FIFTEEN

LA SIGNORA OF SPRING STREET

1972 – 1974

“Life is a goddamn tough racket. Between [the bad] times, you have a complete right to fulfill yourself.”

—Louise Nevelson “… And Some of the Women Who Have Made It to the Top in the World’s Toughest City,” London Sunday Times, November 12, 1972, 43

Women and women artists were everywhere in the news in the early 1970s. Art critics were defending themselves against charges of discrimination—either maintaining that female painters and sculptors were simply not good enough or acknowledging the bias in the gallery and museum world that kept them from gaining the exposure and success that they deserved.

Time magazine had reported in Spring, 1972, some startling statistics: “Of 1000 one-artist shows in 43 years at the Museum of Modern Art, five were by women. Of 129 one-artist shows at the Whitney Museum in ten years, eight were by women. Of nine one-artist shows in five years at the Guggenheim Museum, none were by women.”¹

Forty-some years later, the situation for women artists in America is still heavily biased and barely changed. Auction prices for a top male artist are more than double the amount for a top female. In 2012: “70 percent of the reviews in Art News or Art in America are of male work,” and “while women in most employment make 78 cents for every male dollar, in the art world women make 10 to 30 percent.”² In addition, eighty-six percent of modern artists on museum walls are men.³ Of the artists represented by galleries in New York and Los Angeles, just thirty percent are women. Critic Jerry Saltz noted that fifteen percent of the total Artforum ads for solo shows in New York in September 2014 were for women artists.⁴

In her 1973 essay on “Art and Sexual Politics,” Elizabeth Baker, an art critic and the longtime editor at Art in America, wrote that although art schools were more than half full of women and girls, the faculty was primarily male. If and when women artists were hired to teach, they took low-paying jobs in primary and secondary schools or were given last-minute peripheral jobs in colleges and universities at lower pay and without tenure.

If a woman artist hustles her work, she is seen as excessively ambitious and aggressive. And when she attempts to find a place in the world of galleries and museums she will be at a disadvantage, since most galleries limit the number of women artists to none or few. Baker cogently observed that the situation had been vastly different in the 1930s and ’40s—when as much as one third of some of the large group shows had been made up of women. In that earlier era the business of art was much less lucrative than in the 1970s—so women also had a better chance of exhibiting.⁵ After World War II the retreat-to-the-home movement was a huge setback for the many women, including women artists, who had paying jobs. “The only approved objective … for even the highly educated middle-class girl … was marriage,” Baker pointed out. Women who did not follow the trend were labeled “frustrated, neurotic careerist[s].”⁶ Betty Friedan challenged the idea that women were naturally fulfilled by devoting their lives to being housewives and mothers, famously calling such a notion the feminine mystique.⁷

Baker cites Nevelson as an exception to the difficulties facing women artists in the early 1970s: She was an art-world celebrity and, hence, not subject to the same constraints.⁸ She became successful as an artist at least a decade before the feminist movement helped push other women artists up the ladder, and she was the only woman artist of her time to succeed without the help of a famous or powerful mate. Her few successful confederates were attached to successful male artists: Georgia O’Keeffe had Alfred Stieglitz; Frida Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera; Elaine de Kooning, married to Willem de Kooning; Lee Krasner, married to Jackson Pollock.

Nevelson had had a room of her own in an important show at MoMA in 1959 and one-person shows at the Whitney in 1967—a career retrospective and one of the first of a woman artist at the Whitney—and another in 1970. Indeed, she had been in demand as an artist and a speaker for at least fifteen years, and her work had been reviewed positively in major newspapers and magazines for over thirty years. Though Nevelson had less to complain about than many other women artists in this particular story, even she was not immune to discrimination and exclusion from these same institutions on the grounds of her sex and age.

As noted earlier, in 1969 and 1970 she was omitted from two major exhibitions: one at MoMA and the other at the Metropolitan Museum. The latter, entitled New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970 and curated by Henry Geldzahler, consisted of four hundred works by forty-three artists. The startling inclusion of only one woman artist (Helen Frankenthaler) provides undeniable historical context to the difficulty all American women artists were facing.

