Black or Black Chord, 1963. Painted wood, 100 × 144 × 11 ½ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz. 91.1a e. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch, courtesy of Pace Gallery
“I guess I’m just a sort of one-man circus. I call myself an architect of shadow and reflection. I am not really concerned with anything else.”
—Louise Nevelson “Serene Sculptress,” Palm Beach
Post-Times, March 6, 1971
By the end of 1963 Louise Nevelson’s contractual situation with Janis, as well as the questions about who owned which works, had finally been resolved, and Arne Glimcher had become her legal dealer. Now that her life had gone from chaos dominated by multiple dealers to a kind of order, in which she was cared for but not coddled or controlled, her work reflected her more peaceful state of mind. Up to this time she had been composing with occasional uncertainty. She often found satisfying aesthetic solutions with her unevenly sized boxes and randomly found bits and pieces of wood. She would usually hit the target, sometimes after one or two tries. And once she had found a composition that pleased her eye, she would keep it. The process might be either exhausting or exhilarating.
But once she began using equal-size boxes, her compositional method became like “open-sesame.”1 Because she did not have to worry about balancing the different sizes and shapes of the boxes, she was able to focus primarily on the formal composition within each box, in combination with that of the entire wall. Colette Roberts had noted “the completely Nevelsonian order” in the Janis exhibition, where the three magisterial walls containing equal-sized boxes were first exhibited.2 By creating these pieces in the midst of a troubled period Nevelson had discovered one possible means to find order in her life. Arne Glimcher understood the importance of these three walls to the artist and made sure that, in negotiating her departure from Janis, they were returned to her studio in late 1963 or early 1964. Her intense desire to have them with her confirms the reciprocity of her psychological state and her art. The sense of calm composure they gave her also foreshadowed a change in her style. For most of 1964 she continued to do work with boxes of equal size. For the rest of her working life she would alternate between boxes or grids of equal size and those of variable sizes, as her mood and box availability varied. She liked to jump around. It kept the livingness in her work.
By 1964 Nevelson had married Surrealism with Cubism and come up with a new order. Having more or less mastered that synthesis, she pushed her work toward even newer forms of order. Through three aesthetic novelties she introduced into her work that year—curving walls, huge size, and reflective elements such as mirrors and Plexiglas—she was able to work in a new dimension.3 As she understood it, the world was not simply the concrete, visible three-dimensional universe all around us—it included the harder-to-capture, more ideal and spiritual realm of the fourth dimension.
Nevelson’s first curving wall was Silent Music VII, which consisted of twelve boxes of equal sizes.4 At her last Pace Gallery exhibition in Boston, in March and April 1964, Nevelson installed this work as a three-column wall, with each column set off at an angle to the one next to it; she added Plexiglas covers to each of the boxes. The Plexiglas box covers introduced the non-physical dimension of reflection, which the new angled configuration of the columns made evident: The inside of each box is reflected on the surface of the adjacent boxes, as are lights and other objects in the room. The mix of deep and shallow, rounded and rectilinear, segmented small details and large sweeping shapes becomes even more complicated when the three columns are separated and hinged against each other at different angles—it’s hard to believe it is the same work of art when the curved wall is compared to a straight one. The reflections change everything.
Black (or Black Chord) is one of the relatively early walls made up of equal-sized boxes. Composed sometime in late 1963, most likely after Nevelson returned from Tamarind, its measured combinations of verticals and horizontal slats play with the viewers’ expectation that they will find a perfect match nearby—only to be surprised by some subtle variations. The uppermost box on the right, for example, has an overlay of three wide horizontal pieces that act like a lid of light and dark lines, which arrest the eye and urge it to find the three other boxes with the exact same number of wide horizontal pieces on the surface.
Then, in the bottom register of each of these four boxes, one sees that there are witty variations in the internal composition of each box—none is an exact match. In the first, there is a horizontal rod with a square element, which lands exactly in the center of the wall’s horizontal width. Moving across the top register to the left, the second box has two flat, round pieces that reflect light as well as a pointed triangular element lit up against a dark background.
Black or Black Chord, 1963. Painted wood, 100 × 144 × 11 ½ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz. 91.1a e. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch, courtesy of Pace Gallery
Two rows down on the right is a peep-show view of three turned spindles. The last of the group, which is down one more row and the farthest left, we see a circle and a spindle bringing the whole to a welcome balance. Because of the size of the work and because it contains so much of interest, this particular perceptual play is not immediately noticeable. Each box rewards the viewer’s attentiveness, posing delicacy against stolid strength, and quickly curving linear patterns against slower, majestic planes of light and dark. As we will see below, Black was subjected to one of the novelties Nevelson introduced into her work in 1964, when it was transformed from a flat wall into a curving one, because of the shape of the room in which it was exhibited.
