’s repeated expression of love for her mother, combined with her denial of sadness at her death, lend support to understanding the artist’s conflicted view of the color black. Black was linked with death and loss on the one hand and on the other with the repudiation of painful feelings.
The mourning process for her parents and Nierendorf, long denied by Nevelson at a conscious level, finally received symbolic expression in Moon Garden + One, through her creation of a funereal environment consisting of a holy sepulcher, a cemetery garden, and a coffin. The interment of a king within the moon’s garden strongly suggests the reference to the parental imagery discussed earlier. The fact that this exhibit culminated in a crystallization of Nevelson’s formal style underlines the importance that her preoccupation with death and mourning had played in her life and work.
The breakthrough was psychological as well as aesthetic and spiritual. The public success of Moon Garden + One confirmed for her that she had met a long-unsatisfied need. Through a partial identification with her father, the builder, she had developed a clearer sense of herself and her sculptural style. “Somewhere in my inner being I’m a builder,” she noted.28
With Moon Garden + One Nevelson had created an Elsewhere; she had brought the ideal heavenly spheres down from the fourth dimension into the third-dimensional space of the gallery. She had brought the feelings from her painful past into the present where they could be transformed into masterworks. She could not fully experience the sadness of mourning her dead parents, which surely included their own sorrows at the time they actually died. Now a decade or more later she had created a world in which she could finally tolerate the pain of past losses, her own and her mother’s, and was ready to say goodbye. That is the principal psychological explanation of Louise Nevelson’s turn to environmental sculpture. In order to arrive at this point in her work Nevelson had to experience the psychological pain and repressed memories from her past. Once achieved, she could describe her style with perceptual and aesthetic terms—calling herself an architect of shadow.
More prosaic factors also helped Nevelson arrive at this momentous creative moment—as they always do with artists’ breakthroughs to new ways of seeing and working. The zeitgeist played its role. The desire to create an entire world of one’s own through the construction of works of art was an emerging phenomenon in New York during the 1940s and 1950s. In his article on Nevelson in Arts Yearbook, published in the late 1950s, Robert Rosenblum was not the first to note Nevelson’s similarity to popular Abstract Expressionist painters who formed the vanguard of the impulse toward environmental work: “In some ways, Louise Nevelson’s newest and most astonishing achievements—her vast wooden walls—recall the iconoclastic innovations of the new American painting…. In scale alone, the architectural magnitude of these forests of black boxes parallels the awesomely large paint expanses of Rothko, Still, or Newman, which similarly impose upon the spectator an engulfing sensuous environment.”29
The idea of environment was by no means the exclusive domain of painters and sculptors. Architects as well as artists seemed to be moving in new directions, and these developments provided both inspiration and support for Nevelson’s work of the mid- and late 1950s. Three weeks before Nevelson’s Moon Garden + One show, an impressive exhibition of Antoni Gaudí’s architectural work had opened at the Museum of Modern Art, and both Arts and Art News covered it extensively.30 On display were photographs of La Sagrada Familia, the extraordinary cathedral Gaudí never completed in Barcelona. While the curvilinear art nouveau style did not hold much fascination for Nevelson, the eerie surrealist quality of the Spanish architect’s work appealed to her. In many ways, the accumulation of richly detailed parts organized into a façade of compartments resembled her Sky Cathedral.31 Like all original artists, Nevelson’s formal evolution was simultaneously at one with the zeitgeist and one step in front of it.
Martha Jackson, the director of the highly regarded Martha Jackson Gallery, approached Nevelson at about this time, and the artist also knew it was the right time to make a change—an idea that both thrilled and unsettled her.32 Roberts’s description of Nevelson’s move to Martha Jackson’s gallery is both astute and modest.
