Royal Tides (Installation view, Martha Jackson Gallery), 1961. Photograph © 2016 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“The golds are Louise Nevelson on a manic spree. It takes only a moment to recover from the shock of shimmering surface….”
—Kenneth Sawyer, catalogue essay for Royal Tides Exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961
Martha Jackson was an heiress to part of the Kellogg fortune and had one of the best-financed and most prestigious galleries in New York. After opening the Martha Jackson Gallery in a townhouse on East Sixty-Ninth Street with a series of exhibitions by outstanding artists, including Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, and the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies, she became a founding member of the Art Dealers Association and soon was known as “one of the most extraordinary women dealers in America.”1 Just as Nierendorf’s gallery had been in the early 1940s, Martha Jackson’s gallery was a gathering place for artists of all generations as well as New York City art aficionados.2
Louise Nevelson liked Jackson’s frank, unconventional side. For example, when Jackson felt like it, she would stretch out and relax on the living room floor of a total stranger who had invited her to lunch.3 Perhaps, for Nevelson, her most appealing quality was her acceptance of the artist’s need for control over her work. Nevelson recalled. “Martha let me do exactly what I wanted. She was alert and open-minded—a great individualist.”4
When Nevelson joined the Martha Jackson Gallery, the two women entered into a contractual agreement for “exclusive representation” beginning on April 1, 1959, and lasting until December 31, 1961. Jackson instantly went into action and began to make cooperative arrangements with galleries and museums around the country.
On May 6, 1959, Jackson wrote to the Bolles Gallery in San Francisco that: “Miss Nevelson has placed everything in our hands and agrees to an exhibition providing you are willing to purchase outright one-third or more of the total value of the sculpture and pay all the transport and insurance charges.” She ends with: “So much is happening around Miss Nevelson now that I can assure you that by 1960 her work will be very much in the art world’s eye and sought for by collectors. I hope you … let us know [your] decision so that your gallery will be the first in San Francisco to show NEVELSON.”5
After her first show in Jackson’s gallery, Sky Columns Presence, in October 1959, Nevelson was not only financially solvent as an independent woman artist for the first time in her life, but she soon had exhibitions much farther afield than ever before, and was showing in some new but prestigious avant-garde galleries, such as Leo Castelli Gallery.
Martha Jackson soon worked out a contract with Daniel Cordier in France, who would now be Nevelson’s sole representative in Europe.6 When she was wooing Cordier, Jackson used a clever sales strategy. She announced the competition. “I have a world contract signed by Louise Nevelson to represent her work. She is interested now to have a contract in Europe and wishes me to arrange this for her. As you were the first dealer to buy her work and as you plan a show for her, she wishes to hear your wishes first. Mr. Claude Haim, a dealer, is here now and is ready to make a proposal. Please cable us whether you are interested to discuss a contract or not.”7
In another letter, Jackson told Cordier that the response to the recent exhibition Sky Columns Presence was phenomenal, attracting Asians and Europeans who were “outspoken in ranking Nevelson as one of the great sculptors of the world.”8 Jackson’s hardball tactics succeeded. She then had to work even harder to persuade Nevelson that she should agree to sign with Cordier, who was now enthusiastic—but at a price. One of the results was increased pressure to produce. “Walls, Walls, Walls” could be the title of Jackson’s June 1960 letter to the artist as she communicated Cordier’s insistence that Nevelson continue to produce black wood walls. He loved them; he could sell them; they stood for her and her grand achievement. Since she was already producing mostly walls, Nevelson could accept Cordier’s conditions. In fact, she had so many boxes of black-painted sculpture available that she was able to make eight different full versions of Sky Cathedral.
However, the relationship with Cordier changed the way Nevelson had previously worked with dealers. She would now have to do what he wanted, make work that he needed, not necessarily work she felt should come next—something that never had occurred when she worked with either Nierendorf or Roberts. For the independent Nevelson, the woman for whom freedom was absolutely essential, producing the number of black wood walls a dealer required was hard to accept. But she did—and she eventually paid the price.
By this time Nevelson had established several styles of black-painted sculpture, both inside boxes and free standing. Some consisted of rough pieces of wood clumped together. These rough-hewn works featured old nails and broken bits of lumber. They differ entirely from the cityscapes of 1955–56, where a lineup of smoothly finished forms creates a silhouette reminiscent of an urban scene at night. In 1957–59, when she shifted almost entirely to boxed compositions, she often combined the rough elements with the smooth. For the most part, the boxed pieces were put together separately from the free-standing ones.
The next phase involved combining the boxes into a larger composition. At that point she might choose to combine opposite qualities, rough with smooth, vertically oriented with horizontal, and especially straight lines with curves. Nevelson created increasingly complex rhythms of multiple parts, experimenting her way toward mastery throughout the late 1950s and reaching an apogee in the early 1960s, capping her achievement by switching to white and gold—both of which offered new formal facets with which she could orchestrate a symphonic whole.