Immediately after becoming Nevelson’s sole dealer, Arne Glimcher arranged with Erica Brausen to have a big Nevelson show at the Hanover Gallery in London consisting of art from her New York studio, as well as from Cordier and other European gallerists. As in the Janis exhibition, the pieces on display were sculptural walls made up of equal-sized wooden boxes, most of which were painted black, with just a few painted gold and white. (The white and gold works were not emphasized by having a room of their own as they had been in her Janis exhibition.)
The November 1963 exhibit at Hanover received rave notices. The art critic for the The Times of London began his review by comparing American culture to the ancient Greeks, who “tapped off and refined the scrap and waste of the Eastern Mediterranean.” He wrote that Nevelson’s sculpture suggested a “dynamic, but exquisitely proportioned miniature, architecture.” He ended with the statement that: “To do surréalisme all over again in cubist terms sculpturally is no mean feat.”5
David Sylvester, one of the most astute art critics in England, was unambiguously positive about Nevelson’s work in the London show.
Louise Nevelson is a sculptor I think of as the creator of a world, a limited world but a whole world—a world, like the moon, not only because it’s enigmatic, feminine but because its poetry has to do with forms passing from light into shadow. One part of this remarkable poetry is the tension between the illusion that it’s organic and growing rather than an assemblage of dead wood that [has] been made and used by human-kind…. Today Louise Nevelson is fairly considered to be the world’s leading woman sculptor. I don’t think I’d want to contest that view.6
The sculptures in the London Hanover show, plus an additional ten pieces, went on tour with solo exhibitions at the Gimpel & Hanover Galerie in Zurich, the Galatea-Galeria d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, and, finally, at the Kunsthalle Bern. This was the second time in two years that a solo Nevelson exhibition toured Europe. The following year four of her sculptures were included in Documenta III, an exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, first established in 1955.
Arnold Bode—painter, professor, and the exhibition’s first artistic director—designed the huge exhibition in a mostly bombed-out industrial town, where that year (1964) he invited two hundred artists to present their work. His aim was to focus on art as the production of an individual, thereby avoiding schools and “isms.” Unlike the Venice Biennale, where art-world professionals picked works supposedly representing the best each country had to offer, Documenta was noncompetitive and independent. It irritated or thrilled its viewers, some hailing it as so mammoth a show that it could be called anti-art. It had not been neatly organized by the art-world mainstream, which always strove to define “art.”
Among the artists invited to present their work were luminaries like Matisse, Giacometti, Moore, Picasso, Arp, Lipchitz, Matta, and Laurens, who exhibited in the Alte Galerie. In addition to Nevelson, the established artists of the American contingent included Calder, Noguchi, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Motherwell, Rivers, Bontecou, David Smith, and George Rickey. The newer and younger artists were placed in an outdoor sculpture exhibit where they could be viewed against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings, mere shells of their former glorious state.
Nevelson’s four black walls were assigned to be shown in a circular room, which initially she had not liked. To make the space more congenial, she had the raw stone and cement walls whitewashed and added panels of white cloth between the works. By installing the usually flat wall, Black (Black Chord), made up of forty boxes of equal size, in a curved configuration to match the room’s shape, she dramatically changed its appearance, just as she had done in Boston with Silent Music VII. The wall was ninety feet by one hundred eighteen feet, and before she altered its shape, the very size of the sculpture, both in height and length, might have overwhelmed or intimidated viewers. Now it could literally embrace them by seeming to surround them.
The reviewer for the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle described the gallery at Documenta as a “circular white-walled chapel for the black boxy, altar-like wood assemblages of Louise Nevelson.”7 More than two years after the Venice Biennale, these sculptures were still being seen in a metaphysical or sacred context, and the photograph in the Documenta archives shows a young woman seated in rapt concentration before the “altar-like” curving sculpture Black.
Participating in Documenta III marked the first time Nevelson had been in Germany since 1931 and the first time Arne Glimcher had ever been there. Though artist and dealer came expressly to set up her works, they couldn’t avoid seeing that Germany was a country still marked by the war and its aftermath. Reminders of what had transpired there were everywhere. They did not visit the concentration camps only a few kilometers from Kassel and apparently did not even know of their existence. Yet they could see the stark reminder of the war in the unreconstructed ruins of the city, and they had to be aware of what their fate would have been in Germany twenty or thirty years earlier.8 Perhaps this trip influenced the work that came next, work which suggested a reawakening of Nevelson’s Jewish identity.
The artist had returned to New York from what had to feel like a triumphant exhibition at Documenta III. Her sculptures had been admired by many, and one of her most powerful recollections was of Henry Moore crossing the room to hug her and tell her how much he liked her work.9 For her forthcoming solo show at the Pace Gallery in New York she picked up the thread she had been dangling and wove an entirely new opus from it.
Nevelson had recently fallen out of love with the golden sun—the world of money and materialism. After her startling success and her equally startling crash to the ground, she had found herself in debt and despair. That confrontation with cold, hard reality had opened her to spiritual depths that she could plumb whenever the physical world disappointed her. This time it had led to a new identity and a career-changing exhibition.