Aware of this discrimination but determined to have her work seen by a large number of people, Nevelson frequently donated her work to museums—a practice that she began when she was represented by Colette Roberts, who was sophisticated about art-world politics. Giving her work away was often her only way to have it become part of the museum’s permanent collection. But her plan was not foolproof. Even today, when museums get artworks gratis rather than pay for them with their own funds, the works are more likely to end up in storage than on display.

The Ladies’ Home Journal had cited Nevelson in January 1971 as one of “America’s Most Important Women”—women who “had made the greatest impact on our civilization within the last five years and who would continue to affect us significantly … women who have done the most to shape and illuminate the world in which we live.”⁹ Nevelson’s name was frequently mentioned, alongside Georgia O’Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, Marisol, and Helen Frankenthaler, as proof that women artists could succeed. In an article in Cosmopolitan the author went so far as to say: “If women now really do have a better—if not equal—chance in art, it is not a coincidence that the change took place in Nevelson’s time but probably very much because of her.”¹⁰ Some critics called Nevelson one of the foremothers of American art, a veritable “Mother Courage.” When asked if men treated her as an equal, Nevelson was quick to answer. “Originally, no—at 70 years, yes.”¹¹

When Nevelson was interviewed in the spring of 1970 for an article titled “The Woman as Artist” in Aphra, a feminist literary magazine,¹² she spoke about her personal experience with astonishing candor: “When I first started, nobody took me seriously. In the galleries—a woman! I’d look in the mirror and see the gestures they made behind my back. Meshugganah! A woman wanting to be a sculptor. A man sculptor said to me, ‘Louise, you don’t want to be a sculptor. To be a sculptor, you’ve got to have balls.’ ‘I’ve got balls,’ I said. But it hurt inside.”

How did Nevelson succeed when so many other gifted women artists failed? One answer appeared in a groundbreaking article in the January 1971 issue of Art News, in which art historian Linda Nochlin asked Nevelson and seven other sculptors and painters, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”¹³ Nochlin noted that the usual feminist answer to this question involved, first, digging up examples of important women artists—such as Artemesia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, and Angelica Kauffmann, all of whom had been historically underappreciated—and, second, pointing out that “women’s art” has a distinctive style and a different kind of greatness from men’s.

Nochlin dismissed both responses and offered her own. She argued that, for centuries, the church, the state, the nuclear family, and the educational system had prohibited women from participating in the day-to-day process of learning to be artists. Women were supposed to be doing other things—namely, carrying out domestic duties as wives and mothers, all with an attitude of sweet compliance. Thus it was impossible for them to be totally devoted to professional art production.

As an example of these stifling constraints, Nochlin pointed out that, even if they somehow found their way into an art class, women were not permitted to study the nude body. This meant they couldn’t paint or sculpt the historical or mythological subjects that would allow them to compete for any of the standard prizes and stepping-stones to commercial success—including salon medals, the Prix de Rome, or the Legion of Honor. Nor could women have ateliers where they could instruct students and assistants and, thus, make a living. They could not travel widely, participate in the affairs of an academy, or establish effective relationships with patrons. There were very few exceptions to these mostly unwritten rules. Each of the successful women artists mentioned above were daughters, wives, or partners of male artists.

Louise Nevelson, whose “utter, ‘unfeminine’ dedication to her work and … conspicuously ‘feminine’ false eyelashes” made her so interesting to present-day women was, Nochlin observed, one of those exceptions. Nevelson gave her answer to Nochlin’s question in a short piece called “Do Your Work,” explaining the dearth of important women artists: “The world has thought up to now in ‘male’ vocabulary,” she wrote. “Now I think the door has opened…. Single-mindedness, concentration and absorption in one’s work … should not have anything to do with “masculine-feminine” labels…. To comment further in depth [on Nochlin’s essay] would mean a line-to-line analysis and that of course would interrupt my art.”¹⁴

Beyond her response to Nochlin’s essay, Nevelson had much to say about the conventional woman’s role in the world vis-à-vis her life as an artist.“Darling,” she told a reporter, “I think somewhere I rejected the whole experience of family and husbands. I got married because at the time I didn’t quite trust my beliefs in myself…. [Marriage was] too confining ultimately for my kind of living…. It takes so much of life away, and destroys my concentration. I want to live fully through my work. I want to live with great intensity. I want to be aware as much as possible of the livingness of life…. This way … my life is totally mine. And nobody has a claim on me.”¹⁵ To another interviewer she commented: “I wouldn’t want to be in the horizontal position most of my life. Is that a terrible thing I am saying? My work made me a total woman. Otherwise I’d have been a lackey to some man.”¹⁶