At the beginning of 1960 Nevelson was on a roll. Dawn’s Wedding Feast was on exhibit at MoMA until February 15. She had a solo show of all-black sculpture at David Herbert’s new Gallery on East Sixty-Ninth Street in January and was included in group shows at the Camino Gallery in New York and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. With Martha Jackson handling her career, Nevelson’s work appeared in top galleries around the country and Europe. All the artist had to do was produce. Her inclusion in group shows was more limited than it had been earlier because the choice of exhibitions was more focused and strategic.
As part of her gallery practice Martha Jackson also promoted loans of the artist’s work to various places that could increase her visibility and sometimes lead to a purchase. By October 1960 Nevelson’s work was on loan to the Riverside Museum in New York, Artists Equity, Lever House, and the Society for Ethical Culture. John Canaday of The New York Times noted that “Louise Nevelson, whose work seems to be everywhere at once these days, [is] … one of the sought-after artists.”9
Jackson also knew how to pursue affluent collectors. By the end of 1960 the Jackson Gallery had negotiated the purchase of two white hanging columns from Dawn’s Wedding Feast by MoMA, courtesy of the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. The Rockefellers and the Lipmans would continue to purchase work and support Nevelson’s career until the end of her life. Moreover, both families helped advance her reputation by donating her work to major museums.
Thanks to Martha Jackson, Louise Nevelson was financially secure at last, and it was only during her representation by Jackson that Nevelson painted her wood sculpture gold. Of the many decisions Nevelson made in 1960, both personally and professionally, painting her sculpture gold was the most remarkable.
She showed the first gold-painted sculpture at Martha Jackson’s daring exhibition New Forms – New Media I in June 1960.10 Her tall piece, Golden Night, was described in the show’s checklist as “the artist’s conception for a gold clock tower to face the Guggenheim Museum.” The Guggenheim had opened eight months before and was the talk of the town. The price for Nevelson’s scrap-wood sculpture was an astounding four thousand dollars.
Nevelson had made this sculpture following a trip to Texas with her sister Lillian, where they were fêted, dined, and housed by local art patrons.11 She had been so impressed by the amount of gold—or gold-plated metal—used in Texas homes for bathroom faucets, knives, forks, and plates that she began her brief experiment in gold-painted sculpture. According to her daughter-in-law, Susan Nevelson, the artist was thumbing her nose at the vulgarity she had seen in Texas, where money was the highest value.12
The June 1960 group exhibit at the Martha Jackson Gallery was regarded as being part of “the Junk Culture” (the use of unconventional materials, usually urban detritus) and was notable for its inclusion of some barely known, but soon-to-be-celebrated, young downtown artists. Jackson was prescient about showing this controversial work, and the two New Forms – New Media exhibitions she presented in June and September 1960 included Nevelson, as well as the future stars of Pop Art, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana; Peter Forakis, who would be part of the Park Place group; the happening impresario Allen Kaprow; and the future Minimalists Ronald Bladen and Dan Flavin.13
By October 1960 Nevelson was ready to show more work in gold at the important avant-garde Stable Gallery, where she was included in a guest exhibition of contemporary sculptors attempting “to cross new esthetic frontiers.” Stuart Preston’s review of the show in The New York Times noted: “In a class by itself stands a wood construction by Louise Nevelson, coated with gold paint, completely out of mourning.”14 In the same month the artist included gold-painted Royal Tide III in Sculpture 1960, a Sculptors Guild show at Lever House, as well as two gold walls, Royal Tide I and II, in her solo exhibit at Cordier’s gallery in Paris. Dore Ashton and Colette Roberts had prepared the way for the French public by writing long articles about Nevelson in art journals.15
The large solo show in Paris was Nevelson’s major introduction to Europe, and it was the first time black, white, and gold works were presented together. While he was setting up the show, Cordier asked her “to disappear for a few days.” When she returned the night before the opening, she was with her sister-in-law, who noted that Cordier himself was so full of emotion about Louise’s work that it brought her to tears. “It was fabulous and the reception was magnificent.”16
In December 1960 Jackson displayed Royal Voyage in the “Enormous Room” at her gallery.17 The installation was written up in The New York Times by Stuart Preston, who observed that “Nevelson’s huge gold-painted wood construction covers one whole wall like a gigantic Victorian buffet.”18
That year, a Look magazine article by Charlotte Willard about women artists in America showcased Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan. Nevelson’s sizable income from her art for 1960 was reported to be fifty-thousand dollars, and the fact that she painted her work black, white, or gold was illustrated with a photo of the artist standing by her work in all three colors. Willard wryly evoked the suddenness of the artist’s success: “Less than three years ago Louise Nevelson was living as she had lived most of her life, modestly, unrecognized and self-assured.” She continued on a more serious note: “Women have not yet been given their due…. Look wonders whether, in the years to come, the center of interest will shift. Will some of the artists on these pages match their male contemporaries?”19
Nevelson and Jackson ended the year in Jamaica for a vacation in the sun and then on to 1961—another breakthrough year. In the spring, Nevelson participated in a panel discussion at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, which John Canaday wrote up in The New York Times. The title was “Where do we go from here?” Nevelson and Marcel Duchamp were the star speakers, and Katherine Kuh, art historian and curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, was the moderator. Duchamp launched into a diatribe against materialism: “The dollar and art shouldn’t mix, but they do, and since you can’t destroy money, money is destroying art…. The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.”20
Perhaps stung by Duchamp’s attack on money now that she was finally earning some from her art, Nevelson took an entirely different tack. She declared herself “utterly optimistic [and] sympathetic” about the future of art and was “dying to see what young people are going to do.” “There is something new under the sun. When man wants to reach the sun, the artist has to have parallel forms to match this ambition.”21
Several times during the discussion “Nevelson declared a faith in extra-sensory factors as the true basis of art. ‘We are in tune with the sun and the moon and the airplane. I feel just wonderful about what is taking place…. Consciousness isn’t enough. We have to have extra-sensory values.”22
Nevelson looked the part of a believer in the occult by wearing “fluorescent-green eye shadow, peaked hat and a black cape with silver cabalistic patterns on it.”23 Her unusual costume on this occasion was a rare exception during a period in which she mostly wore “ordinary” clothes and looked like an attractive but conventional middle-aged woman.