Preparing for her debut show at Pace in New York, she began work on a twenty-foot-wide wall, made of sixty equal-sized boxes—the largest to date—to be called Homage to 6,000,000. The enormity of the Holocaust was one of the motivating factors for the size of the new wall; the vast exhibition space she had witnessed at Documenta III was another. So was the generosity of her new dealer, who was willing to finance any project of any size she proposed. Collaborating with Glimcher, whose close-knit Jewish family resembled her own, clearly triggered memories, fears, and hopes inherent in being Jewish in the twentieth century. Nevelson’s poem, written for of the dedication in Jerusalem of a similar work, Homage to 6,000,000 II, is a rare public testament to those feelings, which she usually kept hidden.
ONE LIVES A LIFE
The layers of consciousness are infinite
My own awareness is my own awareness
The essence and the symbols of this presence will be a living presence of a people who have triumphed.
They rose far and above the greatest that was inflicted upon them.
I hear all over this earth a livingness and a presence of these peoples.
I feel that they are here, and there is a song I hear and that song that rings in my ears and that song is here.
The depth of what I feel must remain private, I cannot speak of it out loud.
Their consciousness and our consciousness are one.
Reflection—exaltation—6,000,000 equals epic grandeur
Time is standing still for us in this presence.
They have given us a livingness.10
In her two sculptures referring to the Holocaust, Homage to 6,000,000 and Homage to 6,000,000 II, “consciousness,” “livingness,” “reflection” all came together in works of epic grandeur. As had happened throughout her career, powerful feelings provoked an equally powerful artistic response.11
Nevelson had always managed to have a houseful of helpers, even when she was flat broke. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, her main helper assistant was Teddy Haseltine. When he was fading, in walked Diana MacKown, who would eventually record on tape Nevelson’s autobiography Dawns + Dusks.
Starting in the winter of 1963–64, when Teddy was ill and again drinking too much, Diana began to assist Nevelson with her sculpture. During the summer Teddy seemed to be failing, but, after surgery and a stay in the hospital, he was thought to be recuperating. One morning in August, as was customary in Nevelson’s home, he went to her room to wish her good morning. He knocked on her door, entered the room and found her asleep. At that moment he apparently fell to the floor at the foot of her bed and died. It was a shocking and tragic event.12
Nevelson’s immediate response to the death of this young man, who had lived with her for eight years and become like a devoted son, was consistent with the way she usually dealt with the loss of someone close to her. She didn’t go to his funeral and didn’t speak about him, moving away from the subject as quickly as possible.13 Homage to 6,000,000, on which she was working at this time, was probably part of her mourning process for Teddy. She could no more easily speak about the death of her assistant than she could about the millions of Jews who had died in Europe twenty years earlier, much less the deaths of both parents whose funerals she had declined to attend.
Diana MacKown was away visiting her family when Teddy died so suddenly, and she returned immediately. Nevelson needed to continue making preparations for her Pace show, and had no choice but to have Diana MacKown take over all Teddy’s tasks, which included Nevelson’s practical as well as spiritual needs.14
Ugo Mulas. Louise Nevelson talking on the phone and standing with her assistant, ca. 1960. © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.
For the catalogue essay for the 1964 show at Pace New York, Arne Glimcher turned to the eloquent words William Seitz had written as the exhibition text for the Venice Biennale. Glimcher, like Nevelson, knew he had a lot at stake with this exhibition, and he felt he couldn’t do better than the young MoMA curator had already done. Nevelson knew she had to help Glimcher make his name in New York so the gallery could succeed; she also knew she had to make a big splash to put herself beyond the Janis fiasco.
The exhibit, titled “Nevelson” consisted of at least seven walls and a large triangular work entitled Silent Music as well as the twenty-foot-long Homage to 6,000,000, Silent Motion, and seven compositions from the miniature series Diminishing Reflection.15 The titles of at least four works in the exhibit referred to sound or music.
Nevelson had grown up with classical music: Her father’s Victrola and records of Caruso and other opera stars were part of her personal history, as were the concerts she had attended with her husband Charles during the early years of their marriage. She had not had much spare time for music or money to attend concerts between the end of her marriage and the arrival of Diana MacKown, whose parents and sister were professional musicians.16 Once Diana was in the house, the amount of music Nevelson heard increased dramatically.17 Likewise, so did the number of works whose titles or forms referred to music.
The 1964 New York Pace exhibit featured her three recent innovations: curving walls, huge scale, and use of different materials to create reflections. The curving walls and very large works would prove important in the future, but neither of these novelties was as significant as—or had the power of—her shift in medium: the use of mirrors and glass. With these two reflective elements Nevelson was aiming for a new sculptural form.
In the 1940s and early 1950s Nevelson had explored three-dimensional form with hundreds of terra-cottas. In the mid- to late 1950s she had discovered shadows and how she could use them in her wood assemblages, manipulating them with different colors and compositions. And now in the 1960s, working with mirrors and Plexiglas, she introduced reflection. Throughout, her aesthetic concerns were often as spiritual as they were concretely compositional. She made aesthetic judgments with every wall and every box she assembled, and at the same time she was frequently invoking spiritual dimensions with non-physical shadows and reflections.