Though very proud of her success, Nevelson talked quite candidly about the price she had paid for it: “I was attractive enough, and men always flattered me from the first day I can remember, so why wouldn’t I want to be a woman?” she asks. “In all those years before the sixties, women’s art wasn’t taken as seriously as men’s. Maybe here and there they threw us a bone. I just don’t know if I like to be singled out as a woman or simply as an artist. I’ve paid the price both ways…. I hated what I had to go through, but, in retrospect, while it was tough, it made me independent.”¹⁷

Though she had previously avoided the term “feminist,” by the 1970s Nevelson was in the vanguard of women artists and claimed that she had been a lifelong exponent of equal rights for women and that, while she didn’t need the support of the women’s movement for her career, she welcomed it. As she said to a reporter in Arizona in 1972: “Yes, I am for Women’s Lib. There is a cult in New York around me. They call me Mother Courage. I was interviewed recently and the question was asked, ‘Is the world male-oriented?’ I answered, ‘Yes—from God on down.’ ”¹⁸

Nevelson had enjoyed the support of many critics for many years—Kramer, Genauer, Canaday, Mellow, and others. When the tide of critical writing shifted in the early 1970s, new voices were heard, and Greenberg, Geldzahler, Krauss, and Fried became the new tastemakers. None of them accepted Nevelson into their canon of important American artists. She was a loner, which made her vulnerable. But she remained confident about her work—it helped that she continued to be very successful internationally. It also helped that she had continued to adopt strong women role models.

As heroines or mentors Nevelson consistently (and cannily) selected females who were comfortable and successful in the world. Although she knew Lena Cleveland, Norina Matchabelli, and Ellen Kearns personally, she had never met Edith Sitwell or Jennie Churchill, who also served as lodestars for her.¹⁹

In the early 1970s, Nevelson read a review of a recent biography of Jennie Churchill—the Brooklyn-born mother of Winston Churchill, and the wife and lover of many important men. She was said to be one of the most beautiful women of her time, and she was also well-respected and influential in the highest British social and political circles. On the last page of the book review, Nevelson underlined some words describing this remarkable woman with whom she obviously identified: “Jennie was part of the action and passion of her world…. She established her own frontiers and made her own rules. She had courage to match her beauty and excitement to match her intelligence, energy to match her imagination.”²⁰ Underlining these particular words about Jennie Churchill at this particular moment in her personal trajectory points to Nevelson’s unchanged idea of the kind of person she wanted to be and, given the confidence with which she addressed herself to the world, believed she had become.

On March 22, 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, which would guarantee women the same legal standing and treatment socially, economically, and politically as men, had been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate and was sent to the states for ratification. This should not have presented a problem in a country where women had been voting for over fifty years. Almost immediately twenty-two states (out of the thirty-eight needed for ratification) had given their approval. But right-wing and fundamentalist religious groups quickly organized opposition to halt the forward momentum, and the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified. To this day the differential in pay between men and women for equal work continues to be a contentious issue. Data released in 2015 by the American Association of University Women makes it clear that white women only earn seventy-eight cents on the dollar earned by men. Minority women earn much less.

Later in 1972, Nevelson’s interview with feminist art critic Cindy Nemser, “I Am Women’s Liberation,” was published in the feminist magazine Changes.²¹ It was a sensation, and the issue quickly went out of print and was republished in the Feminist Art Journal. When Nemser remarked that Nevelson had been a great supporter of women’s liberation, the artist’s response was quick and direct: “Of course [I was], because I am a woman’s liberation…. I feel totally female. I didn’t compete with men, and I don’t want to look like a man! I love being a lady and dressing up and masquerading and wearing all the fineries…. We should wear what we like…. I just got myself a chinchilla. So fuck ’um…. The point is that men are as enslaved as women are and it’s only after they recognize it that they too will be free.”²²