Our position as a non-profit gallery was that when people reached a certain level, our ambition was to place them where they belonged…. [N]othing in this commercial world can be done without investment and we did not invest … and to do the final promotion of an artist, you need the investment. I don’t think that she was happy leaving me, because she knew how well we’d worked…. But she was not able to afford it, because she had no money and the simple move of her pieces was something that had to be paid [for].33
As Roberts later explained to Arne Glimcher: “Now that the condition and the high level [in art galleries] has become so much like the stock exchange that [we could] not compete with it … [Louise] was not going to leave, but then the offer came with a financial subsidy…. We couldn’t compete, there was no question.”34
Colette Roberts’s friendship with Louise did not stop, and they continued to see each other regularly.35 Up until Nevelson signed a contract with Martha Jackson, Roberts was continuing to place Nevelson’s art in eleven more exhibitions and as many collections as she could. By the time she left Grand Central Moderns Gallery, Nevelson’s work was in MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Sara Roby Foundation Collection, the Newark Museum, the New York University Collection, Brandeis University, the Nebraska University Collection, and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. Roberts had more than fulfilled the hopes Nevelson had when they first met.
Typical of Nevelson’s situation in 1958 is the story of how MoMA ended up with the wall Sky Cathedral. Dorothy Miller, one of the Curators of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, had been keeping her eye on Nevelson for fifteen years, particularly when she had started showing at Grand Central Moderns Gallery and begun to paint the works all black. The two women had met at openings but didn’t become close friends until well after Nevelson achieved her breakthrough in the late 1950s. Roberts persuaded Miller and Alfred Barr, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, to see Nevelson’s Thirtieth Street house shortly before the Moon Garden + One exhibition.36 Miller and Barr were impressed with what they saw, though Nevelson’s chilly reception of Barr—after so many years of his lack of interest in her work—made him reluctant to help her at MoMA. But, once Miller and Barr saw Moon Garden + One, everything changed, and Barr decided that MoMA had to have a big black wall despite the museum’s lack of funds.37 With Roberts’s urging, Nevelson’s sister and brother-in-law, Lillian and Ben Mildwoff, donated a black wall and, presto, another Nevelson sculpture entered a major museum. Ben Mildwoff said it would be part of his way of helping pay for Nevelson’s move to a new house.
Nevelson had disassembled the original Sky Cathedral, and when MoMA sent a truck for the boxes, she said, “I’ll come with my assistant, we’ll assemble it at the museum, and your men can nail it together.”38 Barr was delighted to have the piece, and he wrote a letter to the Mildwoffs saying that whenever he feels blue he “goes and sits in front of the Nevelson wall.”39
In the late spring of 1958 Nevelson found a notice in the Times about a building at Twenty-Nine Spring Street and sent Teddy Haseltine to check it out. He reported back that it was a five-story house in Little Italy with an occupied ground floor. The sale of the building to “Louise Nevelson, sculptress” was announced in the Times on September 30, 1958.40 And so, very reluctantly, the artist moved from her secure perch into a new world. Again her family helped out, and loans from Nate and Ben made it possible for her to make the down payment.
Nevelson knew she had to move on and it wasn’t as easy as it had been a decade earlier to pick up and start again—in a new home and with a new dealer. Her increased drinking around this time may have helped to ease her into it. Nevelson’s sister Lillian was convinced that the move from Thirtieth Street to Spring Street, which was almost simultaneous with the move to a new gallery, unsettled Louise and made her bitter.
When Lillian Mildwoff, who was now well off and had many friends who were millionaires, tried to persuade them to buy her sister’s work—as many as they might want for two-hundred dollars—there were no takers. Despite her pleading, “not one bought anything, not one.”41 As a result many of the sculptures stored at the Thirtieth Street house had to be either stored or discarded. Nevelson had hoped to get eighteen thousand dollars for the entire “environment.” Despite the extensive positive publicity for Moon Garden + One, she sold only seven individual boxes for ninety-five dollars each. Many of the boxes from the show were later shifted from one composition to another before they were permanently placed. Several years later some of those same boxes landed in new compositions that would be painted gold.
The family had been subsidizing Louise and her work for over twenty-five years, and it was undoubtedly Nevelson herself who decided that it was time to accept Martha Jackson’s offer of a twenty-thousand dollar annual subsidy (Colette Roberts had thought the amount was thirty-thousand dollars) and change to a commercial gallery, which could help her take the next step forward. Nevelson could not have foreseen the unfortunate repercussions that would result, in the years to come, from leaving Roberts.