Her New York Pace Gallery debut took the art world by storm. Emily Genauer, Nevelson’s long-supportive critic, expressed relief that Nevelson had broken out of her stereotyped pattern of the past few years.18 Robert Coates wrote in The New Yorker that her new show was “the most successful in her by now fairly long career.”19
According to John Canaday, who reviewed the show for The New York Times, neither size, mirrored backgrounds, nor framed composition were responsible for the works’ being “powerful in presence.” The “major delight” they provided was “the sensation of absolute completeness.”20
About her inclusion of mirrors and Plexiglas, Nevelson explained: “I took the back out of the box, then I used glass for reflection, then I used a mirror or a glass to get more reflection.”21 Looking back, Arne Glimcher had a more colorful way of describing her use of mirrors. “She suddenly blew the back out behind the wall. She was opening up and allowing herself space. The boxes were a protection, a metaphorical protection. She opened up the back of the piece—which was radical—everything else was closed. You couldn’t see everything in there; it was secret.”22
“In the early sixties,” Glimcher observed: “Nevelson wanted the mirrors that she put in the boxes to extend the space behind the wall. If her walls were up against a wall, she was punching holes in them with the mirrors…. She was going behind the wall.”23 In saying “going behind the wall,” Glimcher inadvertently used a standard metaphor for the fourth dimension. The mirrors went through to the fourth dimension—they allowed one to go through the wall to the other side. What was primarily a perceptual phenomenon for most viewers carried an additional metaphysical meaning for the artist.
In the 1950s, following Hilton Kramer’s lead, Nevelson had started calling herself the “architect of shadows.” Now in the mid-1960s, as she began to use glass, Plexiglas, and mirrors, she anointed herself “the architect of reflection”: “I have given shadow a form. And I gave reflection a form. I used glass for reflections, then I used mirrors. Now we know that shadow and reflection … have a form—but not really an architectural or sculptural form…. So I consider that I am an architect of shadow, and I’m an architect of reflection. Those are titles I gave to myself.”24
The play of reflections beaming off many mirrors in Silent Motion (1964) exemplifies Nevelson’s thinking. No matter how you look at this remarkable work, you see it differently, depending on your perspective and how light strikes it. Two vertically oriented rectangular frames are placed side by side within a larger black frame. In the grid on the left side, the mirror behind the wood pieces makes the wooden elements almost disappear, fragmenting them into little segments. The frame on the right side contains a forty-unit grid, and each unit or box contains a mirror. Because each mirror is differently positioned and angled, the light reflecting back makes the sculpture seem like dozens of different works when it is actually only one. The viewer is either perplexed or transported to another dimension.
The literal and the figurative meanings of the word “reflection” overlapped. She had expanded on what the reflection of an artist’s self could signify: Nevelson was no longer using her art solely to reflect something of herself. With the use of multiple reflections, she sought to translate entire worlds from her own imagination into the physical realm, expanding on her practice of creating immersive environments for the viewer: “All I wanted out of this world, from the beginning, [was] to find out who I was. When you look in a mirror, you see yourself, you hope. And, of course, some people don’t quite have an image of themselves, but let’s assume I do. Well then, I feel that all that I have done has been a reflection of my feeling and understanding of the universe.”25
The artist had long understood the relationship of artist to art as deeply meaningful. “It’s like a marriage,” she said, “you are not the total actor. You play with another actor, and my play with the other [is the way I work with] my materials. And so sometimes they tell me something and sometimes I speak to them so that there is a constant communication for a oneness, for the harmony, and for the totality.”26 The fundamentally communicative nature of her creative process freed Nevelson from the disappointment she so often felt with human beings. They could betray her, as Kurzman and Janis had done a few years earlier. Or they could die suddenly at the foot of her bed as Teddy had done only a few months earlier. But her work would always be there for her. It could be manipulated until it mirrored back to her the harmony and connectedness she wanted to feel. Each object she used, each work she made, was an interlocutor with whom she could converse visually. The changes she saw in her work were both reassuring and fascinating. They indicated she could be one and the same person, while evolving over time. In 1964 she was at a turning point in her life, a new beginning, and she needed to have her own evolution mirrored back to her through her work.
“Now, shadow is fleeting,” she said, “but when I use it, I arrest it … and give it a form. When I began using mirrors and recently glass, I began to feel again like the architect who is controlling reflection and for me it is very, very satisfying because I make it static for myself.”27 What Nevelson saw in her work was not “fleeting”—a word she used often at this time. The shadows she saw everywhere had form and were more exciting than anything else she saw on earth. They told her that she was in the realm of the fourth dimension—an ideal place she could tune in to and find stability, totality, and harmony—all things she had not been able to find in human relationships. Her family—at least the insightful members of her family, like her youngest sister Lillian—recognized that her disappointment with people was as much a result of her self-absorption and expectation that she would be disappointed by others than it was the actual failure of their behavior.28 Only in her art could she find reliable and consistent satisfaction.