Decades later, Nemser observed that, “Louise was not part of any movement. She was not a joiner. Her mind didn’t work that way. She had already had quite a bit of recognition before the feminist movement and felt that she had made it on her own. The early groups of feminist artists were made up of people who were not that well known, and if you were not represented by a movement [such as the feminists] and you were not part of a clique, you did not get their support. Nevelson did not have to do that.”²³

Though she told Nemser that she “love[d] being a woman and not having to imitate men” Nevelson had strong views about women who used feminism to get ahead in the art world. “That does not mean that there aren’t many women who are exploiting the feminist movement.²⁴ And when it comes to the creative arts, it is of paramount importance to know whether they are truly qualified as artists and not just women dabbling in art.”²⁵

Two months after the publication of the famous Nemser interview, in December 1972, in a Newsweek article by Katrine Ames titled “Gothic Queen,”²⁶ Nevelson, referred to as “a hot interview in the art press,” lashed out at what she called “the sacred cows in ‘the art Mafia.’ ”

“Nevelson’s definition of this elite is brutally specific,” Ames writes. “It includes critic Clement Greenberg, the major theoretician of ‘formalist criticism,’ and his followers (most of them located, she says, at Harvard)”—Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss were two of the most influential. Also on the list were “Henry Geldzahler, super-trendsetter and curator of modern American art at the Metropolitan Museum; New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg; and virtually the entire staff of Art News.”

Nevelson asked: “Who are these people to tell us what we have to do and what we have to think? There are artists who have been ignored because they didn’t fit into the mold: they’re angry—everybody’s angry and they’ve had it. The anger gave me strength. I made up my mind I wanted every door in the world open when I came in.”²⁷

In Nemser’s article for Feminist Art Journal, Nevelson had been quite specific about how this coterie of critics were “choking creativity.”

I have collectors, and their children go to Harvard—I could say almost a dozen young people, who are very bright. They wanted to write their theses on me. Well, Michael Fried telephones Greenberg every day…. So Fried says to the students, ‘Why do you want to write a thesis on her?’ … I have never met this [Rosalind] Kraus but the same thing happened…. I don’t want to fight Greenberg…. And I don’t want to fight Henry Geldzahler [the curator at the Metropolitan Museum who had left her out of the big 1970 show]. I don’t want to fight anyone because I’m still the creator sitting on my arse and they’re only critics that I don’t respect.

Nemser responded to the artist’s outrage: “By excluding you, Geldzahler pinpointed the discrimination which exists not only against women, but against any artist who is not of the Greenberg persuasion. You became a cause célèbre.”²⁸

The prejudice against the very successful Louise Nevelson was most likely based upon envy and the wish to discredit her. She had something they lacked—celebrity in a male-dominated world.

Always outspoken, she expanded her views on men and sex: “ ‘I like men for mating. I was always a pretty chick…. But I don’t have to do anything about it any more. I sleep on a narrow bed, like a virgin,’ she marvels, motioning to the upstairs where the bed is located. ‘I’ve had moments in bed so beautiful the world could have stopped right there. But then you get up. You go on. Time goes by—weeks, months.’ ”²⁹

Two years before she died she told journalist Amei Wallach: “I guess I’ve never stopped having a few male friends…. My mother always said ‘Oh you’ll be that way all your life.’ I think she hit it.”³⁰

“Living the way I did … see, I broke all the traditions. If I wanted a lover, I had a lover. I didn’t have to get married again. So I had courage to live as I understood it. I thought art was more important than other things.”³¹ “I’ve always had fun, felt feminine, freelanced [sexually], liked a drink, never felt tired, still get up at 4 a.m., [and] read till six then start work in my studio.”³²

Choosing to be sexually independent and having become financially independent marked Nevelson for many as a pushy dame without any class. The more successful and celebrated she became in the 1970s and ’80s, the greater the attempt to bring her down with rumor and innuendo.

Unhappy members of the feminist clique found ways to malign Nevelson. They spoke of her bizarre way of dressing, they said she was a terrible mother, they gossiped about her promiscuity, arguing that she was either bisexual or just plain gay. Though no one now would care at all about this, at the time it was a cliché that “liberated” women must be gay because they could not “catch a man.” Being called gay or bi was doubly damning, given the low status and ostracized position of homosexuals at the time.