Martha Jackson was wealthy and had an elegant uptown gallery with a support staff that could vastly outperform Roberts’s one-woman operation. By March 1959, Jackson and Nevelson had a contractual agreement, and by April, Jackson had taken over the day-to-day operations of promoting Nevelson’s career.42 And promote she did. She sent photographs of Nevelson’s work to international journals. In 1959 Nevelson was included in eight group shows from Kentucky to Wiesbaden. She was nominated for, and won, cash prizes of one thousand dollars each in New York and Chicago. Not only were these large sums of money at the time, the juries for the shows were top curators from major museums and leading critics. For example, at the Art: USA: 59 at the Coliseum in New York, the prize jury included Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum and Clement Greenberg, influential art critic at The Nation.
By May of 1959, David Anderson, Martha Jackson’s son, was an active participant, and when his mother was distracted or ill, he stepped in to help. By August, Martha was sending checks for Louise to cash for her forthcoming European vacation. Even so, the transition to the new dealer was not an easy one.
Nevelson began the year 1959 speaking about her life and work on television, an activity that would continue for the rest of her career. Her poise and clarity were impressive on the small screen, and her family in Rockland got up early to watch their famous relative become even more famous. When she had visited them in May, the Portland Sunday Telegram detailed her activities and noted that “the famous New York Woman came home to Rockland. Here she talked about her work, her family and her youth.”43
“All my life I have felt that I knew where I wanted to go. I wanted to be an out-of-the-ordinary artist and a great one. It took me a little longer than I thought it would…. I did it the hard way. Others work hard to make the ‘right connections.’ … The miracle of it all is that I seem to have come through on such a grand scale.”44
That grand scale included renting a trailer in Maine, which she filled with driftwood, old boards, a weather-beaten barber pole, antique oak, and an iron baggage cart, and having it driven down to New York. Her explanation: “These are symbols of having lived and functioned and had a life of their own.” Gill writes “her creative mind takes these and gives them a type of resurrection.” Equally grand is the artist’s description of her home as reported by Gill: “the only private residence in Chinatown. It is an eighteen-room house largely filled with her work.”45 Like her father, Louise now collected antiques but, unlike her son who refurbished antiques to sell as a livelihood, she disassembled them to give them new life as parts of her constructions.
In August 1959, Nevelson sailed off to Europe with her sisters, Anita and Lillian, and Lillian’s daughter Susan. When she returned, she had three major shows to prepare: in September, a four-year retrospective at the David Herbert Gallery as well as a group show at the Castelli Gallery; in October, a black show, Sky Columns Presence, her first show at the Martha Jackson Gallery; and in December, a show of white-painted sculpture, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, at MoMA. She concentrated her efforts on Sky Columns Presence and Dawn’s Wedding Feast. Sky Columns Presence opened at the end of October 1959 at her new gallery and the press release provided the key words “mysterious,” “poetic,” “magic world,” and “traces of surrealism … now confirmed by a certain orderly mysticism.”46
As in Moon Garden + One, one gallery wall was completely lined with a wall of black boxes. Facing this along the other walls were groups of tall four-sided columns covered with reliefs—totemic Sky Columns of varying height and width, some of which were suspended from the ceiling but most standing like sentinels. Colette Roberts saw these columns as particularly architectural and cited the artist’s observation on the subject in her book on Nevelson. “Architecture? Architecture is everywhere order is. There is an architecture about our bodies, about the things we build and does not have to be a house.”47
In the center of the gallery, an enclosed relief tondo, a circular work entitled Sun stands on a pedestal. Elsewhere in the exhibit a similarly designed Moon is prominent. Unlike Moon Garden + One, the lighting of this exhibit was professionally designed by Schuyler Watts to create a unified atmosphere and promote an air of mystery.48
A telling indication of this show’s Amerindian focus is the presence of the Sun and Moon. These two prime deities of pre-Columbian culture were here incorporated into Nevelson’s formal and symbolic vocabulary. The hanging columns, in combination with the tall four-sided columns, represented a formal innovation in Sky Columns Presence. As mentioned earlier, the four-sided columns, with their mixture of high and low relief, recall the stelae she had seen in Quiriguá. Due to the limited light of Moon Garden + One, the reliefs on the outside of the boxes had been barely visible. Now she had made them easier to see in Sky Columns Presence, the black show that followed Moon Garden + One.
