Shadow and Reflection I, 1966. Painted wood, 80 × 174 in. Musée de Grenoble, France. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch at Documenta IV, 1968. © documenta Archiv
“So I consider that I’m actually the grandmother of environment.”
—Louise Nevelson, interview with Jeanne Siegel, Great Artists in America Today, 1967
Louise Nevelson never gave up using wood. It was her home base and a foundation to which she would always return. But that did not keep her from exploring other media. Beginning in the mid-1960s, she usually worked in more than one medium at a time. She called it “jumping around” and, as a perennially active artist, she loved it.
In late summer of 1966, Nevelson was off to Detroit to install her huge wood wall, Homage to the World, in the J. L. Hudson Gallery. Nearly twenty-nine feet long and nine feet high and weighing about a thousand pounds, the wall was made up of a hundred units, the largest work she had ever made.1 The monumental sculpture was believed to have been bid for by MoMA, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Whitney Museum. It was finally acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts for fifty-five thousand dollars.2
At the Institute’s recently opened new south wing where the sculpture was installed in a place of honor in October, Nevelson explained her “Testament,” as she called it, to local journalists in her typically enigmatic fashion: “I had that work in one of my studios, and for a year I couldn’t even enter that studio…. I became a little bit frightened of this enormous project, and so I locked the door. And if I needed something out of that studio I sent my assistant…. I couldn’t encompass it. And then one day, after I had done the metal…. I thought, why did this intimidate me? I had to grow to be able to confront this.”3
What about the wall had “frightened” Nevelson? In what way did she have “to grow”? Her own words about the wall provide the crucial clue. “There it is practically one straight line. But then there’s the circle off center where all the energy is. So it is controlled.”4
Yes, we can see one straight line running almost thirty feet, and there are circles near the center. But they are not circles. They are ovals. Her “control,” that is, her aesthetic eye, has set each of these forms at a slightly different angle from its neighbor, and each combination of boxes differs slightly from the others. Some are radically different—their differences almost hidden in the back of the box—or partially covered by the slat of wood attached to the front of the box. Mostly, it is the off-angle tilt of many of the ovoid shapes that obliges our eyes to bounce around as we try to take in the whole in one glance. The dynamic way Nevelson has placed them produces “all the energy.” That she would have to “control” the huge horizontal expanse by the power of her compositional mastery was the frightening challenge she had to meet. She initially felt that filling such an expanse could be chaotic, but as she grew more confident about the prospect of working on such a large sculpture she realized that she could “control” it by playing a relatively few oval shapes off against the massive number of vertical and horizontal forms and shadows.
One of Nevelson’s observations about this work could describe her aim as an artist: “I tell people who ask, that I don’t use wood; I don’t use black; I don’t make sculpture. If the sum of this wall doesn’t transcend wood and black and making something, then I’ve failed. Sculpture is like a person, who adds up to a lot more than a few cents worth of chemicals. I’m trying to communicate. Not to make something.”5 For Nevelson, this went beyond a statement about art; she was trying to articulate what she knew about the human condition: We are all alike and we are all different. And she saw her mission as expressing these contradictory truths, not in so many words, but through the formal decisions she made in her art.
George Francoeur, the reviewer for Art News, felt the gravitas Nevelson hoped the work would convey. “Rather than the complexity of parts playing a dominant role, the interval of space becomes the real content of the work. Her forms are limited and restrained…. Homage to the World, has the severity and mystic evocation that we find in a Gothic portal. Its scale allows us fully to realize the light that glows in the darkness without reference to a surrounding environment.”6
Other journalists were not enthusiastic about Homage to the World and offered the by-now common complaint—by no means uncommon in the criticism of abstract art—that the artist was just using “inexpensive lumber and paint” or discarded scraps of wood and charging sky-high prices.7 These two opposite views of Nevelson’s work—high praise and dismissive criticism—would continue throughout her life, and even afterwards.
Homage to the World was not quite the “finale of big wood walls” Nevelson had imagined. She would keep on making large wood pieces for the rest of her working life, but they alternated with sculptures comprised of the myriad tiny elements such as those in the Diminishing and Expanding Reflections series, which she had been working on for three years, and in the Zag series, which she worked on until the late 1970s.
About Shadow and Reflection, done at the same time and one of her favorite large walls in which she used small boxes of equal size, the artist explained: “I thought of [this work] as ‘energy’ and tried to concentrate the energies in one part. There is the one line, the one column and then a counter-movement to that and so that’s what I call energy.”8
Again Nevelson had created a one-off. There is nothing like Shadow and Reflection in her oeuvre. The central “column,” taller and wider than the two side sections, pushes itself forward, making us pay attention to its rhythmically patterned vertical boxes, with their dramatic alternating light-and-shadow patterns. The boxes seem to have been stretched and widened in order to accommodate the propulsive forward movement. The countermovements from the square boxes on the left and right have their own energy, rippling sideways with their patterns of light and shade.
