Night Focus Dawn, 1969. Painted wood, 107 ¾ × 118 3/16 × 14 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Howard and Jean Lipman. Photograph © Geoffrey Clements
“I was always most interested in what I could do for myself. I won’t do anything for anyone else. One of my complaints is that I never have been selfish enough.”
—Louise Nevelson, in interview with Emmett Meara, “Sculptor Louise Nevelson resents ostracism in Rockland as child,” Bangor Daily News, June 15, 1978, 5
In the first months of 1969 Louise began to prepare for an upcoming exhibition that spring, Recent Wood Sculptures at Pace Gallery. As the Pace show approached, Nevelson finally tackled the ground-floor studio she had been avoiding for almost a year. It was the room she traditionally used for large-scale work. For months she had been opening the door, taking a look at the accumulation and shutting it quickly saying, “No, no, not today.” Having claimed a few months earlier that she would not do any more large walls, she proceeded to make her longest one yet, Nightsphere-Light, and included it in the Pace show.
The huge piece (forty-eight feet wide by eight and a half feet high and eleven inches deep), which had its own room in the gallery, was set up in a gigantic arc against three walls and lit with a mysterious blue light. The Pace catalogue placed Nevelson’s words from an interview (done two decades earlier) next to the illustration of Nightsphere-Light: “There are laws that we have to concede are standing in step with our time. Since we have them, I use them: light and dark, day and night, time and space. Maybe fifty thousand years from now they will not be needed. They are apparently necessary at our present time of evolution. I don’t say they’re the ultimate. They may be, but I don’t think they are.”1
Every one of the twenty-four new, black-painted wood sculptures in the show was sold.2 The Lipmans bought Nightsphere-Light—one masterpiece from a year of many masterpieces—and gave it to the Juilliard School to be installed in the lobby of the Juilliard theater at Lincoln Center. It takes up the entire west wall of the lobby’s upper tier, for which it seems to have been specifically designed.
The president of Juilliard observed that Nightsphere-Light was musical “in that its rhythmical forms express variations on a major theme.”3 In her 1982 book on Nevelson, Jean Lipman introduced photographs of the Juilliard wall with a Nevelson quote: “I use action and counteraction, like in music, all the time. Action and counteraction.”4 After the work was installed in her characteristic debunking manner, Nevelson remarked: “I don’t have any ideas about its being musical. Everything that I understand about the basic things of life has gone into it.”5 However, as anyone with a sense of rhythm or melody can see, the composition is undeniably musical. The contrapuntal themes and variations combine baroque and classical musical styles, and are composed of shapes that echo silhouettes of musical instruments. Formal reversals of figure and ground shimmer across the length and breadth of the work—sometimes they are phantom undulating female shapes. They can also be jagged triangular teeth, which sharpen the eye’s journey across what would otherwise have been a sensuous sweep across the long rectangular wall. James Mellow, writing in Art International, refers to Nightsphere-Light as “a marvelous orchestration of forms…. a beautiful piece of night-music; handsomely proportioned, calm, complex within its ordered simplicity.”6 John Gruen, writing in New York magazine, compared Nevelson’s new works to the organ music of Bach: “Both are brilliantly contrapuntal, both are based on elaborate architectonic concepts of abstract form, both are imbued by a dark, austere lyricism, and both are nourished by strong spiritual beliefs…. Her works have an intense residual of sound in them.”7
In her book on Nevelson, Jean Lipman pairs the illustration of Night-Focus-Dawn with the artist’s words: “Art is as alive as our breathing, as our own lives, but it’s more ordered.”8 It was a happy choice of words. The sculpture seems to breathe, and yet it is highly structured. The energy comes from the subtle variations that range across the four rows of boxes, which seemingly contain identical elements—two or three long, thin triangular wedges on top of a rectangular slab of wood. At one corner of each box is a large triangular wedge whose long curve frames the composition inside the box. The pattern created by the large wedges is almost hypnotic and carries the eye along akin to the sweeping power of a rhythmic musical line.
With her two most musically attuned works—Night-Focus-Dawn and Nightsphere-Light—Nevelson had carried the somber promise of Silent Shadow and Dark Sky to new heights, depths—and lengths. Though these works were done at about the same time,9 they are vastly different in feel, yet most critics saw their essential musicality.
Night Focus Dawn, 1969. Painted wood, 107 ¾ × 118 3/16 × 14 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Howard and Jean Lipman. Photograph © Geoffrey Clements
No matter whether they praised or panned her, the critics concurred on one aspect of Nevelson’s career: whatever she created was uniquely her own.10 She was the grand mistress of transformation. She could take the bric-a-brac detritus of civilization and make it look fresh and vital. Just as easily, she could take freshly cut wood bits and make them look timeless. She could be an artist straight out of the romantic and highly subjective abstract expressionists or an emerging figure of the new technologically taut Minimalists. She was always herself, never just one of a group.
During the spring of 1969 some work from the recent show at the Pace Gallery in New York went to Ohio where it was subsequently shown at Eva Glimcher’s new gallery, Pace Columbus, which she had opened in 1965 soon after arriving there. This was the second of eight one-person shows Nevelson would have at Pace Columbus. By this time Eva Glimcher was well established in Columbus, and visitors to the gallery were accustomed to the artist being present at gallery openings. When Nevelson came to the openings she always stayed with Eva Glimcher for a few days.
Eva Glimcher ran her gallery with the same verve that she had used running the Boston Pace Gallery, and Pace Columbus soon gained an excellent reputation. The openings of her exhibitions were packed; her generosity and salesmanship were legendary. Her daughter-in-law, Patty Glimcher, recalled: “She could sell sand to an Arab.”11
The role of Eva Glimcher in Nevelson’s life should not be underestimated. Without Eva, Nevelson might not have believed that Arne, Eva’s youngest son, could adequately represent her art. Eva was a strong woman in Arne’s life—a woman who broke boundaries well ahead of the women’s liberation movement. She predisposed him to trust and respect Nevelson. In addition, partly because Eva Glimcher and Louise Nevelson were so alike—the exact same age from the same part of the world—Nevelson could trust and count on Eva to stand by her through the difficulties she still experienced because she was a woman, even though a hugely successful one. As a mother of four very successful siblings, Eva was a “good” maternal figure for the artist as well as a close friend and equal.