The critical reaction to Nevelson’s first show at Martha Jackson’s gallery was highly favorable. Dore Ashton, writing in The New York Times, called Nevelson the “grand mistress of the marvelous,” proposing that this exhibition surpassed everything she had done before, and observing that, while other artists—like the Constructivists, the Suprematists, and the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters—had experimented with creating a total ambiance of sculpture, “never has anyone saturated a room with such ideally idiosyncratic poetry.” Ashton explained that the strength of Nevelson’s work is derived from “her ability to sense and fulfill emotional needs.” She sees the boxes as “irreducible, archetypal symbols,” which “create visual similes for a specified état d’âme.”49 Ashton here came the closest of any critic so far to the idea that there might be specific personal meanings embedded in Nevelson’s enigmatic world of shadow boxes.
Like other critics, Ashton referred to Nevelson’s mysterious means. A year later she called Nevelson “an adept of the cryptic, of all that is secretive, all that harbors the promise of revelation.”50 Observing that Nevelson uses half-open doors on boxes that are partly in shadow, purposefully creating “in-between” places, “an imagined universe … [an] hermetic royaume”51 (or kingdom), Ashton carried forward Hilton Kramer’s observations about Nevelson’s use of shadow as a formal element in an architectural realm.
A few months later Ashton wrote a piece on Nevelson for the French journal Cimaise, discussing both Sky Columns Presence and Moon Garden + One and referring to the overarching goal of the artist. “If Nevelson were a writer she would be a writer of ‘romances,’ spinning tales of the wonderful; tales that transcend reality by insisting on the reality of an imagined universe; tales, in short, that strive toward a mythos.”52 Ashton evidently did not know about Nevelson’s specific fascination with the imagined universe of the fourth dimension, but she seemed aware that something unusual was behind the formal qualities of the work.
Nevelson’s next truly innovative work for Martha Jackson would be the gold walls—a dramatic departure from her work in both black and white—which came a year later.
In 1959 Nevelson was on top of the world and enjoying every moment. She was generous, now able to send her son weekly or monthly checks to help him with daily expenses, thus liberating him to do his own creative work. She wrote him inspiring letters about the joys of a creative life. They spoke every Sunday and, when they missed each other’s phone calls, Teddy filled Mike in on her life and mood.
In a letter from Mike in early November 1959, he simultaneously thanks his mother for a check and observes plaintively, “Sometimes I think it is funny that nobody thinks much of my sculpture. But after all these years of work I have never been more secure in my own mind and I am continuing in my own line, developing new forms and making my highly personal statement.”53
In the same letter Mike describes how, five months earlier, Teddy Haseltine appeared in Rockland with two friends where they rearranged, repainted, and relit the version of Sky Cathedral Nevelson had given to her brother Nate. A news item in the Portland Sunday Telegram had shown Mike setting up the eight-foot-high, fifteen-foot-long work in the front lobby of his hotel as best he could. In his letter to his mother on July 15, Mike acknowledged the difference Teddy and his colleagues had made. The work now “looks magnificent. I’m glad they made the improvement, because they share your mentality and understand your concept better than I. I really didn’t know how to stack the pieces for the best effect.”54
In the fall of 1959 Mike returned to Maine from his father’s funeral in Texas, where he had learned that Charles Nevelson had left whatever money he had to his second wife and nothing to him.55 Denying his disappointment with his father, by October Mike was writing with his usual mix of upbeat, happy father and protective adult son: “I was thinking of buying you a new heating pad for a gift. Would like to get you something else—something that could not be painted black or white. Don’t get overtired and watch your diet.”56
Nevelson’s next major exhibit, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, was designed to be a surprise for the art world by changing the color of her sculpture from black to white. Dorothy C. Miller was the curator of a series of MoMA exhibitions devoted to newcomers or little-known artists on the American scene. And now, on the heels of Nevelson’s success with Moon Garden + One, she asked Nevelson to exhibit with fifteen other “young” American artists at a show in this series, Sixteen Americans. Nevelson surprised Miller by accepting immediately and proposing the idea of a white rather than a black show.57
It is possible that Nevelson’s fondness for Dorothy Miller, as well as her excitement about exhibiting for the first time at MoMA and being included with a group of younger artists, inspired her to reach for greater heights. For over a year Nevelson had been associated with walls of black boxes—“a magical, mystical world.” She had become the “grand mistress of the marvelous.” Perhaps she felt the need to break out of the corner into which she and her critics had painted her and reverse her color palette.