At the heart of her shift from shadow to reflection and from self to others was her new situation with Arne Glimcher and Diana MacKown, partners who would stand by her as long as she needed them. By making it possible for her to concentrate solely on her work, MacKown and Glimcher facilitated her reflection.
Nevelson saw something of herself in each of them. Glimcher and she were both formerly shy exhibitionists whose brassy ambitiousness was their common coin. As he put it: “It was more complicated than her just being an artist in the gallery. I truly loved her … and then there was this friendship she had with my mother.”29 From this first New York exhibition and ever afterwards, Arne Glimcher had no trouble selling Nevelson’s work. Her shows at Pace were often sold out by the end of the first opening night.
With Diana MacKown it was different—Nevelson’s semi-secret spirituality was welcomed and reflected in Diana’s own discoveries.30 Diana had grown up with a talented, charismatic mother whom she often felt she had to protect. It is no surprise that she would become the assistant and devotee of another talented, charismatic woman who needed watching over. June Wayne, the director of Tamarind Workshop and a longtime close friend of Nevelson, described Diana MacKown as Louise’s “irreplaceable friend, trouble-shooter, interface with the outside world, and expediter of the inner one. Diana was like a daughter to Louise, but one that could not, would not, claim the reciprocal devotion a child claims of its mother.”31
Nevelson had managed to translate her vision of how people should relate to each other—as equals—into her use of materials and their reflection as a place of consciousness and awareness, her metaphysical ideals. Her goal was no longer about just satisfying her own vision or creating an environment that suited her better than the ones she had found in the world, it was now about creating that place of consciousness and giving that consciousness to everything. Nevelson had grown up in a family that believed all of their children had an equal opportunity in America. She had been close to and admired Diego Rivera, who acted on his belief that all people are equal no matter their social status or financial condition. Fundamentally she agreed with that stance despite her admiration for outstanding individuals.
In December 1964 Nevelson discovered Edith Sitwell, the woman who would become, after Norina Matchabelli and Martha Graham, her new ego ideal. By absorbing some of Sitwell’s look, Louise Nevelson drew closer to the way she herself would appear for the rest of her life—the persona Edward Albee would call “The Nevelson.”
The death of Dame Edith Sitwell, an English poet and preeminent eccentric, was announced on the front page of The New York Times on December 10, 1964, accompanied by a photograph of Sitwell in a large hat, whose profile was remarkable.32 On the inside page was a photo by Cecil Beaton, taken in 1926, of the elegantly posed aristocrat in a long, flowery Tudor-style gown, playing a harp in front of a Baroque tapestry. The two images could have convinced Nevelson that Sitwell was a woman of her own type.
Certainly the physical description of Sitwell in the obituary could have been repeated with minor variations as a description of the later persona of Louise Nevelson herself: “An aquiline nose and heavy-lidded eyes added to her almost Plantagenet look which she accentuated with elaborate hats or turbans and long flowing gowns, sometimes of startling Chinese red, sometimes of intricate brocades. She was addicted to large jewelry and gold armlets, and her fingers were ringed with pebble-size aquamarines. She cut a cabalistic figure, enhanced as the passage of years dulled her blonde hair and made her face gaunt and bony.”33
Diana MacKown cut out Sitwell’s obituary and played for Nevelson a recording of Sitwell’s poetry cycle, Façade, which was published in 1922, with Sitwell reciting the female role.34 MacKown was familiar with Sitwell’s work, since her own British-born mother had made a recording of Façade at the Eastman School of Music in the 1950s, reading the part Sitwell usually read when she toured with her poetry cycle. When MacKown urged Nevelson to do something to honor the poet, Nevelson readily responded. Within a very few days, Nevelson had created the sculpture, Homage to Dame Edith, out of boxes with glass covers that had been left in Teddy Haseltine’s old room. The date on the work is listed as December 9, 1964—the day on which Sitwell actually died, rather than several days later, when the work was actually made.35
Nevelson’s sudden enthusiasm for Sitwell was not out of character. In the distinguished author’s poetry and life story, Nevelson had found a fellow spirit, a model for her future self. While it is relatively easy to imagine how much she would have enjoyed and admired the recording of Façade, it is worth wondering what could have so captivated Nevelson’s attention that she was impelled to create a sculptural homage to Sitwell on the spot, a piece that had to be included in the final days of her show at Pace. She also insisted that the work appear, along with other photographs of her sculpture, in a forthcoming article in Vogue magazine.36
Each box in Homage to Dame Edith contains a series of smaller boxes, many with mirrors done in the same way as the other small works in the Pace exhibition, especially Silent Motion and the series Diminishing Reflections. The syncopated rhythms of the composition enliven the work, playing the open doors off against the mirrored boxes within boxes, so that the whole sculpture echoes the wit of Sitwell’s musical poetry. It is worth noting, too, that all six sculptures entitled Homage to Dame Edith are characterized by a verticality that could be a reference to Sitwell’s unusual height: six feet tall. This is another point of identification for Nevelson who, for most of her youth, was the tallest girl in her class at school in Rockland.