In April 1961 Nevelson’s second solo show, Royal Tides, opened at the Martha Jackson Gallery. The exhibit, which featured seven gold walls, was presented with much fanfare. A poem by Jean Arp, in which he called Nevelson the granddaughter of Kurt Schwitters, and commentary by the French painter Georges Mathieu established her European credentials with panache in the beautifully designed catalogue.
The exhibition had been carefully orchestrated by Jackson. Nevelson received an elaborate schedule months in advance warning her that: “All walls had to be constructed by March 1, all photos taken by March 3, all catalogue data collected by March 7.”24 Nothing—or at least very little—was left to chance.
The press release set out to explain the artist’s new work: “The present title, The Royal Tides, reflects the artist’s belief in the joyous maturity of these her most recent works…. The artist’s development suggests a journey of one who has come from the darkness, mystery and depression of Night through Dawn and emerged in the splendor of the blazing noonday sun.”25
In his eloquent foreword in the exhibition catalogue, Kenneth Sawyer noted that this was to be “the first time Nevelson’s ‘Black, White and Gold’ works have been exhibited together in this country…. The avalanche of splendor that tumbles from her studio is a source of wonder—and envy—to her contemporaries, and downright bewildering to her friends…. ‘How,’ one wonders, ‘can this creature sustain an army of worshipers, three studios, and a production that is often stupefying even to her most extravagant admirers?’ ” Sawyer gives his all to the gold—“disquieting implications in our culture, light is controlled, heights and depths are voluptuous to the eye, they are perfectly coordinated. No vulgarity here. Instead there is a quality that recalls High Baroque—a boldness and freedom.”26
The years of arranging and rearranging furniture in every room of every house Louise Berliawsky had inhabited had now found their zenith in her walls of sculpture, which Jackson was exhibiting here in all three colors. Dore Ashton astutely noted the results: “Because Nevelson works in terms of ensembles, it is possible to overlook her extraordinary inventiveness in each unique piece. This exhibition, if seen in terms of the individual boxes, abounded in ideas, plastic ideas that never seem exhausted. Nevelson has an unfailing instinct for composition and individually, some of these units struck me as little masterpieces.”27
Most reviewers admired the new gold-painted works. Brian O’Doherty of The New York Times wrote a long piece expressing his admiration for the baroque richness of the gold-painted sculptures.28 And only one reviewer, Jack Kroll of Art News, had a generally negative response to Nevelson’s new work. He observed that “her vast boxed walls are like the contents of a gigantic warehouse” and that the gold work reinforces “the sense of a world embalmed.”29
Royal Tides (Installation view, Martha Jackson Gallery), 1961. Photograph © 2016 Estate of Rudy Burckhardt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
After her success with Royal Tides, Nevelson was ebullient. Whether she was conscious at the time of the connection, it seems highly likely her work in gold was related to her representation by Martha Jackson and the new-found prosperity that came with it. The advent of the new color came the same year as the contractual agreement with Jackson: 1959. By the fall of 1962, most of her work in gold was done—and so was the arrangement with Martha Jackson. The few gold-painted constructions made after that time were exceptions for specific purposes. More telling, perhaps, is the fact that several works initially shown as gold were repainted and subsequently exhibited in black.
Nevelson always felt free to edit her earlier work. What pleased her eye might change over time, and it never seemed to her to be a betrayal of her aesthetic principles. This is particularly true of the gold-painted sculpture, which stands out as one of the few shining miscalculations in her oeuvre. Comparing the original gold and later black versions of Royal Tide III, it is evident how much more visible the individual boxed compositions become when they are black.30 The blurring of that specificity with the gold paint makes the whole much more important than its parts, although this is not true for all the gold walls. Moreover, the shadows in the gold-painted works often don’t have the power and mystery of those in the black-painted wood. Nevelson was generally better able to master these qualities as negative space with black-painted works.