Shadow and Reflection I, 1966. Painted wood, 80 × 174 in. Musée de Grenoble, France. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch at Documenta IV, 1968. © documenta Archiv
With her huge walls from the mid-1960s, Nevelson knew she had made monuments to something larger, more transcendent than an arrangement of wooden boxes painted black. Her work in wood had reached a culmination of sorts, and it was about to temporarily cede precedence to her work in new materials: aluminum and Plexiglas. She was finally going outdoors to create her version of an environment that worked with air, trees, and sunlight. Nevelson summed it up in an interview with Dorothy Seckler for a long feature article in Art in America: “At my time of life I’ve arrived at essences…. There had been the principle of the enclosed box, shadow boxed in; with the mirror, [it was] the principle of the reflection boxed in. Now I’m boxing in the outdoors.”9
Nevelson’s first sculpture in aluminum would lead to all her large-scale work over the next two decades. Though she worked only for two years with Plexiglas her work with plastic would entice her toward actual jewels as well as jewel-like sculptures—smaller-scale work that continued until her eighty-sixth year. It was exactly “the idea of bouncing around in different media”10 and the combination of contrasts that she loved—huge and tiny, majestic and commonplace. Those elements would come together in time for her 1967 retrospective at the Whitney Museum.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Nevelson never worked in metal until 1965, the year David Smith died—metal was the medium in which he had been so creative for decades. Nevelson and Smith had known and respected each other since the early 1940s, and one of Nevelson’s closest friends during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was Smith’s first wife, the sculptor Dorothy Dehner.
Nevelson’s shift to direct work in metal sculpture came initially at the suggestion of Arne Glimcher, who felt that she was ready to make a change to new media. It was also the mid-1960s, when the art world in America was at a new peak. Large-scale sculptures, in particular, were being commissioned by both the federal and state governments—between 1962 and 1966, the General Services Administration commissioned thirty-four large works of art for federal buildings. Sculptures and murals appeared in disparate locations as far reaching as Juneau, Alaska; Macon, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Washington, D. C., and New York City.11 Nevelson was perfectly positioned to be included in the vanguard of American artists receiving recognition and commissions for grand assignments.
In his 1967 essay about public sculpture in prominent sites in New York City, Irving Sandler wrote: the Sculpture in Environment show “could not have come at a better time. As it presents monuments by some of the best artists of our time, it also focuses on the fact that the artists’ desire for the kind of spaces that the urban environment can provide coincides with the city’s need for art. The result may be a new birth of public art.”12 His words were prescient, and as usual, Nevelson was at the forefront.
Nevelson’s decision to start working in metal came at a time when she had decided to rid herself of all the collections she had accumulated—including approximately thirty American Indian pottery pieces from the Southwest and many pre-Columbian and African sculptures, which had always been on display in the large living room. She had collected these objects one by one over a lifetime. Suddenly, she was done with them.
She sold the Southwest Indian pottery to Arne Glimcher’s mother and the African sculpture and objects to Fred Mueller, the codirector at Pace Gallery. Early American tools, Japanese lacquer chests, Puerto Rican santos, her collection of Eilshemius paintings—everything went. It was a purging at a level and speed that matched her typical, prodigious energy.13
Glimcher recalls that the decision to experiment with new materials was also related to Nevelson’s newfound economic security and her arrival at a seemingly stable position of eminence in the art world. Nevelson thought she had been there in 1960, when Martha Jackson and Daniel Cordier had been her dealers. After the Janis blowup, it had taken a while for her to again feel safe. Now she no longer needed props, visible evidence that she could afford to buy beautiful things from other cultures. She was ready to be on her own, exploring new territory.
Everything around her was simplified. All the furniture was either sold or put out on the street. The floors were scraped down to their natural wood finish and waxed. The living quarters and the studios were painted white; clothes were stored in gray steel utility cabinets and personal items in filing cabinets. Nonessential items were eliminated, and room was made for her and her work—exclusively. Guests were only welcome for short stays. Deliberately uncomfortable industrial chairs were available for the few invited friends, fellow artists, family, or journalists. Nothing must interfere with the main business of Nevelson’s life—making art. Almost every room in the house was dominated by Nevelson’s work—completed pieces and works in progress.