While the exhibit at Pace Columbus was still up, Nevelson was on her way to Paris for a big show at the prestigious Jeanne Bucher Gallery, where some of her most dramatic walls—among them Homage to the Universe, Shadow and Reflection, Silent Shadow, and Silent Music—were being exhibited as well as smaller and more easily marketable works in wood and Plexiglas.
Photographs of Nevelson at the Paris opening in May show a fur-coated, heavily mascaraed, gypsy-like older woman with an obvious taste for dramatic self-presentation. No wonder reviewers were interested in her Russian origins and the extent to which they inspired either her mystical romanticism or her formal constructivism.
The reviewer for France-Soir observed that Nevelson was tall, still beautiful, not hiding her age, wearing false eyelashes and an elaborate headpiece that emphasized the purity of her features. She likened the artist’s looks to those of Queen Tiye, the beautiful mother of Akhenaten in the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, and pointed out that Nevelson had greeted the eight hundred people who had come to the opening with “royal reserve.” Almost in passing she also noted that Nevelson had produced extraordinary assemblages that combined architecture and sculpture.12
Few people in Paris seemed to like her Plexiglas pieces, but the matte black works were seen as rich with ambiguity and secretly paradoxical. Whether large or small, one writer observed, the black sculptures are “always full of endless riddles and contradictions.”13
In his review of the Bucher show in Le Monde, titled “Nevelson’s Immaculate Bric-a-brac,” Michel Conil Lacoste observed that:
Somehow she marries [all the bric-a-brac] together to produce one of those rhythmic murals which have been astounding the art world for the past ten years…. Her work has a sort of grave humor, the effect of which is to steady and soothe…. The spell she casts: a kind of stillness which seems to accompany even the slightest of her pieces…. The secret lies in her remarkable character, coupled with her exceptional energy and taste for extravagance tempered as it is by a classic simplicity.14
In July 1969 Nevelson’s friend and former dealer, Martha Jackson, died in California at sixty-two years old, after apparently suffering a heart attack while swimming in her own pool. It was one of several serious losses that year. Jackson’s death was personal, the other losses were professional.
Unaccountably—given her recent many successes and celebrated stature in the art world—Nevelson was left out of several large overarching exhibitions. In June, she was left out of an extensive exhibition in New York at MoMA. The MoMA exhibition, The New American Painting and Sculpture: The First Generation, was organized by William Rubin and William Agee and consisted of work in the museum’s permanent collection—though many works were recent acquisitions not actually made when the “First Generation” produced them.
In his scathing review of the MoMA show, Hilton Kramer attacked the museum for its insufficient coverage of some prominent painters, including De Kooning and Pousette-Dart, but he saves his worst for the “problem of the sculpture.” Aside from the work of David Smith and David Hare, he finds most of the work on display to be “merely pitiable.” He is outraged by the omission of Louise Nevelson—“one of the most powerful sculptors of the period.” Kramer objects specifically to her being assigned to “ ‘the nucleus of a distinct second generation.’ ”15
Nevelson’s actual age combined with her actual accomplishments chronologically listed sometimes caused her to be considered the wrong age at the wrong time. Her breakthrough sculpture was being done in the 1950s at approximately the same time as the breakthrough paintings of the Abstract Expressionists, though she was five to ten years older than most of them.
The Metropolitan Museum’s vast show, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, from which Nevelson was also excluded, opened in October 1969 and included more than four hundred works by forty-three artists. Henry Geldzahler, the museum’s curator for Twentieth Century Art, was widely criticized for his narrow-minded selections and significant omissions. All the prominent art critics from leading publications noted that Louise Nevelson—“hailed and exhibited the world over as one of the three or four major talents we’ve produced”16—should not have been left out. The exclusion was especially outrageous in light of the inclusion of more than forty works by Jasper Johns and another forty-two by Ellsworth Kelly. The only woman in the show, Helen Frankenthaler, was the wife of Robert Motherwell, whose work was included in the exhibit.
Critic Emily Genauer accused the thirty-four-year-old Geldzahler of selecting artists who were his friends or the favorites of the “little-magazine” critics, which she called “a closed-circuit affair” that moves along a cycle—from specifically chosen critics to select dealers who show those artists and whose collectors buy them and eventually donate them to the museum (for a tidy tax-deduction), which leads back to the curator who gets invited to all the right parties. She chided the curator for having abnegated his public responsibility.17
Genauer was hardly alone in seeing the show at the Metropolitan Museum as an example of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing. Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times, quotes several prominent artists to make her point that Geldzahler’s curatorial choices are essentially “clannish.” She cites Richard Pousette-Dart: “This exhibition … distorts a whole creative period historically by its false value system of selection where hucksterism and the fast buck are signs of artistic worth.”18 David Hare is quoted by Glueck in her Times piece even more acerbically: “Henry’s interested in going out to dinner and meeting famous people and being in … the selections … have less to do with art than with Geldzahler’s career.” Glueck also notes that the curator had unsuccessfully approached Nevelson’s dealer two years earlier for a major donation to the museum of her work.19 That a woman artist was expected to donate her work to a major museum rather than have it purchased will be taken up later.
In sum, Geldzahler was accused of being a single-minded, self-promoting tastemaker. Harvard- and Yale-educated, young and ambitious, he was part of the world that had made many of the artists he promoted—such as Johns and Warhol—into icons. It was a hipster’s personal preferences being given the imprimatur of America’s premier museum.