Opinions vary enormously about why Nevelson went through a period of painting her sculpture gold. Rufus Foshee, a young art dealer with a desk at the Martha Jackson Gallery, was close to Nevelson throughout her time with Jackson and had strong views about her work in gold. “Things were flying high for her when she made the gold,” he said. “So, why not a golden lining? It seem perfectly logical to me that the gold came when it did. She thought, ‘If white will upset them, then I’ll upset them even more with gold. Why should gold be considered vulgar?’31 Much later he added: “The gold said, Here I am. Fuck you, you bastards. I am here to stay.’ ”32
Arne Glimcher has a similar viewpoint about the transgressive aspect of the gold work: “It gave her a lot of satisfaction that she had taken the detritus of society and spun it into gold—the metaphor for fine art. It wasn’t money; it was a social value. She loved that she could transform toilet seats. I’ve often told the story about someone asking her, ‘Isn’t that a toilet seat?’ And she responded: ‘No, it’s a halo around the Madonna.’ ”33 But he also points to the perceptual and aesthetic rationale for the gold paint: “Some of the gold-painted sculptures are beautiful. Both the white and the black works absorbed light, but the gold reflected light. So instead of sucking you into the pieces, the gold pushed you away. It was deliberate; another move for her.”34
In her 1964 book about Nevelson, Colette Roberts offered a spiritual-poetic perspective on the gold sculpture, which is at odds with the ones expressed by both Foshee and Glimcher. Her obscure, almost metaphysical, depiction of the gold-painted works refers to the paradoxical “Elsewhere,” the word she had coined to describe Nevelson’s fourth-dimensional world: “Her enthusiasm for gold should not be confused with a symbol of material success. It is the gold of some secret altar and of “harmony with … unknown forces.” She concludes that the Royal Tides “assert a total order, order over Chaos, which does not exclude Chaos … a paradox of classic order encompassing romanticism.”35
When the artist herself was asked about why she used gold, her ideas boiled down to two essential thoughts: Gold shines like the sun. Gold is cash. I can transform one into the other. In her words: “Gold has been the staple of the world through the ages; it is universal. The reality of gold is alchemy.”36 But the practical woman who had lived in straitened circumstances for so long was never far below the surface. Without gelt—“money” in Yiddish—she would not be able to continue making sculpture.
The thought is echoed in her autobiography, Dawns + Dusks: “Gold is a metal that reflects the great sun…. Really I was going back to the elements. Shadow, light, the sun, the moon…. And don’t forget that America was considered the land of opportunity…. They promised that the streets of America would be paved with gold.”37
Nevelson’s view of gold was alternatively spiritual, “fourth-dimensional,” or downright materialistic. Her highfalutin words about the sun and the moon—alchemical references—also speak to the strictly formal goals she reached with many of these remarkable works. Royal Game, for example, ranks with the best of her oeuvre and contains every bit of Nevelson’s compositional legerdemain (visible to us even under the gold paint). The tensely arched slats in the top box tie the whole together, as we can see from the various verticals on both the right and left sides of the lower two boxes. The bottom box declares itself the gravitational base, with furniture legs as well as its busyness. Finally, the ovals and circular forms are carefully arranged to draw the eye around within the whole. Royal Game, as well Solar Winds, Royal Tide I, and Royal Tide IV, expressed her spiritual wishes and hopes to bring the viewers to an idealized realm.
Finally, while some reviewers were very impressed with Nevelson’s development in new colors, Hilton Kramer—her most eloquent champion—was not. He dismissed it as over-the-top and glitzy. And however pleased Nevelson was by the money and attention the gold work provided, she listened carefully to Kramer’s reservations. After several years she put away her gold paint—which was actually a new product, Spray-O-Namel—and returned to her forte, wood painted black.38 “She had stopped making gold work before she was with me,” Arne Glimcher stated matter-of-factly. “I think she felt that the works she painted gold were a finite group of works.”39
The money Nevelson received from the gallery allowed her to comfortably help her son by beginning to pay back the money he had sent to support her in the two decades before she was able to support herself. She was sending “beautiful” large checks to Mike very regularly all through 1960 and 1961. He expressed his gratitude in long, loving letters to her. He explained that the money she was sending “has really transformed our lives and we must regard it as a worthwhile investment. Not a cent of it went to self indulgence.”40
Mike Nevelson brought his family down to New York in late January for a ten-day vacation and afterwards wrote to her about how “good it is for kids to feel they are part of a family with grandparents and all the works.”41 Two weeks later he again wrote, thanking her for the check: “Flo and I realize that even with your great success, this money is something of a sacrifice for you. We want you to know that we appreciate and think it is a wonderful thing for you to be able to do.”42 A few months later Nevelson sent another big check in honor of the birth of her third grandchild, Maria Isak, named in part for her great-grandfather.43 Whatever unhappiness Louise or Mike Nevelson had felt about each other during the earlier hard years, that was now long past, and they both enjoyed their very positive mutual relationship.
A few months later Mike Nevelson was in high spirits because he had the prospect of an exhibition in Paris. But he didn’t stop being the wise advisor and protector of his mother: “I really feel that my career is launched and on the way. Take care of yourself. Smoke less and cough less. The weather here is fine. Now back to work.”44
For more than a decade Louise Nevelson had been known as a “sculptor’s sculptor,” admired by a wide group of young artists as well as many of her peers. Financially secure for the first time since her marriage forty years earlier, she was at last able to support herself. Her first work in gold, with its four-figure price, made a clear statement that she felt she could command high prices. After all, she was being represented by a commercial gallery—even better, one run by a wealthy businesswoman.