In her autobiography, Nevelson explained her shift to white sculpture after five years of working with black-stained wood: Dorothy Miller “asked me if I would be in ‘Sixteen Americans.’ I guess I was so taken by storm and surprise … I said that I would do a white show…. in a way it was an homage to her…. It was a kind of wish fulfillment, a transition to a marriage with the world.”58 Nevelson might have noted that her son had written to her a few months earlier (before she had decided to do a white wedding feast) that he had just painted one of his wood sculptures with two coats of white and that “the dead white gives strong shadow contrasts and makes for more visual volume.”59
Despite being fifty-nine years old, Nevelson felt herself to be both debutante and bride. The night before the exhibition she stayed with close friend and fellow sculptor Anna Walinska, who gave her white orchids to wear at the opening.60 Just as Dido Smith had known that Nevelson herself was the Bride of the Black Moon, Walinska knew that Nevelson was the bride-to-be at her Wedding Feast.
“I may never [use black] again,” she told an interviewer, “because I’ve gotten tired of being crystallized. I’ve always wanted to free myself from the impact of the outside. Now I’m using another color for the Museum of Modern Art show…. The world is unlimited … the artist must never limit himself. The moment he’s limited … he’s dead!”61
In her autobiography she said:
Now … Dawn’s Wedding Feast, so it is early morning when you arise between night and dawn. When you’ve slept and the city has slept you get a psychic vision of an awakening. And therefore, between almost the dream and the awakening, it is like celestial…. Because the world is a little bit asleep and you are basically more alive to what’s coming through the day.
I feel that the white permits a little something to enter. I don’t know whether it’s a mood … probably a little more light. Just as you see it in the universe. The white was more festive.62
Nevelson rented a separate studio that she painted all white to prepare the work and also to keep the new development a secret. She worked intensively for three months, building the separate units: columns, boxes, and free-standing objects. She couldn’t give Miller photographs of completed work for the catalogue since it was constantly changing. Two columns and a temporary wall were constructed for the photos, but they were never again placed together in the same way.
In four hours she and Teddy Haseltine, along with two helpers from the museum staff, installed the show at the museum late in the afternoon before the opening. Miller recalled: “It was like eating a beautiful dessert after preparing a splendid meal.”63
The largest room in the MoMA exhibit had been reserved for Nevelson, and she installed a sixteen-foot-long wall of boxes against the back wall of the room. This section was called Dawn’s Wedding Chapel, and near the center of this section was a box entitled Dawn’s Wedding Mirror. The composition consisted of a large oval frame encircling a toilet-seat cover. To the left of the large sculpted wall—against the back and side walls—were two platforms forming an L on which stood ten tall, thin encrusted columns, similar to those made for Sky Columns Presence. The collages that covered them were as cluttered as the black ones from the earlier show, but they were easier to look at in white, as though the purity of the matte white simplified them. Several hanging columns, also similar to those in Sky Columns Presence, and a few more boxes made up the remainder of the exhibit. In front of one group lay a step-like set of boxes called Dawn’s Wedding Pillow.