According to Arne Glimcher, the talk about Nevelson’s sexual identity was started by Lee Krasner, who was briefly showing at Pace Gallery at the same time as Nevelson and was envious of Nevelson’s professional success.³³ Many people who didn’t know her well assumed that her relationship with her assistant and friend, Diana MacKown, was sexual as well as everything else. After Nevelson’s death, some of Nevelson’s friends persuaded MacKown to launch a “palimony” suit in order to retrieve from Mike Nevelson work she said Louise had promised to her. That turned the rumor into “fact.”

Edward Albee, who knew Nevelson for over twenty years and saw her regularly, disagrees with those who rumored that she was gay: “Louise had started to get very well known, and all sorts of rumors started floating around, including the fact that she slept with women. I knew all the rumors, but I never saw any indication of it. It doesn’t seem right. I never saw any kind of physical closeness. You’d see Louise and Diana and they had both been drinking very, very late the night before, and they both would be in bed clothes but that didn’t mean anything. I wouldn’t have minded what their relationship was, for God’s sake, but I think they were just drinking buddies.”³⁴

Fall 1972 was a sober moment for American artists in New York. The presidential election scene was beginning to heat up. The summer had seen more bombing and deaths in Vietnam; a burglary at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.C., office complex called Watergate; an unfortunate setback for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, when his pick for vice-president, Thomas Eagleton, was forced to resign once it was known that he had been treated for depression with ECT (electroconvulsive therapy).

Nevelson was among the contemporary artists who donated their works to a sale at the Pace and Janis galleries to raise funds for the McGovern campaign. As a prominent figure in the art world, she was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor:

Usually artists are not that concerned about who is President but this is a time when everyone must be concerned. I read all the New York newspapers every day and I feel that if people do not choose to be aware then they have to be prepared to take the consequences. I think it is dangerous not to be aware, not to be right out there rooting for a better world. I believe McGovern will stop the war…. We want a President who’s a democrat, not one who thinks he’s an emperor.³⁵

Nixon won the election by a landslide. But the seeds of his downfall and resignation were developing, and ultimately he would be forced out of office for his “dirty tricks” two years later in 1974.

In the meantime, Nevelson continued to lend her name and physical presence to causes she supported. She participated in the press conference in December 1972 on behalf of Soviet Jews who were not allowed to leave Russia, and she was a member of Artists and Writers for Peace in the Middle East.

The causes Nevelson supported at that time were not only political, however. It was an essential part of her character that she would support other artists she respected and lend them the power of her, by then, quite sturdy fame by exhibiting with them. She presented some of her work in December 1972 at a small show at an alternative downtown gallery alongside her artist friends Sari Dienes and Lily Ente, whom she had known for decades. Lawrence Campbell, who reviewed the show for Art News, pointed out how important but, unfortunately, unrecognized were the works of Sari Dienes and Lily Ente. He noted that Dienes’s collages prefigured Rauschenberg and perhaps also those of Joseph Cornell. Campbell had been on the art scene in New York since the mid-1940s, when he studied at the Art Student’s League and became its resident intellectual. Of Nevelson he wrote: “Before [she] achieved her great fame in the 1950s she was a largely unrecognized but first-rate sculptor.”³⁶

One of the men with whom Louise Nevelson flirted every time they met was Howard Lipman. In March 1972 she headed out to Scottsdale, Arizona, where Lipman—industrialist, local home-owner, Nevelson collector, and friend, as was his wife, Jean Lipman—had persuaded the city’s fine-arts commission to hire her to create a sculpture for the new Scottsdale Civic Center.³⁷ The forty-thousand-dollar commission was financed by funds matched by the National Endowment for the Arts. “Scottsdale is the first ‘small city’ in the US to receive such recognition” and “naturally looked for the most creative, best known environmental sculptor available to execute the piece,” the local paper reported.³⁸

At an informal meeting in Scottsdale’s city hall, everyone involved in the project gathered to study the various sites for the artwork and to discuss possible models. All present were deferential to Nevelson. When she was asked which sculptural model she liked best, she answered: “I prefer the first one that would permit you to see the transparency—you can see the mountains, [you can see] the cactus. I think we should have it bigger than it is and of course, there will be a base of the same material…. I think the landscape here demands it. Arizona is part of the sculpture.”³⁹ Though previous works in the Atmosphere and Environment series were transparent, their transparency had never before been so central in the mind of the artist. While discussing timing and funding, Nevelson inquired: “When do you want it—next week? I am a fast worker.”⁴⁰ The group laughed, little realizing that she meant exactly what she said.