“I don’t like a homey home,” Nevelson said. “I don’t want to worry about cleaning. I bought what furniture I have from an office-supply place…. I don’t like easy chairs—they lead to boring conversation. We don’t cook much. We eat out a lot in the neighborhood.”14
Sometime in 1965, Nevelson went with Arne Glimcher to visit Victoria Fabricators, in St. Louis, Missouri, where Ernest Trova had his sculptures made, and as a result she “began to explore the lightweight and reflective properties of black-enameled aluminum and of black and clear Plexiglas.”15 Four years later, Glimcher would take her to Lippincott’s Fine Arts Metal Fabricators in North Haven, Connecticut, where she began to work directly in metal.
Nevelson started her first large metal works by making small-size models out of gray sheet cardboard and taping them together into small four-sided frames, which were open in front and back. She cut a vocabulary of forms—radiating arcs, progressive squares, S-curves, and tubes.
Some of the forms were made in Plexiglas in miniature and stacked for later use. Individual Plexiglas pieces were left loose. Nevelson “began to arrange the pieces into her familiar stack assemblages … changing, and adding forms almost endlessly until the interaction of the separate units reinforced their boundaries” exactly as she wanted.16 Then she put the models on the windowsill for several days, so she could observe the variations in their light-conducting and reflecting qualities. When she was satisfied, she sent the plastic models—generally nine inches by ten inches—to Victoria Fabricators. There, they were made into full-scale pieces in enameled aluminum and painted with shining black vinyl epoxy, thus resembling the reflective surface of the small black Plexiglas models.17 She was preparing these new works for her 1966 exhibition at Pace Gallery, where she astonished the art world by taking her work in a new direction: the beginning of the Atmosphere and Environment series.
Nevelson used aluminum for these first metal works because the lightness gave her great flexibility, stacking the units within the box format she was continuing to use. She had the workers slice fifteen-foot-long aluminum tubes into shorter segments, then stack and bolt them together and arrange them on a base. Finally she had certain simple shapes—circles, squares and rectangles—cast or fabricated out of sheet metal and put into the boxes.18
Moving back and forth as she did between smaller Plexiglas models and the final metal sculptures, manufactured in St. Louis, as she developed the early pieces in the Atmosphere and Environment series, it’s not surprising that Nevelson would soon turn the tables, employing the aluminum works as models for larger clear Plexiglas sculptures.19
Her 1966 show at Pace Gallery included four large works in black-painted enameled aluminum with titles that suggest the progression in her thinking, beginning with Enclosure, moving to Offering, and finally arriving at the first two works of the Atmosphere and Environment series.20 Nevelson was starting off in a new direction, and Glimcher’s theatrical canniness set the stage. The announcement of the exhibition was a photograph of the gardens at Versailles with four pop-open windows featuring each of Nevelson’s new works. The sculptures were shown in a simulated outdoor space that had been created in the gallery. It included two sizable ficus trees and “ground” made of Astroturf.
Though most photographs do not do justice to the complexity of the works in this exhibition, Nevelson’s ingenuity is notable. The first group of Atmosphere and Environments is characterized by a remarkably divergent way of perceiving the sculptures. Seen straight on, obdurate black rectangles block the view through the openwork lattice of tubes, semicircles, and hourglass shapes, which inhabit each of the grid’s cubes. From an angled perspective, however, the solidity of the big black shapes disappear into the syncopated rhythms of many smaller rectangles, which seem to bounce back and forth like a fragmented mobile chessboard, and tubes are eaten by their shadowy reflections.
During 1966 Nevelson would produce approximately five more large metal sculptures in the Atmosphere and Environment series. By the time she created Atmosphere and Environment VI, she was ready to play even more dramatic tricks on the viewer.
Nevelson’s sleight of hand is particularly notable with Atmosphere and Environment V, which Governor Nelson Rockefeller arranged to have installed on the mall in Albany. Photographs taken straight on (from the back or front of the work) make the tubes disappear into slim linear circles of dark, showing up within large light rectangles. These are counterbalanced against the large dark circles, which seem solid but on close inspection are not. They are part of a graduated series of similar shapes or separated sections that match up at differing depths to form the illusion of a singular shape. This was more of the characteristically subtle but powerful perceptual game playing that we have seen all along in Nevelson’s work. Turn your head slightly and you see a different work.
Atmosphere and Environment VI, which Nelson Rockefeller commissioned for Kykuit, his home in Westchester, New York, was produced at his request in magnesium—an expensive, lightweight material—so that, unlike other versions of the series, it could be manufactured as one piece rather than in separate columns that would be soldered together.21
Atmosphere and Environment VI (at Kykuit Magnesium), 1966. 106 × 102 ½ × 49 ½ in. Kykuit, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller. Photograph by Charles Uht, courtesy of Pace Gallery, © Charles Uht, Rockefeller Archives
Once in place, it became more obvious that each unit is a three-dimensional shape, a box, into or onto which are placed flat pieces in circular, square, or rectangular shapes. Some of these are cut into smaller shapes—semicircular forms—placed in graduated series from large to small and vice versa. Its dark interior shapes, partially shaded shapes, and transparent light background give the composition remarkable force.