Hilton Kramer wrote two reviews, both blasting the show and its curator. In the first he states: “What is offered … is an account of reputations, which are now especially esteemed, and of individual works that happened to strike Mr. Geldzahler’s fancy…. We are offered, for the most part, a series of random one-man shows. It is indeed doubtful if so large an exhibition about so circumscribed a period has ever succeeded in conveying so confused and arbitrary a picture of what evolved in that period…. There is a shocking lack of historical intelligence in the selection and the shape of the exhibition.”20
In his second review a day later, he presciently observes that, “This exhibition will … be very influential despite its grave errors and distortions. Its sponsorship by the Met[ropolitan Museum] will guarantee that…. For the art scene itself, [the exhibition] serves notice that modishness and the arbitrary rewriting of history are now sanctioned as policy in our greatest museum.” “The omission of William Baziotes and Richard Pousette-Dart … is high-handed and indefensible. So is the omission of Louise Nevelson among the important sculptors of the last decade and a half,” Hilton Kramer inveighed in response to Nevelson’s having been omitted from this show.21 More than a decade later, in 1981, Robert Hughes, esteemed art critic for Time magazine, referred to Nevelson’s omission from the exhibition as “one of the most celebrated curatorial blunders in recent memory.”22
Fortunately, to balance some of the sour notes of 1969, Nevelson was given a prestigious award. Founded in 1907, MacDowell Colony is the oldest artists’ colony in the United States. In August 1969, when Nevelson received the MacDowell Colony’s highest honor, the Edward MacDowell Medal “for Outstanding Contributions to Sculpture,” she used the ceremony to speak up for women artists, saying: “I have never thought that to be creative you had to either wear a skirt or pants…. I wanted to be a sculptor from the start. Now here I am. Not because I am a woman, but because Nature gives creativity and doesn’t ask that question…. In America we have recognized [women] in the other arts, in poetry, even in composing … the visual arts were the last to recognize the female in art.”23
Nevelson had had a retrospective at the premier American museum for American artists—the Whitney Museum of American Art—and large-scale exhibitions in Europe. But she had not had a large show in America outside of New York. The progress in mounting exhibitions in the late 1960s can be tracked through the records and correspondence between all the parties involved. As a result there is much documentation about Nevelson’s next major solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas (MFAH), which ran from October 23 through December 14, 1969. The details of the planning and execution of this major exhibition, provide a revealing look at how Nevelson’s career was built once she and Arne Glimcher were working together and how the planning of a major exhibition gave scope to their ingenuity and talents. Also evident is the polarizing effect Nevelson often had on people—everyone agreed she was a great artist but there was anything but unanimity on the topic of her human qualities.
From the start Arne Glimcher, Fred Mueller, co-director at Pace Gallery, and Louise Nevelson were all closely involved in planning the exhibition. Mary H. Buxton, the Georgia belle transplanted to Houston with an “unbelievably charming personality,” was the one who made it happen. Buxton was interim director of the MFAH between 1967 and 1969, filling in between James Johnson Sweeney and Philippe de Montebello. What was meant to be a three-month stint for the former docent coordinator in the education department became a two-year term, during which she curated several major exhibitions, including the Louise Nevelson show. Buxton saw the exhibit as a perfect marriage between Louise Nevelson and architect Mies van der Rohe, who had recently designed a new wing of the museum—Cullinan Hall.
The correspondence between Buxton, Pace Gallery, and Nevelson is extensive and reveals the curator’s forceful personality—sometimes flattering, sometimes commanding, but always confident and exacting in her requests and expectations of cooperation.
Mary Buxton wrote to Arne Glimcher about her forthcoming trip to New York in October 1968 and her desire to meet with Louise Nevelson and plan for an exhibition in Houston. The next month she wrote to Glimcher, “My visit with Louise was so delightful and you were grand to arrange it,” followed by her reporting that she had met with the museum’s trustees who had given a go-ahead signal for the exhibition a year later.24
In October 1968, Buxton confided to Glimcher that she was “quite excited” about seeing Nevelson’s show in Chicago the following week (at the Arts Club of Chicago).25 But her recollection of the events almost forty years afterwards in a tape-recorded interview is totally different from what she had written to Glimcher at the time.26 In 2005 she said:
I have never met a woman who spoke in just four letter words. I said, “Do you not know any English?” It was awful. And I don’t know whether she took an immediate dislike to me or what. I had a terrible time with her, and I almost gave up. And finally I said, “You know, you and I could get along, but I’m not going to speak your language and you’re not going to speak mine. There’s got to be some intermediate ground we can meet on.” And she [Nevelson] said, “You come to Chicago and see my show.” Well, off I went to Chicago and … then I said, “Now will you do it?” And she said, “I’ll do it.”27
A week after getting the museum’s go-ahead for a Nevelson exhibit, Buxton wrote to the artist on October 22, 1968: “Like a dutiful daughter I flew to Chicago Friday to see your show at the Arts Club, and it is one of the handsomest I’ve ever viewed.” In her letter she also wrote: “It was such a wonderful experience meeting and visiting with you, and the Board is thrilled over the prospect of your exhibition next fall…. Your black pieces are superb, but then the white group [America Dawn 1962] at the Chicago Institute was so exciting as well. What do you think of borrowing that group from the Institute? Here I go making suggestions, which you can ignore completely and try to understand that I’m only so excited over the prospect that it’s difficult to remain subdued.”28
The president of the Arts Club of Chicago, Rue Winterbotham Shaw, had met with Mary Buxton and told her that Nevelson’s show had been “the most popular exhibition they had ever held and people were returning again and again.” Not to be outdone by the Arts Club of Chicago, which was already renowned as a preeminent exhibitor of international contemporary art, Buxton wrote, “Since there were eighteen pieces in [the Chicago] show I predict that we will probably have to double or even triple the number for [ours]. This, of course, will be left entirely up to you.”29
Thus the way was cleared for the largest American exhibition of Nevelson’s works outside of New York. Texas was getting ready to outdo its competitors, with Mary Buxton at the reins.