The resulting sculpture, Windows to the West, or Atmosphere and Environment VIII (1973), was a few inches smaller than the earlier works of the series but seemed considerably larger because of its placement in the wide-open spaces of Arizona. It was felicitously positioned standing in a reflecting pool of water surrounded by a large, expansive lawn. And, just as the artist had wished, one could see the palm trees and local landscape through the open spaces that were part of the work.

The city reporter for the local paper, The Phoenix Gazette, wrote up the visit with great fanfare. Nevelson, who had managed to fit in a press interview and the purchase of a cowboy hat between three days of meetings with the commission members, is quoted as saying: “It is fortunate that Scottsdale has attracted people who are so mature and realize how much it will mean to the environment to have good art.”⁴¹

A year later when Nevelson went to Scottsdale to install Windows to the West she met a young, artistically inclined teenager who was biking around the new Civic Center Mall where her sculpture was standing. That teenager, Wendy Furman, now an acclaimed artist, recalled: “We had a discussion about art…. She took me seriously. She sat down and spoke with me for about half an hour. I asked her if she was still passionate about art.” Nevelson’s firm answer—yes—bolstered Furman’s confidence in [her own] future as an artist.”⁴²

Nevelson’s November 1972 show at Pace Gallery, entitled simply Houses, introduced three new series of works: End of Day, Untitled Collages, and Dream Houses.⁴³ Two beautiful large walls and a new series of sculptures in grids, End of Day, were the best work in wood she had done that year. They competed for attention with the Dream Houses, a series that mostly failed to rise to her compositional heights. The exhibition was on two floors of the gallery. On the lower floor was City Reflection (1972), a somber wall of great simplicity and strength. Unlike anything else on display, it consisted of a stark series of vertical spaces—actually a repeating series of three narrow planks adjacent to empty spaces—in which the variations in the height and width of light and dark evoked stunning emotional responses. There was just enough disparity in the size of the vertical modules to keep the eye moving across the work, leading to the surprise switch to a recumbent finale as the lower portion of the last four vertical spaces was a unit turned on its side and oriented horizontally.

Upstairs was Star Reflection (1972). Within a grid of equal-sized boxes, the artist had created a shimmering syncopation of small boxes, each containing a combination of organic and sharp-edged shapes. The variation in depth and positioning of the elements in the boxes set off a rapid rhythmic pattern, which echoed the complexity of the stupendous End of Day series.

Bill Katz, a friend and neighbor of Nevelson, had recently moved into a loft that had formerly been a printing shop and saw that hundreds of printers’ trays were being thrown out on the street. Knowing of her insatiable appetite for interesting shapes and forms, Katz called Nevelson and asked if she wanted the trays. She said yes, and he quickly arranged to have them delivered to her Spring Street house.⁴⁴ Over the course of the year, she worked on them—usually at night, at the end of her working day—seated at a table in her living room.

Each tray was divided into four equal-sized sections, which were further divided into forty-nine cells, seven by seven. Nevelson had ready-made grids to play with. And play she did. Somehow the grid of the printer’s tray, which was itself of pleasing proportions, served as a calming frame for her huge collection of wood scraps and shapes—including spools, wheels, wooden wedges, and Lincoln Logs—which she selectively inserted in the individual cells.