Rockefeller had Atmosphere and Environment VI set up on the ridge of a hill next to his house so that he could see the Hudson River and surrounding landscape through it. Depending on how the light strikes it and the angle from which it is seen, the sculpture looks different—an ever-changing work of art, just as Nevelson had planned.
Ice Palace I, 1966. Lucite, 24 × 26 × 12 in. Kykuit, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch, courtesy of Pace Gallery
Looking straight on, it is not clear that each of the six columns that make up the work is at a different level from the one next to it. The two farthest ends are closest to the viewer, and the third from the left is the farthest away, another visual illusion that becomes more obvious when the sculpture is replicated in a smaller version in Plexiglas or Lucite.
By carefully comparing Atmosphere and Environment VI with Ice Palace I and Transparent Sculpture IV, two of Nevelson’s smaller works in Plexiglas from the same year, it becomes evident that all three works are actually the same design—though done in different materials (transparent or opaque), at different scales, and displayed in different positions (upright or turned on one side).22 Such a comparison forces the viewer to realize how subjectively we see. By tipping the Plexiglas work slightly or completely—or by requiring that the viewer move her head slightly or completely—Nevelson was creating, or rather capturing, entirely different perceptions, different gestalten. Playing with presence and absence; solidity and invisibility; permanence and mutability; temporality; and two-, three-, and four-dimensionality—she was at the top of her game, not only formally but also conceptually.
Transparent Sculpture IV, 1968. Plexiglas, 19 ⅔ × 33 ¾ × 31 in. Albright Knox Gallery. Photograph by Ferdinand Boesch at Documenta IV, 1968.© documenta Archiv
Looking at the original Plexiglas, or Lucite, versions of Ice Palace I (24 feet by 26 feet by 12 feet), a careful observer will note that the base is not quite square. The spidery etched designs of radiating circular and square forms make a nearly all-over pattern, creating an integrated whole out of the separate parts. Less movement is noticeable from surface to depth and back, because, when seen straight on, a two-dimensional pattern dominates the view. Naturally that changes when the viewer moves—and changes even more when the work is tipped on its side.
Tipped on its back, it becomes Transparent Sculpture IV, a fully three-dimensional object. Placed on a shallow-framed mirror glass, as it usually is, it looks a bit like a human torso pulling itself upright from a reclining position. There is no sign of the linear tracery that distinguishes it from the metal version, Atmosphere and Environment VI. At most, the circular and square configurations inside the columns of transparent boxes give the whole a vitality it would otherwise lack.23
Nevelson doesn’t stop gaming the viewer with this remarkable series of sculptures, which could be called an artistic trifecta. She experiments with other pairs of apparently dissimilar equations, playing with perceptions, until it is no longer clear what is up or down, large or small, near or far.
Transparent Sculpture VII in Plexiglas seems to be the twin sister of Atmosphere and Environment VIII, a unique black-painted aluminum sculpture made for Documenta IV in 1968. Transparent Sculpture VII fits the description of a jewel-like object, and it was treasured as such by Nelson Rockefeller, who bought it and had it enclosed in a Plexiglas box so that the glittering surfaces would never be marred. Its compositional richness is evident with careful study, which reveals how varying the heights of the columns speeds or retards their rhythmic rising up and down. It also becomes eye-catchingly clear that those partial arcs of Plexiglass could seem quite complex when they are set against the tubular shapes nearby.
Sometimes the tubes are solid, acting as horizontal accents, and sometimes their hollowness leads us through to the other side. The artist has drawn us into another dimension—whether or not we chose to follow her.
At the inaugural exhibition of Ferus/Pace Gallery in Los Angeles in December 1966, when the world encountered her new outdoor sculptures, the critic from the Los Angeles Times proclaimed: “Despite the deserved fame and the wide imitation that Louise Nevelson’s compartmentalized constructions have brought her, this ingenious sculptress continues to change and expand her vocabulary while strengthening her idiom…. [She has] turned to a greater clarity and simplification without in any way contending herself with the current reductive vogue.”25 And indeed, metal would dominate Nevelson’s future oeuvre.
Critics such as John Canaday of The New York Times were impressed with Nevelson’s artistic verve: “She has reached points where she could have rested on her laurels, but with each new show she has kicked the laurels aside like so many uprooted weeds and has gone on gardening the fertile soil of her creative inventiveness.”