According to the deal worked out with Jackson’s gallery, Nevelson received twenty-thousand dollars a year from Jackson and another twenty-thousand dollars from Daniel Cordier, for a total of forty-thousand dollars—a fortune in the early 1960s. For the annual sum the Martha Jackson Gallery paid Nevelson, Jackson and Cordier now owned all the work she produced. If that work didn’t sell quickly or for the hoped-for amount, Nevelson owed even more work to Jackson, who was overseeing the division between the two galleries. In the early 1960s, though Nevelson surely felt the pressure of having to produce large amounts of sculpture to meet the contractual arrangements with her dealers, she rode those arrangements out from a position of strength.
By the beginning of 1960, after a busy year of exhibitions, sales, and prizes, Martha Jackson worked out detailed policies for handling Nevelson and her sculptures. Jackson assigned Thomas Kendall, a sophisticated young man with an art history background, to take charge of everything having to do with Nevelson for the gallery. This included coordinating the way the work was exhibited, sold, photographed, and stored, as well as keeping the records and keeping track of Nevelson’s work—where it was going and when it was sold, and so on. Kendall’s salary was split fifty-fifty with the Daniel Cordier Gallery.
It soon became evident to Martha Jackson that she needed more than one person to tend to the Nevelson inventory. The photographer Rudy Burkhardt was hired to visually record Nevelson’s work at every turn.
The following policies were designed to protect the artist, her work, and her reputation, to bring order out of the chaos of Nevelson’s rapid working style and generous distribution of her work to family, friends, dealers, critics, and assorted causes, as well as to ensure that the gallery was adequately recompensed:
1. No one was to visit Nevelson at her studio or interrupt her work without some cash sale taking place.
2. At the gallery, sales over five hundred dollars were to be reviewed by Martha.
3. Cash deposits were required because of the fragility of the sculptures.
4. The walls that had been sold were to be set up by Louise and Ted Haseltine; the financial arrangements would be managed by Martha, who would visit the purchasers to check on their satisfaction and to settle the accounts.
5. Tom Kendall would arrange for Rudy Burkhardt to take photographs.45
Lists of possible purchasers and the status of their interest were detailed, as were plans for exhibitions at galleries around the country. Once Martha Jackson and Daniel Cordier had worked out their agreement, contract purchases were arranged, listing the walls by name, by number of boxes, by square footage and by price per size, for example walls that were twenty to twenty-four square feet were priced at six-thousand dollars, those twenty-four to thirty-nine square feet were priced at seventy-five hundred, and so on. In selling art by the square foot, the gallery was stepping in a direction Nevelson would surely have found offensive if she had known about it, which it seems that she did not.46 Was this artistry or business practice?
The Martha Jackson Gallery worked out a variety of percentages for sales at galleries to which Nevelson’s works were sent. This would eventually become a contentious matter between the artist and the gallery. They ranged from a low of “10% to us, 30% to them” for large exhibits to “30% to us, 20% to them” for “small and local” galleries.47
As far as the gallery was concerned, all of this meticulous organization was necessary. Although Nevelson was characteristically neat and orderly, she was used to doing with her work whatever suited her on a given day at a given time. For example, sometimes the gallery would offer a wall to a client based on a particular combination in a photograph and later would discover that Nevelson had taken some of the boxes from the “original” composition without notice and used them in a different composition for a different client.
A note from Tom Kendall to Nevelson on August 23, 1961, is typical. Nevelson had proposed exchanging one of her walls for a painting by Adja Yunkers, the artist and husband of influential critic Dore Ashton. Kendall felt it necessary to remind Nevelson that, while under contract to Jackson and Cordier, she had to toe the line: “As you know both Martha Jackson and Daniel Cordier have to refuse your sculptures before you can actually part with a wall installation.”48
It was understandably irritating when Nevelson would dismantle walls, which had been photographed in the gallery and were available for sale. It was especially irritating when she sold some of the boxes from these walls directly to collectors, since the gallery would get no cut from those transactions. Sometimes, Martha Jackson seemed to tolerate Louise Nevelson’s arbitrary behavior. For example, over time the Howard and Jean Lipman changed and exchanged walls they owned, and, since they were loyal Nevelson collectors, both Nevelson and Jackson were willing to accommodate their requests.
What becomes clear in all the inventorying and planning for prospective sales is that many people were involved in supporting the artist’s career development. Martha Jackson jumped in when there was need for direct personal contact with a client. Tom Kendall was the go-between for Nevelson and everybody else. Nevelson’s brother-in-law, Ben Mildwoff, could be counted on to make available for sales the walls and boxes Nevelson had stored with or loaned to him. Colette Roberts was still serving as a liaison for the institutions, such as New York University, or for individuals with whom she had originally made contact.
Sometime in early 1961 Jackson’s son, David Anderson, also became involved in Nevelson’s dealings with the gallery. Anderson worked as a sort of business manager and secretary for his mother. His title was vice-president and secretary, and, though he had no previous business experience, he gave himself the task of setting up a new accounting system for each of the gallery’s artists, calling the previous system of accounting “rather haphazard.”