A few years later, Nevelson’s close friend and former dealer Colette Roberts asked her: “What is your personal reaction to Edith Sitwell, for whom you made this box [Homage to Dame Edith]?37 Nevelson responded: “Well, if I ever get out of my own shell, I would like to parallel her. I love when a woman is seventy-seven in bed and the reporters come and ask her, ‘How are you feeling?’ And she says, ‘Dying. Other than that I’m fine.’ ”38 Famous for her barbed wit and an intolerance for fools, Sitwell’s unconventionality appealed to Nevelson. The English poet had once sent a stuffed owl to a pompous member of the British parliament.39
The anonymous author of Sitwell’s obituary referred to the idiosyncrasies of the poet: “Among her recreations, Dame Edith listed silence, but it was a luxury she rarely indulged.” The writer noted that: “Dame Edith was rarely out of the news…. She admitted to and even gloried in eccentricity.”40 The obituary included the fact that Edith Sitwell was very close to her two younger brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, also distinguished authors.
Façade had achieved a succès de scandale when the poetry cycle was first performed in London in 1923. The reciter was supposed to make his or her intonation as level as possible, turning the voice into an instrument among instruments so as to eliminate all personality. The composer William Walton, a friend of Sitwell’s brothers, composed music to accompany the poetry cycle. The Times obituary pointed out that the poet was essentially a formalist whose word-music exploited poetry’s musical qualities of sound and rhythm.41
Dame Edith’s feelings for her siblings, her interest in metaphysics and the transcendental, as well as a focus on form over content in her chosen art, were aspects of her character with which Nevelson could identify. If all those facts were not enough to catch Nevelson’s attention, the author of the obituary quoted Sitwell’s claim that she had a lifelong “affinity for Queen Elizabeth [I],” about whom she had written two books, Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) and The Queens and the Hive (1962). Her unusual appearance provoked critics almost as much as her verse. She was known to her friends as “Queen Edith.”
What Diana MacKown recalls about Nevelson’s admiration for Sitwell is: “She was a Plantagenet, a royal grand aristocrat, who had great style and elegance, but whose brilliance and willingness to break laws in her work made her an exceptional human being.”42 Nevelson saw Sitwell as a descendent of the true royalty of England—someone with whom Nevelson could easily identify. And she did—ever afterwards.
What Nevelson had gleaned from Sitwell’s obituary as well as her autobiography, which was published in 1965, proved to be a step in the development of her “look.” It was more than a continuation of her identification with royalty. Emerging from the doldrums of her down period of 1963 and the first half of 1964, Nevelson put the past behind her and determined to have a new future. That future would not just be new sculpture. It would also include a re-creation of her public persona. With Sitwell as a model, Nevelson incorporated all her former wishes for a royal heritage into what must have seemed like a perfectly timed invitation from fate. The artist did indeed manage to parallel Sitwell, especially as she increasingly moved away from her conventional style of dressing to something more like the outrageous English eccentric.
In Sitwell’s autobiography, Nevelson would have read (or had MacKown read to her) about her heroine’s endearing quirks and seen them depicted in photographs. Katherine Rouse, an interviewer who met with Nevelson in January 1966, saw in the artist strong traces of Sitwell: “Miss Nevelson is rather formidable at first glance,” Rouse wrote. “Her hair is hidden by a long loose cap so that only her face can be seen behind arresting eyes and superb rather Mayan, bone structure. Her skin is dark and swarthy and her eyes are accentuated by mascara. She wears a loose fitting, shaggy woolen coat of brilliant red and her hands are expressive, square chunks that seem strong and like the animate emblem of a sculptor. She at once made me think of Dame Edith Sitwell and Judith Anderson.”43
Photographs taken of Nevelson in 1965 and 1966 by Ugo Mulas and others confirm that, though she was wearing fairly heavy eye makeup, she had not started to use the soon-to-be-famous false eyelashes. That would change—and the retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum in 1967 marked the turning point of that change. We shall see in a future chapter the trajectory of Nevelson’s arrival at a distinguished persona.
In 1967 a Time magazine writer noted: “Nevelson herself, a big-hatted, cigar-smoking metaphysic on the order of Edith Sitwell or Isak Dinesen, is pleased but not entirely surprised by her acclaim.”44 In 1967, when a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily in 1967 asked Nevelson if she liked other women, whom she admired and who were her friends, she responded:
I’ve never understood women who can’t stand other women. To me it’s the mind, the personality that counts. There are interesting men and interesting women. And those I admire are not necessarily my friends.