He wrote, of the newer works, that, “when they stand in the out-of-doors you must see sky and trees and fields merged with the sculpture itself…. This fine conception of a unity between sculpture and site is as simple and as direct as possible—too simple and too direct to have occurred to many sculptors. Mrs. Nevelson works with a kind of ebullience that hits straight through incidental considerations to the heart of whatever problem she takes on, and she has hit the target again in her present exhibition.”26
Many other artists were turning to new materials and styles during the 1960s. Nevelson’s geometric focus was definitely in the artistic air at the 1964 Documenta III in paintings by Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Ben Nicholson, as well as the Cubi by David Smith. Back at home the new work of Frank Stella, Ron Bladen, and Robert Morris was emphatically geometric. Despite the fact that other sculptors were mining the same geometric vein as Nevelson, Canaday was on target when he pointed out that the new works she was producing “are like nothing she had done before, but at the same time they are pure Nevelson.”
Glimcher and Nevelson had known since December 1964 that she would have a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the spring of 1967.27 Her work and many of her decisions from 1964 through 1966 occurred in the context of the promise of that large exhibit at the premier American museum.
Preparing herself for the Whitney retrospective in 1967, Louise Nevelson could tell Dorothy Seckler: “My feelings are changing—about myself, my work, the world and its work.” It was not only in her new sculptures that she felt she had “pushed through into the open.” … “I’ve lived with a feeling of accomplishment all my life. Still, the Whitney show will give me more freedom to continue to work on a grand scale.”28
Nevelson knew that her friend Dorothy Miller had wanted to give her a big show at MoMA, but the artist decided that the Whitney Museum would be a better venue. There was no real competition for her favors between the two museums. Nevelson had shown in eleven Whitney Annual exhibitions and been included in some of the Whitney’s major thematic shows, such as Nature in Abstraction (1958) and American Sculpture Between the Fairs 1939–64 (1964). MoMA had included her in just two—Sixteen Americans in 1959 and Art of Assemblage in 1961—and had sponsored her for the Venice Biennale in 1962. These several events were the result of Dorothy Miller’s endorsement, but Miller did not yet have the status or power at MoMA comparable to Howard and Jean Lipman, her enthusiastic supporters on the board of the Whitney.29
With the 1967 retrospective at the Whitney, Nevelson was aiming to impress on the New York art world that she should be acknowledged as the first and leading environmental artist in America. This was well prepared for. In February 1965, Arne Glimcher had written in his formal letter to Lloyd Goodrich, the director of the Whitney Museum, confirming Nevelson’s retrospective: “Louise Nevelson asked me to tell you that she has always designed the mounting of her exhibitions herself and asks that she be permitted to do the installation at the Whitney.”30 Nevelson followed up with her own letter to Jack Gordon, the curator of the show, making this point abundantly clear: “I have given long and careful consideration to the installation of the exhibition, which you know is as important to me as the work itself. As I am, and will always be, an environmental artist, so must this be a retrospective environment of my total composition.”31
Nevelson never stopped emphasizing the importance of doing her own installation. “I fought for control of the exhibit,” she told a reviewer. “People say I’m tough, but if you’re not in control, your work loses out. The way things are placed can change their effect. The light, the walls, the ceiling—everything is part of the art work.”32 For Nevelson, the installation of any exhibition was nothing less than the creation of an environment.
The press release for the Whitney show stated: “Mrs. Nevelson is credited with developing ‘environmental’ sculpture.”33 Using Nevelson’s words from an interview with Colette Roberts, the curator’s introduction in the exhibition catalogue repeatedly and emphatically noted Nevelson’s long-standing interest in environments: “Since art, particularly sculpture, is so very living, naturally you want all of life, so you make an environment, but that environment is sculpture too.”34
By the mid-1960s Nevelson could count eight exhibitions that might be considered “environmental”—beginning in 1943 with The Clown Is the Center of His World and continuing through and beyond her breakthrough show, Moon Garden + One, in 1958. She had not used the word “environment” as a title for any of her works until 1966, when she began the series Atmosphere and Environments. By the time of the Whitney retrospective, Nevelson, along with many others, believed she had successfully shown that she had been an environmental artist all along.
Each room of the retrospective presented the different facets and evolving styles of Nevelson’s oeuvre. In the room with white-painted sculptures, America Dawn was made up of individual pieces, many of which had been exhibited as part of the famous Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959). Standing works were gathered on a platform, and columns hanging from the ceiling above gave the ensemble a life as a white environment. A grouping of Nevelson’s best works in gold, including Royal Tide I (1960) and Dawn (1962), made for another environment.
The pièce de résistance was a remarkable semi-enclosed passageway—called “Rain Forest” (or “Tropical Rain Forest”)—which brought the viewer from the enormous room containing Nevelson’s large, black wood walls (including the huge Homage to the World) into the chamber with her latest works in metal and plastic.