Complementing the prolific display of new sculpted works were twenty stark but stunning collages—the artist’s first attempt in that medium⁴⁵—combining torn and cut color paper, foil, sprayed newspapers, and spray-painted stencil images. “To occupy her evenings … she took up collage last summer, producing ravishing little assemblages in colored and black paper,” wrote one journalist.⁴⁶ She had made many of the collages at a house she had rented in Stony Point in Rockland County, New York, near her friends Merce Cunningham and John Cage.⁴⁷

John Canaday praised the collages, claiming them as “marvels of that combination of technical self-assurance and instinctive sensitivity to what is just right that marks the works of first-rate artists at the height of their powers.”⁴⁸ The Arts Magazine critic Ellen Lubell echoed Canaday’s enthusiasm for the collages: “They share the particular ambience of the constructions, that is, of entities that seem to have magically appeared whole and ready-made, so strong is the sense of completeness, unity and finish.”⁴⁹ Vivien Raynor, reviewing the exhibition in Art in America, disagreed: She saw the collages as “merely pretty” and in total contrast to the severe and majestic City Reflection in the same room.⁵⁰ The collages were far from pretty, rather they were severe and startling with their unpredictable combinations of contrasting shapes and textures. In that respect they were like the best Surrealist works characterized by unexpected elements fortuitously combined.

The works in the 1972 exhibition that most caught the attention of the critics were the Dream Houses. Ranging in size from twenty-three and a half inches by twelve inches by twenty-three inches (Dream House II) to 135 inches by twenty-nine inches by twenty-three inches (Dream House XXXVII), they resembled dollhouses with doors and windows fixed open. Full of small parts, often with barely enough room to contain them, they were different from anything Nevelson had made before.

Canaday enthused about the Dream Houses but most critics were careful not to go beyond faint praise. Artforum’s April Kingsley was overtly critical of the show: “All the work is cluttered,” she wrote. “Every cavity is filled and each surface is articulated with wooden trim, knobs, molding, furniture parts, spools, and scraps chosen from an apparently inexhaustible inventory. Her obsession to add and fill amounts to a horror vacui. The works look like jigsaw puzzles of some Surreal cityscape lining the gallery walls and occupying much of the floor space.”⁵¹

While Nevelson was working on these sculptures in March, she had explained to drama critic Louis Botto that she had always been interested in houses. “I call these sculpture houses…. My father was a builder. I wasn’t out to imitate him, but there’s something within me that will always bend toward a house.”⁵² Glimcher has always argued that Nevelson’s idea for these works came from having seen a production of Tiny Alice by her friend Edward Albee.

But there may have been an alternate motivation—probably not conscious—for these overcrowded, often claustrophobic pieces, which seem so unconnected to Nevelson’s characteristic compositional talent, on display in every other work in the exhibit. Indeed, they seem to come from a frame of mind totally different from the one that made the End of Day sculptures, the collages, or City Reflection, a work of masterful minimalism. Nor can we dismiss the possibility that Nevelson’s ambivalent thoughts and feelings about a woman’s role as domestic ruler of the house and home played some part in their appearance.

Sculpture House 2 or Dream House XXXVI, 1972. Painted wood, 54 × 28 × 12 in. Private collection. Photograph by Al Mozell, courtesy of Pace Gallery

In 1972, when Botto asked her about the origin of the boxes, she recalled the “horrible depression” she had experienced when her son was in danger during the Second World War. “I have a whole theory about motherhood—the guilts we have known.”⁵³ Years later she expanded on this idea: “I think the greatest guilt of all is having children without thinking too much…. Some of us are not ready to be mothers. I have never been ready. My son is fifty-six and I still feel guilty, but I’ve done a great deal to overcompensate him for this.”⁵⁴ The year 1972 was the beginning of her son’s plan to help his mother with her bill paying, making sure that she had plenty of money in her account and was up to date on payments. Previously, when Con Edison had threatened to cut off her electricity, she had ignored the bills, stating that she would just use candles.⁵⁵ From 1972 onwards, Mike handled all Nevelson’s bills, checks, credit cards, and so forth. Later Nevelson’s friends would say that she was so guilt-ridden over her repeated abandonment of her son that she gave him total control of her financial affairs.⁵⁶

Nevelson had been successful for more than a decade. By 1972 she was world famous and seemed more attached to her surrogate son, Arne Glimcher, and her surrogate daughter, Diana MacKown, than to her biological child, whom she kept at a distance. Mike was rarely included in her exciting life in New York City. But he was her only child, and he was trying to play a role in her life. She was proud of his being an artist, making wood sculptures in a style quite different from hers. It allowed them to continue their relationship as pals or comrades—as Marjorie Eaton had described the two of them in the early 1930s, but there was inevitable conflict and ambivalence on both sides.⁵⁷