My book of serigraphs [it goes for $1000] is dedicated to Edith Sitwell. She’s one person I admired. And Marianne Moore. Martha Graham is another. And Greta Garbo, gorgeous and consistent. That’s what I respect. A person who has a single line, a dedication, and sustains it through life and somehow to some degree fulfills it. It’s easy to slip. But you go back and start again. One never leaves off, just keeps adding—as with me and my sculpture.45
The year 1965 opened with elegance. A thirteen-page portfolio of Louise Nevelson’s sculpture at Pace Gallery, subtitled “Potent and Arcane,” appeared in the March issue of Vogue magazine.46 The big-name photographer was Gordon Parks. Some of the gowns—the clothes for “Brilliant Evenings,” as they were called—were worn by Veruschka, one of the leading models of the day.
“I am an architect of light and shadow,” Nevelson told the writer, and then, tapping a glass table top, added, “You see these lights in here…. These are the depths and shadows, the reflections I’m interested in…. What do they mean when they say ‘clairvoyant’? It’s looking through. I want transparency.”47 The article named collectors who had already bought works from the show, and “Pace Gallery” was frequently mentioned. It was a win-win for the artist and her dealer. Nevelson, a long-time fashion lover, was delighted.
In May of 1965, Homage to 6,000,000 I, the huge wall in the Pace exhibit, had been bought by Mr. and Mrs. Albert List and was formally presented to the Jewish Museum in New York. The same month, six thousand miles away, Nevelson attended the dedication of her second wall honoring victims of the Holocaust, Homage to 6,000,000 II, at the opening of the new Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Eva Glimcher, Arne’s mother, traveled with Nevelson to Israel for the dedication ceremony. Afterwards the two women went to Jordan and Egypt—a trip that became legendary in the Glimcher family. Leaving the Israeli part of Jerusalem to enter the Jordanian sector, Mrs. Nevelson and Mrs. Glimcher had to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate. At customs at the former checkpoint, they were asked their religion. Eva Glimcher calmly said, “Ethical Culture.” Nevelson was frazzled and quickly answered, “Same as hers.” As the story goes, Eva Glimcher then found someone to carry their luggage, and the ladies headed into Jordan.48
Arriving in London after their trip to the Middle East, they were met in the lobby of their hotel by Arne and Milly Glimcher.49 Asked by Arne to describe her first impression of the Egyptian pyramids, Nevelson answered, “Too small.”50 This became one of Arne Glimcher’s favorite Nevelson anecdotes. In her defense, he explains that the artist was used to photographs showing the pyramids as huge, as they filled the space of a post card from top to bottom. Seeing the ancient monuments in person, the proportions reversed themselves, seeming to shrink in size against the Egyptian sky.51
In his eventual comparisons of his star sculptor with his mother, Glimcher made these observations: “They were both from Russia and both came to America as babies. Though they were the same age and similar in so many ways, my mother was the antithesis of Louise. She was this sort of ‘respectable woman’ who would never have led the kind of life Louise did. Louise did things my mother would normally have considered shocking and improper. But she found it acceptable because Louise was the person doing it. That wouldn’t have been the case with anyone else.”52
Milly Glimcher, Arne’s wife, had a similar impression of the two women: “They were alike in having a tough inner core and not being easily dissuaded from what they wanted to do. But Eva disapproved of Louise’s lifestyle—the fact that she would sleep around and have lots of boyfriends. My mother-in-law was a bit puritanical, so she didn’t like that. Even in her sixties Louise would flirt and carry on with men. Eva thought that was unseemly. But the biggest difference between them was in their attitude toward their children. For Eva, her children were the most important thing in her life. Poor Mike got neglected.”53
In 1965—at a moment in the art world when prints had become a respectable way for artists and their dealers to sell less expensive work to a larger audience—Nevelson started making silk-screen prints. She cut up photographs of some of the sculptures in the series Silent Music from her 1964 Pace New York show and collaged them into a portfolio entitled Façade, dedicated to Edith Sitwell. Though each of the twelve prints is named for one of the poems in Façade, there is no direct relationship between an individual poem and the corresponding print. Speaking visually, they are less an homage to the poet, and more a continuation of Nevelson’s train of thought at this time, related to Silent Music and to her ideas about the fourth dimension.
Arne Glimcher had commissioned the portfolio and paid for everything, also arranging for Nevelson to work with Steve Poleskie at Chiron Press, which had quickly become the premier silkscreen workshop for New York artists. With her mysterious works, executed in subtle tones of gray, Nevelson was after a complex set of images whose titles would honor the poet’s work while the images themselves reflected Nevelson’s current aesthetic and metaphysical interests.
Andy Warhol had started the fashion for silkscreen prints on canvas in the early 1960s with his images of Marilyn Monroe. Glimcher had shown Warhol’s silkscreen paintings in 1962 in Boston and was well aware of the growing popularity of his images of Che Guevara, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor. By 1965 silkscreens, epitomized by Warhol’s Pop Art icons, had taken off.