As Nevelson had explained to the curator: “My reason for the placement of the passageway and its housing of the tropical rain garden is to allow a fluid and light movement from the present into other periods of my work and then a direct route back to the present and the crescendo of the enormous new metal sculpture as people leave my environment. This is my particular pride and joy.”35
A reviewer described Rain Forest: “At one point the visitor moves out of an area of white constructions through a completely black passage with shapes and forms looming and hanging and standing majestically, some of them picked out by a strange blue spotlight, all of them placed in a mystery of shadows and reflections. Strictly this is an environment of sculptures … but the effect is that of a complete work. The group is called ‘Tropical Rain Forest,’ but the experience of walking through this place of secrecy and darkness renders titles redundant.”36
With the Whitney retrospective, Nevelson accomplished exactly what she wanted: she was generally recognized as the founder and principal proponent of environmental art. Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times, exclaimed: “If you’re Louise Nevelson, you’ve created an enchanted empire—a low-key metaphor for the spectacular group of her assemblages that now inhabits the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum.”37
Geoffrey Clements. Installation view of Louise Nevelson retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1967. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, © Geoffrey Clements
John Canaday was equally enthusiastic:
The Nevelson show at the Whitney proves … that she is truly the top figure in two sculptural revolutions of more recent date—the technical one by which sculpture is an assemblage of objects picked up just about anywhere, and the conceptual one of sculpture as an environment rather than as an object. If we have always known this, the Whitney show has afforded Mrs. Nevelson her first opportunity to install her environmental compositions in space of satisfactory dimensions.38
Charlotte Willard of the New York Post wrote: “Credited with being the originator of environmental sculpture, Nevelson has, in any event, done the most impressive and brilliant work in this movement…. Strangely silent, Nevelson’s work offers itself for contemplation and wins us not by an overwhelming presence but by the pervasive enchantment of its enveloping serenity.”39
Almost a decade after her first undeniably environmental exhibit, Moon Garden + One (1958), the artist was emphatically claiming the territory as the First Environmental Artist. The time lapse between the formal invention and the naming of it is similar to the one that occurred between the time (1957) Hilton Kramer noted how she used shadow as a formal device and her nominating herself as an Architect of Shadow (1964). First, she intuitively discovered (or created) a formal innovation, then she figured out—usually with the help of a critic or gallerist—how to put the innovation into words.
Not everyone was entranced by the retrospective. Reviewing the opening, the art critic Emily Genauer, who had written supportively about the artist for almost thirty years, declared herself to be fatigued by too much Nevelson: “Line up a whole museum floor of her pieces…. Fancy becomes formula; incantation becomes rhetoric…. It’s too little varied to reward overgenerous seeing.”40
Four days later, however, Genauer wrote a paean to the exhibit, entitled, “A Scavenger’s Black Magic.” The critic had obviously gone back for another look and emerged with a very different perspective:
It is nothing less than the creation of a special very private world of dream into which they may follow the artist and find revelations of timeless mysteries…. Her closely contained constructions vivify the space around them as an ancient god might, appearing on earth in impenetrable clouds…. Nevelson’s works wait for you to come to them. They wait with quiet and mysterious dignity. They enfold you in a new experience as completely as her boxes contain the enigmatic elements she has placed in them…. The living quality with which she has invested them grows ever larger, operating on a new level. This … is a magnification of image into an experience that the viewer not only perceives for the first time but in which he is also profoundly involved.41
At times, too much Nevelson was hard to take, even for a fan, and could seem repetitive. At other times it was a fabulous feast, as long as one took the time to carefully savor the individual dishes.
The flood of admiration Nevelson received as a result of the Whitney retrospective—as well as her now-established ability to elicit admiration with the use of new materials and new formal vocabularies—enhanced her reputation in the art world. An increasing number of critics as well as colleagues saw her as the most important American sculptor at the mid-twentieth century.
“She’s probably the top sculptress in the country at the moment, but there’s no knowing what she’ll do, or say,”42 wrote Gregory McDonald, a staffer on The Boston Globe. One canny reviewer for Artforum allowed that her new work (in plastic and metal) was “handled with geometrically icy self-assurance. Louise Nevelson is, in her sixth decade, displaying a much more strenuous investigation of her genuinely witty impulses.”43 Most of the reviewers of the Whitney retrospective noted that Nevelson’s new work was taking her to a more contemporary mode, and some even argued that her older work in wood could be seen as a bridge to her present more robust accomplishment.
It was nevertheless a dicey position, given that younger artists were rapidly moving forward, and the “oldsters”—which included sixty-seven-year-old Nevelson—were meant to be left behind. By the mid-1960s “Minimalism” was one of the hottest isms in the art world. Nevelson had already absorbed its message by osmosis—just as some artists of every era absorb the vibrations of the events surrounding them—and invented her own version.