In an interview in 2008, David Anderson recalled:
The gallery’s practice was to make cards and tags with numbers, titles, date, and dimensions. We had Nevelson’s boxes standing on the floor. She would come in and immediately construct, deconstruct and reconstruct walls, then we called in a photographer.
A wall would stand for a couple of days, and then she would come back and make a different wall. Since the tags were on the back against the wall, it became impossible to track the boxes by number, and a photographer would have to come and take new photographs.
Once the show was over, there was no room to store the work, so we would return the boxes to her studio. Then she’d get a call from a collector asking her to go to their house, she’d go there and measure the space, go back to her studio, pick out the boxes she wanted and make a new wall.49
Once Anderson was involved, the system became much more confusing than it had been before.50 The arrangements between the Martha Jackson Gallery and Nevelson, which had previously been comprehensible to her, were now so complicated that she asked on several occasions for a straightforward accounting.
No matter what Nevelson ultimately felt about the accounting practices of Martha Jackson’s gallery, she knew that Jackson also did the difficult work of defending her artists. When a curator from the Art Institute of Chicago questioned the “permanency of Nevelson’s White Column,” stating that the piece would disintegrate in six months without museum care, Jackson instantly rode to the rescue, writing a strong letter about Nevelson, guaranteeing her work to last as long as any wood sculpture by contemporary artists, and stating that she knew of no complaints about Nevelson’s sculptures. She then informed him of the other highly important and knowledgable collectors of White Columns: Dorothy Miller at MoMA, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, and Mr. and Mrs. John de Menil. If the curator had any more doubts, Martha Jackson invited him to visit Nevelson’s studio.51
Martha Jackson was a consummate dealmaker and a genius at working out consignment arrangements with galleries all over the United States, and her timing was usually impeccable. A prescient example was the arrangement she made with a twenty-two-year-old neophyte who had just opened Pace, a small gallery at 125 Newberry Street in Boston. The day after Nevelson’s big show Royal Tides closed at Jackson’s gallery, on May 20, 1961, Arnold Glimcher arranged for a truck to take seventeen of the unsold pieces up to Boston, where he opened a Nevelson show nine days later. Glimcher was surprised and grateful that Martha Jackson would let him, a graduate student in art at Boston University, take on one of her important artists. “She let me pack up a truck with all these Nevelsons and drive it to Boston. No one signed a piece of paper. Martha was gracious and fantastic.”52
The story wasn’t quite as casual as Glimcher recalled, since shipping records show exactly what was sent on consignment from MKJG to Arnold “Glimshire.” But in essence the story is true. Reflecting backwards, Glimcher says that Martha Jackson should never have let him do that. “I was nobody—just a kid from Boston. She was a very rich woman.” He had only twenty-four hundred dollars to his name—lent by his older brother Herb—and almost no experience.
That Martha Jackson would have agreed to let an art-world novice take seventeen sculptures to Boston on consignment immediately after her own important Nevelson exhibition seems both extraordinary and in character. Jackson was allowing galleries all over the country—in fact all over the world—to show and sell Nevelson’s work.
Milly Glimcher, Arne’s wife, remembered a different aspect of the show:
It’s indelible in my mind. Absolutely indelible. We had asked Louise to come for the show, and we told her we would put her up at the Ritz. As she came down Newbury Street, we were looking out the window and waiting. We saw her approach and were completely puzzled. She has a huge head of blond hair that didn’t look like pictures of her. We couldn’t believe our eyes. When she came closer we saw it was a fox hat she was wearing at the end of May. It was hot, and she had on a long flouncy Native American skirt and lots of silver jewelry. Of course she called us “Darlings” and hugged us. I will never forget that image of her coming down the street.53
Rufus Foshee, a man half Nevelson’s age, from Alabama and aspiring to be an art dealer, had a few loyal clients who liked and bought Nevelson’s work. Here is the way he recalled the sequence of events as they unfolded around Nevelson’s first exhibition with Glimcher, another take on the same events:
Sometime in May 1961, Arne Glimcher came to Louise’s house downtown. I worked with them on having a show in Boston. The show was arranged for Memorial Day weekend. Louise would not go to Boston unless I went with her. We stayed at the Ritz Carlton ($15 a day then). Louise kept me up most of the night threatening to jump out the window, while waving a bottle of Scotch in one hand. I didn’t think about it in those days, but later I could see how humiliating that Boston thing was for her. She had had all those shows in New York and not much was sold.
Foshee remembered other aspects of the weekend: “On Sunday at the appointed time, Louise and I went to the Pace Gallery. The gallery was packed and the show was already sold out. I am quite certain Arne had bought everything. (No matter, I knew that he would be her dealer whenever he landed in New York. It took four years.) By the time the show opened the next night, nobody would have guessed what despair the anticipation had caused the artist—but there were rewards. For the first time in her career, Nevelson had nearly a sellout show.”54
While the 1961 Pace Gallery Nevelson show was not the sellout that Rufus Foshee recalled, it was nonetheless a big success. Approximately six or seven works were bought—far more than Jackson had managed to sell a few weeks earlier in New York.