Over the course of the next fourteen months dozens of letters passed back and forth between the curator in Houston and the New York team of Glimcher and Mueller at Pace. By spring Buxton began to pick up the pace with the gallery. In response to her telephone call to Glimcher on March 18, 1969, for an update, Glimcher wrote back that, “Mrs. Nevelson has already begun to prepare a one-man exhibition for the Museum of Fine Arts for October, 1969. It is understood that Mrs. Nevelson will design the installation and that you will carry out her plan, which will include the building of bases and the possibility of painting certain walls black.”30
Between May 1 and May 27, Mary Buxton went from politely describing (to “Mr. Glimcher”) all she would need to prepare the catalogue to telling him to “Get to Work!” after having announced that, “It is of the utmost importance that we move along as rapidly as possible.”31
Forthwith she was sent a photograph of Nevelson and the catalogue from the recent Pace New York show for the latest bibliography and chronology. By mid-July, Buxton was working on the possibility of the show’s travelling to New Orleans or Austin, Texas, asking “Dear Louise” if she would be willing to give a short lecture the day after the opening.
Buxton’s letter to William Fagaly, the curator at the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans, is striking for Buxton’s “candid” view of Louise Nevelson. “I am delighted that you wish to join us with the Nevelson, for I thoroughly feel it could be her last really great show. She is in her 70s and tires easily, and the pieces she is working on will never have been seen before which will make the entire presentation quite unique.”32 The show ultimately went to Austin, Texas, and was certainly not Nevelson’s “last really great show.” She had only just turned seventy, nor did she show much evidence of tiring for the next eighteen years. Buxton had cleverly implied to Fagaly that this was a rare opportunity not to be missed, a gambit she would use several more times.
Nevelson and Glimcher made the decisions together about which works to include in the Houston exhibition. The selection set in motion a chronological trajectory for the artist that became fixed and standard ever afterwards. It begins with a number of works all dated 1955: Night Presence I–VI, Relief, and two series, Moon Spikes and Moon Garden Forms.33
Then the chronology picks up speed with two walls, which “were first assembled in 1959 and then added to or reassembled in 1962 and 1968.”34 Assigning a date range became the solution, for example, Night Totality 1959–64. Beginning in 1964, the works moved forward in orderly fashion until 1969, when they reached the grand finale of seven works that were made especially for this exhibit: three large black walls and one white grouping.
In late July, Mueller replied to Buxton that, according to the tentative plans he and Nevelson had worked out for the installation, the Houston museum needed to build a large partition wall across the front of the exhibition space, which would darken the hall. Additionally, he wrote that: “These partitions must be painted black, then black photographer’s paper can be stapled to the permanent walls where necessary.” Mueller explained that Nevelson was creating a large, new white work with “lots of rising towers and perhaps hanging columns.” Mueller ended his letter on a hopeful note. “I think the space will work out beautifully, and if Houston doesn’t swarm to the exhibition, I’ll be very surprised.”35
In October came a price list, which indicated that fifty-two of the sixty works were for sale. The two most expensive were the new white environment, New Dawn (priced at $100,000), and Mirror Image I (at $75,000). The remaining works ranged from four to sixty thousand dollars. Before the show closed Mary Buxton persuaded a donor to purchase Mirror Image I for the museum.36 In an exuberant letter to the donor’s wife, Alice Brown, Buxton wrote to say: “I’m still in shock over the fantastic gift of the NEVELSON! In fact, it’s really difficult for me to continue working today. Philippe [de Montebello, Museum Director] is so very pleased … and the entire Accessions Committee is unanimously thrilled.”37
In the days before the exhibit opened, Pace’s instructions about how to handle Nevelson’s fragile work flew back and forth between New York and Houston: “You may have to reglue some of the pieces when they arrive. Any good strong glue will do—something like Elmer’s.”38 In her last letter to Nevelson before the opening, Buxton reported that construction had started for the installation. She then detailed the plans for the days the artist would be in Houston, including small dinner parties, a talk by the artist, interviews with critics, and possibly a meeting with Dominique de Menil, the most prominent art patron in Houston.39
The evening the show opened, on October 23, 1969, Buxton sent a letter to Arne Glimcher and Fred Mueller: “I am writing you together for I am too drained emotionally at this point to ‘do my thing’ twice! You both are, without a doubt, the most tremendous, most adorable to have crossed my path in years, and this is what makes life such a joy to live. Your talent and sensitive taste have made you what you are, and fortunately it carried over into this show. It was incredible, and people will never cease talking about the merger of Nevelson and Mies.” In a postscript Buxton asks Glimcher for his mother’s address: “She’s absolutely marvelous, and I must tell her on paper.”40
In her letter to “Dearest Louise,” after the show had opened, she noted that:
Even though words are not necessary between us, I had to write! If only you could be here every day as I am and see the looks of wonder on the faces of people of all ages. I’m afraid that my work is suffering badly, for I find myself in the gallery a dozen times daily, just strolling and absorbing the beauty of your sculpture. You are indeed a genius and, thank God, a very warm and human one. The fact that you thought the installation worthy of your work is one of the most rewarding things that could have happened and I too, only wish Mies could have seen it.41
Nevelson came to the exhibition with Dorothy Miller from MoMA. According to Buxton, when Nevelson first walked into the show, she said, “Now I can die happy.”42
The installation photographs demonstrate how well Nevelson’s dramatic work could be displayed in a large darkened space. The lighting was sparse, theatrical, and highly focused. The goal was to rivet the attention of viewers on the work without any distraction. Eleven years earlier, Nevelson had achieved a similar effect in Grand Central Moderns Gallery with Moon Garden + One. She had tried over the previous decade to repeat the effect, but it was not until the Houston exhibit that she achieved exactly what she wanted. The work looked magical.