Nevelson was enthusiastic about making the silkscreen prints and showed up daily for several months in the winter of 1965–66, producing Façade. Poleskie remembered Nevelson as being “easy to work with and very calm, almost mellow.” He said that though she didn’t talk about Edith Sitwell, whose poetry and person had ostensibly been the inspiration for the prints, “she dressed like Sitwell in big hats and a fur coat. She talked a lot with her lyrical voice and seemed to enjoy herself working on the prints. Other artists were making prints because they owed their dealers. But she had a very clear sense of purpose in her head.” It was a moment in which Nevelson felt like making homages to the world, a moment of large thinking and expansive art-making. As Poleskie said, “She was aware of her presence in the art world at that moment.”54
Since only one artist at a time worked at Chiron Press, it was a peaceful place, with no music blaring and no other artists chatting. Nevelson’s modus operandi at Chiron may have started out like other artists’, using silkscreen to quickly produce multiple images that would sell quickly. But true to her usual spontaneous approach, she changed the process as she went along. After reproducing the silk screens of five photographs from her 1964 show—specifically, Sky Wave, Diminishing Reflection, Ancient Secret, Silent Music I and IV—she felt they looked too flat and began to cut them up and collage the parts together into new images. She and Poleskie experimented until they figured out how to construct the collaged images on acetate, and then they photographed the result into what would be the final screen from which the twelve different original prints for the portfolio would be made.
One of the sculptures from the Pace show, which Nevelson particularly liked, was the large pyramidal-shaped Silent Music (1964). It reappeared in two of the most forceful screen prints in the portfolio: By the Lake and Black Mrs. Behemoth. In both prints Nevelson has taken a portion of the photograph of Ancient Secret, also from the 1964 Pace show, turned it upside down and backwards, and inserted it into the new prints in front of the photo of triangular Silent Music as though it were a door angling into and beyond the deep space she has created with this illusion. With this complicated use of photographs Nevelson invites the viewer into the fourth dimension by creating a powerful sensation of being sucked into the image. The multiple views of the same sculpture, collaged together via her complicated and novel use of the silkscreen medium, force the viewer to shift back and forth between dimensions.
Diana MacKown, who was present when these prints were made, was similarly convinced that, through these works, Nevelson was searching for ways to depict the fourth dimension. She had been using mirrors and Plexiglas toward that goal in her 1964 Pace exhibit. She knew that Edith Sitwell also had metaphysical inclinations, but she never discussed these matters in her public statements about her portfolio of silkscreen prints.
Rarely satisfied with working on one project at a time, Nevelson continued making the series of miniatures, Diminishing Reflection, through 1965 and into 1966. She used the same few elemental shapes—disks, round slices of dowels, square and rectangular wood blocks—to create compositions which were similar but never exactly the same. In Diminishing Reflections XXVII she first made twelve small boxes, then put pairs of two small boxes inside six larger ones. Finally she put all six together, creating a square of syncopated round and irregular rhythms that defy the eyes’ wish for closure and completeness. The vitality of the total is astonishing.
The inventiveness of the spontaneous moment is also evident in the small Expanding Reflection(s) series.55 While she was working on the silk-screen prints at Chiron Press, some plastic boxes arrived for the artist Ernest Trova, who had a factory in St. Louis making display cases. Like the surrealist scavenger she had always been, Nevelson printed leftover silk screen elements from the Façade series on some of the left-over boxes. The result is a large work (thirty-six feet by seventy-six feet by three feet), Expanding Reflection I, which consists of a grid, with ten boxes across and twenty-three long. Each box is different: some contain compositions of small wood pieces; some are stenciled with geometric shapes derived from those wood bits and pieces; and some are silk-screened with parts of photographs she had already used in Façade. The total is a complex and integrated composition forcing one’s eyes to flicker from surface to depth—from two-dimensional photo to three-dimensional box—and back. With this work, Nevelson carried the theme of layered reflections as far as she could go. It was a true one-off. For decades Expanding Reflection I remained in the office of David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank and was included in major Nevelson retrospectives, including the big show at the Whitney in 1967.
Expanding Reflection, 1966. Silkscreen on Plexiglas and wood, 75 9/16 × 45 ¾ × 5 in. JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery
Nevelson ended the year 1965 on a high. Her exhibition in October at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto got enthusiastic reviews and cemented—at least in her mind—her status.56 “The American artist, Louise Nevelson, is one of the great living sculptors,” wrote Telegram reviewer Harry Malcolmson. “Some time ago she perfected her basic sculpture commonly known as a Wall…. The Nevelson Wall has now become like a Henry Moore Mother and Child or a Marino Marini Horse, an enriching addition to our basic visual vocabulary. Moreover, her work is widely admired and popular. There is likely no other non-representational artist as enthusiastically sought after and purchased as Nevelson.”57
As she began 1966, Nevelson was rocketing back and forth between miniature and majestically huge, a lively contrast she enjoyed. It was still not quite lively enough for her. She was about to launch herself in two new directions with two new media: Plexiglas and metal.