At least four of the works in her first Pace New York show, Silent Music in 1964, had been minimal, pared down to essences as she liked to say. Nevelson, along with David Smith, Anthony Caro, Tony Smith, Isamu Noguchi, and Ellsworth Kelly, was one of the only sculptors to produce work with such startling simplicity before 1965. Then came a tidal wave of a new generation of artists intent on creating “a new artistic spirit”: Minimalism. But their elders had led the way.
When the new movement was trumpeted, as it was in the 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, Nevelson was left out. She hadn’t been “younger” for decades. But her work was as minimal as most of her chronological “juniors” in that famous show, which included Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Larry Bell, Ellsworth Kelly (who, though he had been ahead of his generation in producing minimalist work before 1965, was certainly a chronological “junior”) and Carl Andre. These younger artists were pushing forward, and they became the big names of the Minimalist movement. Still, the art world was changing faster and faster, and while Nevelson moved on, to new styles, new materials, and new challenges, many of the younger artists didn’t.
Discussing the difference between her own style and the new champions of Minimalism, Nevelson had this to say: “Let me explain forever: I’m not geometric. Any line - straight or curved - is the same to me. I am not using [lines] in a regimented way. I can take a straight line and make it into a curve. As the creator you can make knots in it…. I’m not using [geometry] like other people are using it. Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella are wonderful, but they are working on another level. Maybe the feminine principle in me doesn’t want to be that regimented…. If I can’t encompass both geometric and baroque, I’ve missed the boat.”44
Nevelson was frequently asked about where she fit with the move many artists were starting to make towards working with technology. Her response was classic: “I go my way, have always gone my way and always will. Technology … I am more of a romantic than ever.”45 Despite Nevelson’s age—which should have placed her firmly in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists and their emotionally loaded and subjectively warm work—she did not exactly fit there and had managed to stay in tune with the changing art scene while remaining true to herself.
After her Whitney retrospective in 1967, when she was included in important group exhibitions of sculptors—such as at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and MoMA—she was grouped with her age-mates David Smith, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi. The younger artists presented themselves as a contrast—as the next generation tends to do—to the heated emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism. Nevelson’s ordered chaos, contained in many boxed walls, didn’t seem to fit in either group.
The Guggenheim Museum’s Fifth International Exhibition in October 1967, which was devoted entirely to sculpture, began with the work of Arp, Giacometti, David Smith, and Burgoyne Diller—all recently deceased. Then came the “old masters,” including Picasso, Lipchitz, Calder, and Nevelson, among others. The show concluded with the newer generation, the “contemporary practitioners” who were presented as being in revolt against the ways of the older artists—George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris.46
The fact that working artists, including Nevelson, were excluded from the group of “contemporary practitioners” indicates that the definition of that group was necessarily arbitrary. Clearly the curatorial eye, which is given the freedom to editorialize and shapes the art world, just as it is shaped by the art world, was intentionally pitting the younger generation against more established artists. Perhaps the more concerning exclusion, and one that was soon to come to the fore, was that of women artists working at the time. Nevelson and Barbara Hepworth were the only women sculptors included in the collection of seventy-seven artists from around the world. Worse yet, Nevelson had been reduced to being an “old master”—did they really mean an “old mistress”?
Nevelson was completely sympathetic to the modern age. The openness of the 1960s suited her perfectly. Because of the publicity generated by the Whitney retrospective, Nevelson and her thoughts about life, fashion, and the future were reported everywhere. Women’s Wear Daily and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin both interviewed her at the end of the year and her pithy comments make it very clear how she lived and what she was thinking about in 1967. She observed: “There are so many things going on. You hear about violence. The black and white problem. Reaching the moon. And yet, for me personally, these are the most exciting times on record. All the excitement of life multiplied …. I still say our times are better than any other. Because they’re saying what they are right in the open, they’re not covering up…. That’s why I love our age—it’s changing the meaning of everything.”47
Brief though it was, the presidency of John F. Kennedy had ushered in a new hopeful era: government support for the arts, the Civil Rights Act, the women’s movement, Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, the Beatles, Medicare, and the space race. And just in time for Nevelson to expand her wings and fly.