Between November 10 and 14, Buxton went into high gear trying to get art critics from the major art magazines in America to come to Houston and write about the Nevelson show. Sometimes she cannily added, “At Nevelson’s age, this could be one of her last.”43 In her letter to Emily Genauer she wrote: “Now, we have what I feel is the most perfect show to have ever been held in this gallery, LOUISE NEVELSON…. Since I am a deep admirer of yours, it would give me a great deal of pleasure to have you come to Houston as the museum’s guest…. 44 Nevelson is 70 this year, and I do feel her omission by Geldzahler was a blow; however, I also feel that she has the strength to stand alone and I think you do, too.”45
Buxton repeated far and wide Nevelson’s delight: “Now I can die happy.” Nevelson experienced this show as a triumph and was happy to tell anyone willing to listen how she felt. At the gala opening she proclaimed: “In all my exhibitions all over the world this is the first which I can say the sculpture and Mies van der Rohe’s architecture is a marriage … yes, yes, it is a love affair.”46
At the start Buxton hadn’t really known with whom she was dealing. By the end of her adventure with Nevelson and company, however, she was duly impressed and could see beyond the persona Nevelson often projected. Thirty-plus years later when Mary Buxton was describing her experience with the artist and the exhibit, she still recalled the artist’s off-color language and eccentricity. Buxton knew what she had accomplished by pairing Louise Nevelson with Mies. And by the end of her dealings with the artist she realized that Nevelson was an astute and often acerbic judge of people. But she could not have known that in 1969 Nevelson was just reaching her prime as one of the century’s premier artists. What she was not was an “elderly” female artist in the twilight of her energy and productivity.
The story behind Nevelson’s show in Houston demonstrates that during the late 1960s the artist had at least two divergent reputations: hard-drinking exhibitionist versus sober spiritual seeker. For many Nevelson was a vulgarian, who exploited her impossible charisma to make a spectacle of herself. The epitome of excess and overdress, she was under-articulate, selfish, and self-important. Her admirers (and there were many) respected her as a dedicated artist whose every effort went to bringing what she saw in the fourth dimension down into the third dimension. They knew her ostentatious, eye-catching persona and legendary toughness were mere façades, protecting her fragile self-esteem and warding off perennial despair and fear of failure. Buxton also came to see the complex picture of the artist who sometimes projected a perplexing persona and at other times was simply a hard-working person just like herself who used hyperbole to get her mission accomplished.
Following the installation of her huge beautiful wood wall, Nightsphere-Light, at the Juilliard School and her triumph in Houston, Louise Nevelson was gearing up for something new. She had played with aluminum and steel for the Atmosphere and Environment series. But that was a diversion—or, rather, an experimental extension of her now abandoned work in Plexiglas—not a full commitment to a new medium. She was about to engage in earnest with a material that would hold her attention to the end of her life.
“So we had lunch together at Bellotos,” Glimcher recalls, “and I introduced her to Don Lippincott because he was making large-scale metal things for other artists. I remember she was a little cantankerous at the beginning, but she liked him. He called her, ‘Mrs. Nevelson,’ and she said, ‘Call me Louise.’ So we went to Connecticut the next week to visit Lippincott. It was a memorable trip.”47 Memorable indeed. Arne’s car broke down on the way, and trying to get to a phone he cut himself on a barbed-wire fence and landed in Yale-New Haven Hospital. The injury was a serious enough to require specialized hand surgery. Remarkably, the surgeon had heard of both Louise Nevelson and Pace Gallery, fit Glimcher’s surgery into his busy schedule, and was able to put his hand back together. Don Lippincott came to the hospital, and, after the surgery, the three of them went to Lippincott’s metal fabrication shop so that “Louise could see the set up and make plans to work there.”48 Steely determination and denial of “minor” inconveniences were qualities that characterized the relationship between the artist and her dealer.
The first of Nevelson’s works made at Lippincott’s were three large sculptures fabricated in Cor-Ten steel: Atmosphere and Environment X, Atmosphere and Environment XI, and Atmosphere and Environment XII.49 These sculptures were a continuation of the series Nevelson had begun in 1966 in Plexiglas and enameled aluminum and were later placed at Princeton and Yale Universities and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. Because the earlier works had been factory-built from small-scale models, there was a long lead-time between the artist’s decisions and the resulting sculpture. As a consequence, Nevelson had not had the flexibility and spontaneity that had always characterized her best efforts. Working at Lippincott’s shop was different because she was able to be intimately involved in the process. The craftsmen he employed worked very closely with individual artists, even becoming specialists in the production of specific sculptors’ work.
Don Lippincott had founded Lippincott Inc. in 1966 to meet the growing need of American sculptors for a place exclusively dedicated to the fabrication of large-scale work.50 After a decade of operation, Lippincott was the country’s only exclusive fabricator of sculpture for such artists as James Rosati, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Murray, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana and, now, Louise Nevelson.51 Don’s father, J. Gordon Lippincott, was the founder of Lippincott and Margulies, a successful industrial-design firm based in New York City. Instilling in his son a strong belief in urban planning, he had also introduced him to Cor-Ten steel, a new weathering steel-plate product created by one of his clients, U.S. Steel, and it soon became the staple for outdoor sculpture produced at Don’s shop.
A Quaker, Lippincott brought to his work a calm steadiness that fit well with the artists who came to trust him totally. An Art News writer described him as “a tall, lanky, energetic, mustached master of metal crafts.”52 He was methodical and practical, taking care of all the business relationships with artists and their galleries as well as the many technical issues that came up.
James Rosati described the comfortable working atmosphere: “If there’s something wrong—if something needs changing—there will be no argument. If you have to start over, then you start over.”53 Meticulously kept records, indefatigable resourcefulness, and implacable demeanor made Lippincott a trustworthy partner in the new world of public art. He became the quintessential resource for architects, planners, engineers, and art dealers. Another service Lippincott Inc. provided was the possibility of displaying an artist’s finished work in the ten-acre field adjoining the shop buildings.
Don Lippincott had founded the company with Roxanne Everett, a Manhattan fundraiser who was experienced in public relations and well-connected in the New York art world. Roxanne began by finding artists who would soon come on their own when the word went out about what Lippincott Inc. could offer them. Lippincott hired craftsmen and technicians who could use industrial methods, materials and standard metal-working tools to produce big works with precision and technical prowess far beyond what most individual sculptors could make in a studio. Most of the workers had no ambitions to be artists themselves, but all of them enjoyed participating in the process—especially those working with Nevelson, who had to make adjustments in their working style to keep pace “with her incredible energy.”54
Nevelson’s first sculptures at Lippincott, the Atmosphere and Environment series, followed the usual working methods of the place. First, designing a layout. Next, selecting the material—either Cor-Ten steel or aluminum—and deciding how it would be put together. Then it was welded, and finally the sculpture was finished—the surface was polished to remove weld marks—and painted.