Glimcher’s gallery was named after his father Pace, who had recently died.55 His young wife Milly, an undergraduate student in art history at Wellesley College, was his helper, as was his mother, Eva, who “babysat the gallery” while Arne and Milly attended their classes.56 Eva Glimcher taught her son the rudiments of salesmanship, and he taught his mother all about art. The arrangement worked beautifully as the two quickly learned from each other.
Aware that his gallery had come onto the scene without fanfare, he devised a plan to gain quick renown. When he was advertising the show in art magazines, he simply put the word “PACE” in stenciled letters on the ad without much more information. That caught the attention he was aiming for.
Arne Glimcher came down to New York as often as he could. He wasn’t even twenty years old in 1958, an undergraduate at Massachusetts College of Art, when he had discovered the work of Louise Nevelson at the Museum of Modern Art. He recalls having seen Sky Cathedral there, installed in an alcove. At the time he mistakenly read “Louis” for “Louise” and believed that the artist was a man. But by the next year, at the time of her big breakthrough show at the museum, he knew who she was. When he came down from Boston to see Sixteen Americans at MoMA, Dawn’s Wedding Feast hit him like a thunderclap—an epiphany.
As an art dealer, Glimcher felt he had a gift for selecting artists who had both the talent and the confidence—“the blissful stupidity” as he called it—to believe that they could do as well or better than their predecessors. He was open to the new and was drawn simultaneously to Pop Art, just coming on the scene, and abstract art, which was both subtle and sophisticated. Nevelson was one of his three favorites, along with Josef Albers and Claes Oldenburg. She was the first New York artist he wanted to show at his fledgling gallery in Boston.
Was it savvy of him to go after her? Yes and no. He probably couldn’t stop himself. Nevelson was his ego ideal, his maternal imago personified. He wanted to be an artist himself, but he lacked the confidence in his own powers to create anything that would be either new or better.
When Louise Nevelson met Arne Glimcher, she described him as “this slip of a boy, a very slender, very bright young man,”57 just a bit older than her oldest granddaughter. She had her doubts about his ability to take her on and make something of her career, and she was taken aback that her important work was shipped off to an unknown dealer in the cultural backwoods of Boston. But she trusted her intuition.
As Glimcher later reflected, “I was so young that I don’t think I was threatening to Jackson or Teddy Haseltine. Louise took me seriously. I don’t think anyone else did.”58 Long before Nevelson was represented exclusively by Pace Gallery, Glimcher was selling her work with ease.
At the time of this unusual situation, Nevelson was in treatment with a well-known psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, because of problems she was having with Teddy Haseltine. Bergler encouraged her to write down her dreams and note her associations to events in reality.59 On June 12, two weeks after her show at Pace opened in Boston, Nevelson recalled that it was the forty-first anniversary of her wedding to Charles Nevelson at Boston’s posh Copley Plaza Hotel. She wrote in her notebook: “Married in Boston, Returned in June to Boston 1961.”60 Turning to dreams for connections between her past and present, her conscious and unconscious thoughts led her to link her wedding to Charles in 1920 to the beginning of her relationship with Arne Glimcher. In a few years she would be united with the young entrepreneur in an exceptionally profitable, long-lasting, and creative union as artist and dealer: Glimcher, the young man whom she would later call her “little lover boy.” Arne Glimcher’s astute eye and boldness quickly earned him the esteem that would eventually make him one of the art world’s leading gallerists. But in 1961 he was still an unknown, and Nevelson was still contractually tied to Martha Jackson.
Rufus Foshee had bonded with Nevelson when they first met at the opening of Sixteen Americans. Between 1961 and 1962 he and his close friend Jack Horton had bought major parts of Dawn’s Wedding Feast and were trying to buy the missing sections from Cordier so that they could reassemble the entire composition and sell or give it to a museum. Their goal was something Nevelson had wanted from the beginning and something she had probably resented Jackson and Cordier for not having done or even tried to do.
Carried aloft by Martha Jackson’s regular support, 1961 was turning out to be another superb year for Louise Nevelson. With some help from her sister Lillian, she had bought herself another house on Spring Street, number 31, next door to the one she already owned. She was beginning to find collectors who prized her work and could place it well, and her sculpture was illustrated in prestigious journals and newspapers. In August 1961, for example, Sky Chapel had been included in a photograph of Howard and Jean Lipman’s New York apartment in the New York Herald Tribune magazine. The accompanying article encouraged collectors to buy works of art for their homes. “Mrs. Howard W. Lipman, an editor of Art in America, and her husband devote their New York apartment to abstract sculpture that’s especially good with early American and contemporary furniture. Wood wall sculpture Sky Chapel by Louise Nevelson dominates … Nevelson wall sculptures [are] about $10,000.”61 Black Majesty, a work from 1955—and by that time at the Whitney Museum—was also illustrated in the article. On top of each illustration we find the words, “Nevelson sculpture through Martha Jackson Gallery.”
The Lipmans were among the most faithful and important collectors Nevelson ever had. That Jean Lipman was the editor of Art in America, an increasingly important art magazine, and Howard Lipman was one of the most powerful members on the board of the Whitney Museum helped Nevelson get exposure and excellent word-of-mouth publicity. Equally if not more important, the couple had three homes, all of which contained works by Nevelson. The fact that the Lipmans gave many of Nevelson’s works to the Whitney was in no small way responsible for Nevelson retrospectives at the museum in 1967, 1970, 1980, 1987, and 1988.