After five years of growing success, Arne Glimcher had moved Pace Gallery down the street to 32 West Fifty-Seventh Street. Architect I. M. Pei designed the new gallery in a larger space. It became a “glamorous showcase for the works of far-out younger artists, whom it has carefully nurtured, as well as such stars as Louise Nevelson and Jean Dubuffet.”48
In the late summer and early fall of 1968 Nevelson was exhibiting works in both wood and new media at Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany. She had a room of her own, which she filled with two Plexiglas works (Transparent Sculptures IV and V), the complete suite of her silk-screen prints Façade, and a huge wood wall, Shadow and Reflection (1966). In the outdoor exhibition space, she showed a large enameled-aluminum sculpture Atmosphere and Environment VIII, which appears to be the model for Transparent Sculpture VII. This indicated how intertwined the works in metal and plastic had always been—and continued to be, to the end of both series. Her work in metal continued, but for two years—from 1967 to 1968—Nevelson had pushed as far as she could go with Plexiglas works; in the end Plexiglas, where the final product was made by others, proved to be too restrictive and indirect a medium for this hands-on artist.
Along with some of the old masters, such as Josef Albers, David Smith, and Ad Reinhardt, Documenta IV now included the younger Minimalists and Pop artists, including Frank Stella, Tony Smith, George Segal, George Rickey, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Mark de Suvero, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselman.
Everything—every medium, every ism—was on exhibit. Nevelson’s work seemed right up to date: modern technology; Minimalist aesthetic; large outdoor sculpture. She felt at one with the international group of artists gathered for Documenta. “Usually an artist works in loneliness. But here, one suddenly experiences the kinship one always suspects one might have with the rest of the artistic world.”49
This time when she came back from Germany she was confronted with a mountain of work in preparation for forthcoming exhibitions in Chicago and Toronto. But her mood was not so ebullient as it had been. It was 1968. Too many deaths, too much war. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had broken the back of the optimism she and many others felt through most of the ’60s.50 The Vietnam War seemed endless, students were protesting everywhere she went, and riot police were putting them down all around her. It seemed that all the freedoms that had liberated so many people around the world began to close up and die. Nevelson was a fierce advocate for those unjustly mistreated or dismissed—whether it was the young Americans who were being forced to fight an unjust war, the Czechs who were fighting Russian domination, or the students everywhere who believed their authoritarian elders were holding them back and down.
Nevelson’s admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement was widely known, and she was proud that her oldest granddaughter, Neith, had married a black man and had just given birth to a baby girl. Nevelson donated her art to support Jewish causes, and with the same fervor she gave her support to civil rights, peace, and Native Americans, with whom she always felt a close kinship.51 The world around Nevelson was anything but peaceful and something somber seeped into her work.
The large works Dark Sky and Silent Shadow, both done in 1968, are ominous, the latter reminding one curator of the boxcars used by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It should be easy to dismiss Dark Sky as a mere match of large boxes with slats, but instead it has a beauty and haunting eloquence. While able to look deeply into the dark of some of its boxes, the viewer is kept at a distance on the surface of others. The shift from depth to surface and back again engages the viewer’s eye, as does the almost but not quite symmetrical arrangement of boxes. The small variations from one side of the composition to the other do not discomfort, but rather enliven. This calls to mind the dimensional shifts in her screen-prints.
Silent Shadow is almost impossible to register. The viewer is drawn back and forth by the vertically striped shadows caused by the space between the slats of wood—some are punctuated with bent nails, others by the stubby ends of horizontal bits of wood. The interplay between the darkly open spaces and the rough texture of the wood makes this simple sculpture into a complex and heart-breaking work. To the discerning eye there is a breathtaking difference from slat to slat. For someone ready to dismiss this work as a bunch of leftover pieces from a junk pile, those subtle differences of parts and whole are invisible.
In contrast to these two works Nevelson produced a quantity of small sculptures: little pieces, which were put together with other little pieces, and then combined with several others to become a more complete composition. Nevelson usually worked on the floor with this series, and once she pronounced the various groupings done, she had them framed. She called one series “Zags,” twenty-six iterations labeled from A to Z. (By March 1969 she had gotten through the entire alphabet and was starting with Zag AA.)52
An exhibit at the Arts Club of Chicago in October 1968 featured eighteen sculptures, including Dark Sky. Like most of her exhibits at this time, the show combines some very large walls—Homage to the Universe (thirty feet long, containing one hundred and two units) and Rain Forest Wall (twelve feet long by eight and a half feet high)—as well as much smaller works, such as Zag A and B. In between were some extraordinary “simple” works, the four Night Visages.
On first glance, the works in this series might look easy to comprehend with a single glance, but not so. Just as the viewer’s eyes are persuaded that they will find a similar pattern in the next box over up and down the grid, they don’t. The change is small and keeps you guessing: How different is it really? No manufactured object can play such tricks, no fabricator can gauge how much or how little the variations should be. As Nevelson repeatedly said: “Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”53
During the historical and psychological tumult of the late 1960s Nevelson had found a way to stay anchored and steady. She could repeatedly practice with new materials and new technology in the creation of order out of the chaos of material plenitude. Large size, enormous variation of parts—all could be organized because it passed through her creative mind.