Atmosphere and Environment X, XI, and XII are described in Lippincott’s records as similar works, with the basic structure consisting of thirty boxes in six columns of five boxes each. There are, however, a few significant differences. In Atmosphere and Environment X (destined for Princeton University), nine of the thirty boxes were covered by steel plates. In Atmosphere and Environment XI and XII (which landed at Yale University and at Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, respectively), nine boxes are open;55 moreover, XI is also only half the size of XII. Once again she managed to get three works out of one design—a three-in-one deal rather similar to the Plexiglas works that inspired Atmosphere and Environment.
Most of the sculpture Nevelson would subsequently make at Lippincott was composed directly with the discarded scrap-metal elements she found on the shop floor or nearby. However, her earliest work there to be composed with found elements was made first with plywood, which was later translated into a metal sculpture. Having worked for over fifteen years creating sculpture by working directly with scrap wood pieces, it was evidently too big a leap for her to make sculpture using metal fragments at the beginning of her shift to direct work with metal.
Roxanne Everett. Louise Nevelson with Bobby Giza at Lippincott, Inc. 1975 © Roxanne Everett / Lippincott’s, LLC
During the third week of November and the first week of December 1970, as the work on the three Atmosphere and Environment sculptures was being completed, Nevelson cobbled together a model in plywood using discarded bits of wood from Lippincott’s shop. She then decided to have a freestanding, three-dimensional sculpture made in Cor-Ten steel based on the plywood model of the work eventually titled Night Tree.
Over a period of four weeks in April 1971, the plywood model of Night Tree was fabricated in Cor-Ten steel in two different scales—one was eight feet eight inches high; the other full-scale version was twelve feet eight inches.56 (Lippincott and his workers always referred to the sculpture as Meat Ax, as one of the elements that juts out from the central core bears an unmistakable resemblance to a cleaver.)57
Nevelson had been composing sculpture with wood bits and pieces for years. It was not only good engineering practice for her to begin her major move into metal by playing with scraps of plywood but also a psychologically astute way of shifting gears. Equally astute was the idea of making the second step in the transition a little larger than life-size. The many photographs of the first Cor-Ten model of Night Tree underscore the awareness at Lippincott Inc. that Nevelson was trying something very new and very different.
It took a year and a fair amount of experimentation to come up with a satisfactory form of the final sculpture. Nevelson would have the workers cut and or move pieces of steel, temporarily attaching them to the work until it looked exactly the way she wanted it to look. And once arrived at, it was produced in three Cor-Ten versions, and one additional version in aluminum. Nevelson evidently liked the initial result of the Night Tree mockup in plywood enough to continue in the same mode of selecting discarded fragments, but from then on she worked with metal scraps instead of wood. The week after the plywood mockup was made for Night Tree, Nevelson began working with aluminum scraps and, with the help of the Lippincott staff, quickly produced ten sculptures in aluminum, which she called Seventh Decade Garden.58
All the attention about the beginning of Nevelson’s direct work with metal tends to be lavished on the ten aluminum trees in Seventh Decade Garden, and the now-famous explanation of how they came into being goes like this: On a routine visit to Lippincott’s in 1971 to oversee the Atmosphere and Environment sculptures, Nevelson was taken past a room filled with remnants of aluminum from sculptor George Sugarman’s constructions, which were soon to be carted away. She turned to Don Lippincott, saying, “Dear, save these pieces for me. I’ll come back and build sculpture out of them.”59
Nevelson eventually appropriated the discarded metal fragments and ordered ten rectangular and triangular cores and bases, to which she would attach the scraps, constructing ten tall aluminum trees. Discovering that for each scrap she found, there was another that was nearly identical, she made almost exact twin pieces—five sets of two each, as can be seen in photographs taken at Lippincott.60 Another feature of the now-legendary story was that the entire series was made in two days.61
Decade Garden I–X were shown at the Pace gallery in the spring of 1971. Glimcher produced a cunning flyer for the show, with flaps that opened up to show the sculpted trees concealed behind the photographed trees.
In his review of the Pace show for The New York Times, Canaday was enthusiastic about Nevelson’s forestful of trees: Her “new exhibition … proves once again that the woman simply cannot be trusted. For several years now, from show to show, she has implicitly capped off her career with a final demonstration of her powers of invention, but each following year she comes up with something new. This refusal to settle into a rut is very wearing for us art reporters. This year Mrs. Nevelson has turned up with a beautiful group of 12 tall, tree-like painted aluminum sculptures [according to Lippincott’s invoice there were only ten], her first venture into direct welding.”62 Canaday also noted that Nevelson got her math wrong. At age seventy-two, she was actually in her eighth decade.
In addition to the metal works on exhibit, there were thirty small, volumetric wood sculptures, Young Trees, and photographs of the recently installed large-scale outdoor pieces: Atmosphere and Environment X and Atmosphere and Environment XI.
The show at Pace also included one large wood sculpture, Black Garden Wall I, in the shape of a parallelogram, which one Art News critic described as a “low relief in black painted wood which covered one whole wall.” The reviewer notes that, “The rest of the exhibition seemed to be a determined effort to break away from this style.”63 He finally asks whether or not Nevelson will continue working with wood or has she now switched completely to creating metal sculpture.
Here was a question that would preoccupy critics, curators, and the art-loving public for the next fifteen years. Should Nevelson stick to what she did so well—wood sculpture—or should she branch out in yet another new direction—direct-made metal sculpture?
How we answer that question depends on whether we focus on the Cor-Ten steel Night Tree or the ten aluminum trees of Seventh Decade Garden. Night Tree is bolder than the aluminum pieces but it does not have the flashy exuberance of the aluminum trees, which were created immediately afterward, and it has none of their anthropomorphic wit. However, its deliberative compositional style is more Nevelsonian, as it had been known for long. Ironically she had greater formal flexibility when using metal which, could be bent and shaped more easily and more eccentrically than wood fragments.