At a wedding feast one should expect to find the bride, but the few titled pieces in the show do not specifically identify her. In front of the Wedding Chapel, a platform with two large totemic columns was placed diagonally to the Chapel wall. The columns were unmistakably figurative, with their larger lower sections and their heavily encrusted but narrow upper parts. To each column was attached a round shield bearing a low relief. On the biggest shield the relief elements were emphatically vertical, strongly suggesting that this column was meant to be the groom. The smaller tondo on the smaller column bears three square frames, each enclosing a delicate relief, probably the bride. These central figures have not been given titles, nor are they usually discussed in terms of content. It is possible to see the two shields as differentiated, the larger representing a sun and the smaller one a moon.
The two shields in Dawn’s Wedding Feast are similar to the Sun and Moon pieces from Sky Columns Presence. The variation in size and design of the two sets not only indicates the distinct celestial bodies but also strongly suggest gender differences. Thus, the black Moon from the Jackson Gallery show has wood fragments that appear like a woman’s hair surrounding an encrusted circular “face.” Like the two columns in Dawn’s Wedding Feast, the Sun and Moon pieces in Sky Columns Presence are placed in the center of the room as focal points.
If this hypothesis is valid, and the two large columns in Dawn’s Wedding Feast carry the respective shields of the moon and sun, then their presence in the chapel at the wedding feast implies that they are the couple in whose honor the other columnar figures have gathered.
In the installation photograph, the moon column is facing the Chapel wall, while the sun column faces away from both the Chapel and its columnar partner. This placement suggests that the moon column is in closer contact with the mirror in the wall toward which she is facing than with the sun column with whom she is presumably to be united. Although the “bride” column does not precisely face the mirror, she is aimed in its direction. It should also be noted that the pillow looks hard and uninviting, with a large sharp triangle in the center that would divide any couple brave enough to rest their heads there.
In the sequential development of Nevelson’s thematic exhibitions, the moon made its first appearance in Ancient Games, Ancient Places in the form of etchings, Moon Goddess I and Moon Lady, discussed earlier. Part of the aesthetic merit and iconographic fascination of both etchings is the obscuring darkness, in one case achieved through the heavy overlay of lace fabric. This may be another instance in which a mythical and impersonal figure (the moon goddess) is used to symbolize Nevelson and/or her mother. Minna Berliawsky was at times distant and unavailable, like the black moon rapt in her lifelong mourning. At other times, she shone in all her finery, indeed like a goddess to a young girl.
The appearance of lunar deities on the first voyage of the Bride of the Black Moon in 1955 implies their complex meaning. On the one hand, the Bride is to marry the moon, and on the other, the moon goddess protects and sponsors the young bride. Nevelson, as a young child, had sought in vain to be close to her mother; as a young bride, she must have looked once again to her mother for guidance. But for both Louise Berliawsky and Minna Smolerank marriage meant leaving home, moving to a metropolis and then suffering in a mismatched partnership. Thus the Moon Goddess could symbolize both the artist’s distant, wished-for mother of childhood and the equally distant mother of a young woman about to be married.
The monumental size and square-columned nature of the two shield-bearing central figures in Dawn’s Wedding Feast might also be understood as recollected images, most recently from Quiriguá, and further back in time from childhood. The sun god and moon goddess, so pivotal in the Mayan pantheon, have returned in Nevelson’s oeuvre for a celebrated marriage feast. As the early-rising Nevelson greets the dawn, that momentary union of light and shadowy darkness, she creates a magnificent white environment using artistic means to effect a resolution of her own personal conflict—much easier than the actual coming together of two people.