As a result of Daniel Cordier’s efforts, in September and October 1961 eleven Nevelson walls were included in an important solo show at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden.62 Cordier had made the case that being in that particular show would give Nevelson good reviews and great visibility in Germany. And so it did. Her huge gold-painted work, Royal Tide IV, was sold shortly before it was to be exhibited in Baden-Baden.
In his first letter to Nevelson announcing his plans for the exhibition, the curator, Dietrich Mahlow, director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle, requested some additional large walls from Nevelson in order to give “a comprehensive impression of your work,” of that “kind of world you are living in.” The large walls would be shown in a separate room. Mahlow hoped “the impression would be magnificent, and we are glad to be able to win friends for you in Germany.”63
In less than a month, Nevelson created a collective forty-five feet of walls, approximately nine feet high (including Sky Presence I and II and Little Black Wall, which were all black, and Vision One, which was white) and sent them to Germany, along with photographs as guides for the way she wanted them to be set up. Sky Presence I is one of Nevelson’s most beautiful walls.64 That she had to construct it in a hurry in no way diminishes it as a masterwork of composition. Like any artist touched by Surrealism’s ethos, working fast only meant allowing one’s unconscious to make its contribution.
As always in her best works, Nevelson organizes sweeping formal rhythms, which tie the many boxes together but not in a mechanical way. Thus large circular shapes and curvilinear elements echo back and forth throughout the work. The play of vertically oriented boxes against horizontal ones is measured and feels balanced. The multitude of smaller circular shapes and horizontal and vertical elements adds to the counterpoint without confusing the composition.
According to the curators’ reports, the German crowds were large and enthusiastic. After Baden-Baden the show traveled to six German cities.65 In Munich six thousand people visited the show.66 The reviews of Nevelson’s traveling exhibit in Germany include the same kind of mixed reviews as were typical in the United States: Either the critics saw that the artist was transforming discarded objects into compositions which gave them a new quality of “livingness,” or they believed that she was obsessively collecting bits of junk, painting them with a monochrome color, and haphazardly shoving them together, calling the whole mess “art.”67
In October 1961 Nevelson exhibited one large black wall in a group show at the Hanover Gallery in London. It was her first time exhibiting in London, and Martha Jackson had begun with the most progressive and important new gallery, run by Erica Brausen, who had long been interested in showing and selling Nevelson’s work.
Back home, Nevelson was included in a variety of group shows, including one at the New School for Social Research in New York City, the Tanager Gallery, also in New York, and the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. Great Dawn Column, one of the large white columns from Dawn’s Wedding Feast, was in the prestigious Pittsburgh International Exhibition.
The most important group exhibition in which Nevelson participated in the last months of 1961 was MoMA’s Art of Assemblage, which included Royal Tide I.68 Each of the eighteen boxes stands on its own as a powerful yet complex formal statement, and, when combined in this particular wall, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. With unerring mastery, circular forms—whether solid or suggested as negative shapes—are played off against rough and smooth, vertical and horizontal, surface and depth. The light glints off of the smooth surfaces and disappears behind them into dramatic depth—even though we know there can be no more than eight inches between the surface and the back of the box.
Sky Presence (Installation view, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden), 1961. Photograph © Horstheinz Neuendorff / Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
William C. Seitz, the associate curator of the Department of Paintings and Sculpture Exhibitions at MoMA, wrote the brief essay about Nevelson and Royal Tide I for the catalogue: “This authoritative work resembles a reredos, an altar; but its dedication is not to a spiritualized divinity. The immediacy, clarity, and tangibility of its form and surface muffle and control, though they do not obliterate, the atmosphere of mysticism and romanticism. The gold is as much that of Versailles as of Burgos.”69 Seitz’s words would come back to haunt him the next year when he wrote a very similar essay for Nevelson’s contribution to the 1962 Venice Biennale, where his linking Nevelson with Burgos or Versailles was seen as unrealistic as well as grandiose.
Jean Lipman bought Royal Tide I out of the MoMA show. The Lipmans had already bought and exchanged several black walls, but they would always keep this work. With the exception of the MoMA show, where the admiration of Nevelson’s friend Dorothy Miller had been the driving force, almost all of Nevelson’s extraordinary success in 1960 and 1961 had been arranged by Martha Jackson. In September of 1961 Jackson wrote to Nevelson about her plans for “a big exhibition for you in LA. UCLA is interested. I want to have it before your prices go up, as there are a large number of collectors here who are interested and we want it to be a success.”70 Jackson did even better than she hoped. The Los Angeles County Museum gave Nevelson a show that received good reviews. It also included loans from some of the local collectors, who eventually bought additional works by Nevelson, just as Martha Jackson had planned.71
Despite the fact that Nevelson’s contract with Martha Jackson ended on December 31, 1961, her work stayed on exhibit at the gallery for another fifteen years. Jackson had started Nevelson on the path to celebrity status, but the artist’s desire to move farther and faster led her into troubled waters, where she nearly drowned.