Seventh Decade Garden VII (Installation view from Louise Nevelson: Seventh Decade Garden, Pace Gallery) 1971. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery
In all the chronological reports of Nevelson’s development in metal sculpture, Night Tree has been mostly misplaced and forgotten. Its origin in wood scraps, which actually links her emerging style in metal to the old one in wood, has been completely unrecognized. Indeed, some of its blockiness may be a remnant of its plywood beginnings, but that is offset by the several powerful profiles it presents to the viewer who walks around it. Also apparent with close study is the clever complexity of the composition. The curved cutouts, which repeat the pairs of discs at differing levels, make the eye work to find the coherence of the composition. If we can get past the distraction of the very visible “meat ax,” it becomes possible to see the not-quite-syncopated rhythms and play of horizontal and vertical elements in three dimensions.
As for the aluminum trees, by comparison with her later work at Lippincott’s, they look as if they were done in a hurried frenzy. And, true enough, they were done very, very quickly—in two days, as legend has it64—and for the artist they were just the beginning of something different. The Art News reviewer described them this way: “In sharp contrast to the precision and order of her work of the recent past, these appear very spontaneously conceived—almost slapdash.”65 Perhaps the spiky silhouettes are what seem most careless. They do not have the harmonic cohesion or even the contrapuntal rhythms of Nevelson’s best work in wood. As she became accustomed to working at Lippincott, Nevelson would find her aesthetic footing with the new medium. With the help of the willing workers there a much wider range of shapes and forms became available to her. She could ask them to twist flat steel elements into a myriad of shapes including corkscrews. Eventually she would be able to wield the metal with ease and skill, or—as she would famously say—“I can translate Cor-Ten into butter and butter into Cor-Ten steel.”66
As her work with metal matured and as she gained confidence and grace, some of her largest works would prove to be some of her best. Nevelson loved working large. It was related to her feeling that she was an intuitive architect dealing with spaces and scale. “Working in metal has allowed me to fulfill myself as an environmental architect.”67 It was like a dream come true for the artist who had always tended to think big and act bigger.
Working large-scale was by no means unique to Nevelson in the early 1970s. It was why Lippincott Inc. had come into existence. America was ready for large-scale sculpture. Large-scale paintings had been around for several decades, introduced by the Abstract-Expressionist painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. In the late 1960s and early ’70s oversize prints grew naturally out of the monumental paintings, which had become both technically possible and commercially viable.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was established in 1965 and it introduced a period of dramatically increased government support for the arts, which meant reinvigorating some of the goals of the WPA and New Deal. NEA programs mandated that half to one percent of the estimated costs of construction or renovation of government buildings was to be spent for public art commissions by living American artists. The program was called Percent for Art. In addition to the governmental support on the city, state, and federal levels, corporations, private collectors, and other institutional entities jumped on the bandwagon. Thus monumental sculpture was funded, produced, and exhibited in public spaces in previously unimaginable quantity and quality.68
The perception that public sculpture conferred civic identity and cachet had grown rapidly in the late 1960s.69 Colleges, corporations, cultural and religious institutions, governmental institutions, and city councils responsible for municipal buildings all began commissioning and buying large outdoor sculpture that would be seen by the largest possible audiences.70
The explosion in monumental public art was the source for some of Nevelson’s most powerful sculpture in the 1970s and 1980s—sculpture that she was able to create because of her collaboration with Lippincott. Arne Glimcher was fully ready to help public and private entities select Nevelson’s work for public spaces, and she was delighted to participate in the effort since it matched her long-held personal view that art should be at the center of life, especially urban life. Nevelson believed that everyone from secretary to CEO should have the opportunity to enjoy art, which could only happen if art was displayed in public places. More importantly, Nevelson had long seen herself as an architect, and doing large metal sculpture that would be placed outdoors in public settings gave her the chance to test herself.
As Nevelson became used to working with the crew at Lippincott’s she grew increasingly comfortable with the medium and more spontaneous in her use.
Now the longer I went up [to Lippincott’s], the closer I got acquainted with this material Cor-Ten…. I must have been ready for it…. [Because] I found that in my hands … it was almost like butter—like working with whipped cream on a cake.
I was using steel as if it was ribbon made out of satin. And somehow it gave me another dimension. It gave me the possibility of maybe fulfilling the place and space and environment that I have probably consciously, unconsciously, been seeking all my life.71
She tended to come up to North Haven on a Monday or Tuesday and stay two to four days. Arne Glimcher would often arrive with her or come the last day to look at her work and participate with her and Don Lippincott in the decisions about combining separate pieces into new compositions. Lippincott was always consulted on technical issues, scale, placement, and feasibility of production.
By 1971 Louise Nevelson had become the hot topic of the moment. Her dramatic look, her exotic home and studios, her astonishing productivity, and her pithy commentary on life, on art, on anything, appealed to journalists and publications looking for a striking subject.
That year would see Nevelson’s arrival at a peak of publicity and consolidation in her gallery representation. Two more gallerists—one in Philadelphia, the other in Chicago—joined her team and would show and sell her work until the end of her life and beyond. At seventy-two years of age she was able to savor the success that had begun only when she was fifty-eight. She felt free and acted on her freedom with a vigor that was rarely matched by anyone even near her age. She had had over fifty one-person exhibitions and had been pronounced “one of the major sculptors of our time”72 and one of “the most impressive and individualistic sculptors America has yet produced.”73
In 1971 Nevelson had solo shows New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Columbus, Ohio. Five different colleges invited her to accept an honorary doctorate or speak at commencement. Brandeis University honored her with its “Creative Arts Award in Sculpture” and an honorarium. The University of Bridgeport offered her a visiting professorship—a named lecture also with an honorarium. She accepted all offers, especially delighting in speaking with young people about the arts and the future. Over the years, she managed to overcome her frequent awkwardness with words and was a forceful presence and articulate, if eccentric, speaker.