Nevelson’s inclusion in the Sixteen Americans exhibit at MoMA surprised the critics. She was already “the most famous artist in the group…. Louise Nevelson is a prime figure in sculpture whose influence can be seen on many of her younger colleagues.”64 The critics were taken aback by the change in color, and their reaction was mixed. Thomas B. Hess called these white pieces “catalogues of obsessions.”65 Dore Ashton was both enthusiastic and sharply perceptive. She saw Dawn’s Wedding Feast as a delightful fantasy from Victorian New England and related it to Emily Dickinson: “The baroque finery—lacey and latticed like a small Victorian town with its wooden houses and daintily fenced garden.”66 Clearly the critics had caught the mood of the exhibit, but had they divined any underlying meaning?
At the time of these exhibitions, formalism was the dominant way of looking at art. Iconography of the kind I have suggested above was reserved for medieval or early Renaissance works, where the focus was invariably religious and neither biographical nor psychological. That some of Nevelson’s close artist friends recognized the personal meanings contained in her thematic exhibitions has made it easier for me to argue for the personal meanings underlying the sculptures and environments that were usually denied by the artist. Despite the artist’s constant and conscious focus on the formal appearance of her work, she was nevertheless often able to imbue it with personal meaning.
Nevelson’s continuing perception of herself as the bride reappeared two years later when traveling with Miller (the MoMA curator who had invited her to Dawn’s Wedding) on their way to the Venice Biennale in 1962. Selected by the Museum of Modern Art to represent the United States, Nevelson’s exhibition was made up of remnants from Dawn’s Wedding Feast and Sky Columns Presence; a new white wall, which emerged in the installation, was retitled Voyage.67 The remarkable statement Nevelson claims to have made—upon arriving at the airport in Venice, discovering that her suitcase had not arrived, and learning that the airport officials were not willing to act quickly to resolve the problem—is the clearest instance of her relationship to the theme of the bride expressed in her work: “ ‘Now I’m getting married tomorrow and I’ve got to have my trousseau. My white wedding dress is in [the suitcase].’ Well, of course, I was already sixty-two years old and that was the last thing on my mind.”68
This remark, together with Nevelson’s continued avowal that the marriage theme represents for her a union with her work or the world in general, discloses both the truth and a denial of the complex significance of marriage for the artist. About Dawn’s Wedding Feast, Colette Roberts quotes the artist: “I’ve dedicated my life to my work and all it stands for. You have to be with the work and the work has to be with you, that’s the marriage.”69
Nevelson also wrote that, “I was hoping … Dawn’s Wedding Feast would be kept as a permanent installation in a museum…. I would have almost been willing to give it away at the time in order to place it permanently.”70 When it was not purchased as a single environment, Nevelson was disappointed, but she put the separate parts together in new compositions, which eventually entered private collections and from there often found their way into museums. Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II was sold to Jean and Howard Lipman, wealthy and influential art collectors, who eventually gave it to the Whitney Museum of Art. Likewise, there were several more Wedding Chapels and quite a few versions of Sky Cathedrals, including the one that went from Ben Mildwoff’s collection to MoMA.
Nevelson was not unique in her complex personal and artistic relationship to the theme of marriage. The twentieth-century artist whose work is most closely associated to the idea of the bride is Marcel Duchamp, and few other artists in the twentieth century have attempted to deal with this subject since his early (beginning around 1913) claim upon it. His master work, the enigmatic Large Glass, otherwise known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, was made in New York, and knowledge of its existence had thrown decades of artists into a tizzy.
While Duchamp’s brides are mechanical and beset by numerous bachelors, Nevelson’s brides tend to stand alone or to turn their backs on potential spouses. Nevelson’s use of this theme was intensely personal, and for many years it was a fertile source for her art. However, one can see that Duchamp’s work might have had an occasional catalytic effect on Nevelson.71
Whatever personal, even painful, significance might have been embedded in Dawn’s Wedding Feast, the artist was much more ready to point to universal metaphorical meanings than to direct anyone’s attention to her own life.
And then Louise Nevelson moved on. She had just exhibited at MoMA in Sixteen Americans with future art stars, all young men on their way up—Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella—and with her powerful presence had proven that age and gender were no bar to success and celebrity. Her long-frustrated ambition was about to overreach her way of life. The next development of her work—gold-painted wood sculpture—would reflect both her grandiosity and her vulnerability.