As part of the New York City’s Sculpture in Environment Program, Atmosphere and Environment XII, one of Nevelson’s largest works in metal (sixteen feet by ten feet by five feet of Cor-Ten steel, weighing eighteen thousand pounds) was temporarily installed, with the help of a fifty-foot crane, in front of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. The event, in January 1971, was written up in The New York Times with the headline “Park Ave. Gets a Nevelson Sculpture.”74
After six weeks the large sculpture was to be moved to Philadelphia, where it would be installed in Fairmount Park. When the word got out that the cost of the work was sixty-thousand dollars, there was some grumbling, given the poor state of the economy. But the Fairmount Park Art archivist disputed that narrow-minded view: “Even if you’re desperately poor, you need a place to sit in the country. You need the art, which is just as much a part of life as bread. Otherwise you’re not really civilized.”75
This same work inspired a taxi driver in New York to give an eloquent description of Nevelson’s sculpture to art critic Emily Genauer: “Last year I went many times to see [it.] You know, the one that looked like stacks of black metal boxes with open spaces here and there? That was great. It was like the sculptor had made bookcases for books that can’t ever be written.” Genauer saw this as a perfect way of describing “the mystery and magic of Nevelson’s work, and how visual creativity can never be translated into words.”76
In May 1971, timed to coincide with the arrival in Philadelphia and publicity about Atmosphere and Environment XII, Hope and Paul Makler staged the first of six solo shows of Nevelson’s work at the Makler Gallery. Both the Maklers had studied at the Barnes Foundation in the late 1950s, and their education in perception grounded their aesthetic vision for the rest of their lives. After fifteen years of collecting, they opened their gallery in Philadelphia in 1960 and saw themselves as advisors and art critics as well as merchants.77
Arne Glimcher was impressed by the success of the Makler show and gave them free rein in the choice of works for future exhibitions. Unsurprisingly, they quickly found that the most salable works were ones “that are not too large to house.”78
Ironically, it was this very issue of size and salability that had been a sticking point between Nevelson and Martha Jackson. In 1960 Jackson had nagged the artist about making smaller, more saleable works, and Nevelson looked down on the dealer’s commercial interest in salability at the time she was trying to make her mark in the art world as a serious artist.
Later in 1971 the Maklers visited Nevelson in New York, escorted by Arne Glimcher. They had been forewarned about Nevelson’s potential for being difficult and were surprised by her warmth and wit. As usual, the persona was unforgettable. As Makler noted afterwards: “The really spectacular exhibit, of course, was Louise Nevelson herself. Her clothing was obviously considered as costume…. Her jewelry was massive…. Her eyes were heavily made-up and embellished with the huge false eyelashes that are her trade mark. All this coupled with her energy, her strong opinions so vigorously expressed, and the ambience of her work in the house made an impression that was forceful to say the least.”79
A year later Nevelson was back in Philadelphia for a TV appearance and visited with the Maklers. “She liked the two Nevelson walls in our living room; made some suggestions about rearranging our paintings and was obviously quite comfortable.”80 Clearly the artist felt very much at ease with the Maklers, and they continued to be her agents in Philadelphia for twenty years.
In August 1971 Colette Roberts died of heart failure in Paris. The obituary in The New York Times emphasized the importance of Roberts’s support of Louise Nevelson, citing her 1964 book, her many lectures and exhibitions of Nevelson’s work.81 Two months later, on Picasso’s ninetieth birthday, October 25, 1971, as yet one more sign of her success, Nevelson was one of the three New York artists asked for their thoughts about the twentieth-century artist who stood out as the beacon of greatness. Nevelson responded: “I believe that Picasso is still doing magnificent work, and that is enough to celebrate. He brought to the visual concept the total awareness that we humans have arrived at through the ages.”82 She added: “You feel that he gives birth to himself every day.” Nevelson was putting her own ideas into the mind of her mentor.
The end of 1971 and beginning of 1972 saw her fourth solo show of the year and her first exhibition at the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago. The exhibition in Chicago was a retrospective of sorts. It included twenty works from 1958–63, many from the famous 1959 show Sky Columns Presence at the Martha Jackson Gallery, where Richard Gray had first seen and liked Nevelson’s work.
Eventually, Gray had five more Nevelson exhibitions. Richard Gray had started his collecting and subsequent art dealing in 1963, and he, like the Maklers, enjoyed teaching his collectors how to appreciate the art he so loved. He not only admired Nevelson’s work, which he had been following closely since 1959, he was very fond of her as a person: “Everyone who ever met her, saw her, spent time with her was struck with her incredible presence. The way she presented herself, the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, what she talked about—everything was much larger than life. She was unique—a one off—but lovely and warm, gentle in a way.” Gray described her, as did most of her other dealers, as very easy to work with—“never difficult—I never had a harsh interchange or expression of disappointment from her. But she had no trouble letting you know what she really felt about you, her work, all the rest of it.”83
Reflecting on the fact that he always installed her shows himself, Gray observed that he and Nevelson shared a way of seeing things. They both had “an instinctive intuitive way of operating” of moving objects to just the right place.
It is true that part of the reason I got interested in her work was that it mirrored the kind of sensibility and visual way of seeing things that was directly connected to my own…. I walk into a room, see a picture or a chair [and need to move it.] It drives my wife crazy. In two seconds I … move the chair about an inch and a half to get it back where it belongs. I can’t help it…. That’s what her work was about—taking a disparate group of … objects and assembling it the way it belongs.84
The reviewers of Richard Gray’s first Nevelson show got the point. Jane Allen and Derek Gutherie wrote in the Chicago Tribune of “the beautiful display of Nevelsons on view at the Gray Gallery. In a small room, Gray had placed a truly monumental wall-sized sculpture, two large works and five or six small sculptures. They work, both as a group and individually, partly because of their placement, but primarily because of the lighting.” Citing Sky Presence II: “A classic Nevelson at her very best, this complex assemblage is like a Bach chorale. The counterpoint of motifs, textures, and structures weave themselves into a harmonious architectural whole.”85
Richard Gray always chose the art he included in his shows. Several years later, when he was working more closely with Arne Glimcher at Pace Gallery, he withstood Arne’s inclination to make the choices of which pieces would be exhibited and where. He had a keen eye and knew he was in synch with the artist’s aesthetic sense. Nevelson always agreed with his choices.