Sometimes, she would visit Mike’s Connecticut home, where he would be refinishing antique furniture (which he did to make a living), and insist that he give her this or that chair or table, which she would then take back to her studio, cut up, and use the severed parts in her own work.⁵⁸

For a decade Louise Nevelson had been giving her son money so that he would be free to make his own work. Mike’s way of recompensing her had been to make boxes for her from the early 1960s. In 1972 he built the structures for the Dream Houses, determining where the windows and doors would be.⁵⁹ The artist had little choice about how many hinged doors and windows the Dream Houses would have and where they would be located. Her contribution was to add the architectural geegaws and decorative trim to the exterior and the interior of the ready-made houses. The mostly rigid regularity of the Dream Houses, for example, in the size and placement of the windows and the doors—differs dramatically from Louise Nevelson’s usual playfulness and unconventionality. Their bewildering over-muchness was alien to her characteristic style. Her sense of composition had never included an unmodulated series of unmodulated shapes. For a brief moment in 1972—just when Nevelson started her new series of Dream Houses, and at the start of a new financial arrangement between mother and son—her ambivalence about Mike seemed to overwhelm her own style, when she worked on the wood constructions he had created for her.

In early 1973, with the help of his lawyer, Mike Nevelson set up Sculptotek, a corporation that was designed to protect the money coming from Nevelson’s sales. It was to be managed by Mike Nevelson and his lawyer, Maurice Spanbock. In the terms of the corporation, his mother was a worker producing art and Diana Mackown was an employee of his mother. Sculptotek paid salaries to Louise Nevelson and Diana MacKown. Effectively this meant that Mike Nevelson owned all of the work that was produced by his mother and subsequently sold to Glimcher at Pace Gallery. The existence of Sculptotek did not actually inconvenience Louise Nevelson and was evidently seen by both mother and son as just one more step in Mike Nevelson’s attempt to help his mother with her finances.

One of the goals of this plan, not uncommon at the time, was to protect her estate from excessive taxes after she died. Arne Glimcher warned Mike, Mike later acknowledged, that it probably would not hold up in court.⁶⁰ According to one of Nevelson’s granddaughters: “All the people involved in the new financial set up were either clueless about how to do such things or so greedy that they overreached.”⁶¹ The full consequences of this plan would not be felt until after her death.

On December 14, 1972, a huge Cor-Ten steel sculpture was installed at Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street.⁶² Night Presence IV was twenty-two and a half feet high, just over thirteen feet wide and weighed approximately nine thousand pounds. Its style harkens back to her earliest works in wood from the 1940s—elegant combinations of abstract elements. Nevelson saw it as a Christmas present to the city in which she had lived for fifty years. “This city, more than Paris or Rome, is where most of the world’s great minds and creative spirits are…. New York represents the whole of my conscious life, and I thought it fitting that I should give it something of myself.”⁶³

Arne Glimcher had arranged for the installation to coincide with the publication of his new book on Nevelson, entitled simply Louise Nevelson, which had just arrived in the bookstores. Louise Nevelson was praised for the stunning photographs of her paintings and sculpture and the informative text, in which analyses of her work were interspersed with her life story and her personal commentary.

April Kingsley, who had written one of the few negative reviews for the 1972 Pace Gallery exhibition, criticized Arne Glimcher for having written a book on the artist, given that he was her close friend and current dealer. “I question the ultimate wisdom of an unscholarly treatment of an artist of Nevelson’s stature and would have preferred a professional’s objective overview.”⁶⁴

Glimcher was not her only major proponent at this time. Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Giorgio Marconi, the young director of Studio Marconi in Milan, were about to bring Nevelson’s works to the attention of thousands of Americans and Europeans through impressive traveling exhibitions in 1973 and 1974.⁶⁵

Sometime in 1971 Giorgio Marconi, whose gallery specialized in modern and contemporary art, wrote a letter to Arne Glimcher saying he wanted to represent Louise Nevelson in Europe. Two years later Marconi held a large Nevelson exhibition in his gallery—eighty works were shown, almost evenly divided between sculptures from the 1950s and ’60s, and sculpture and collages from 1972, which included nine works in aluminum. Marconi’s taste tended toward the most avant-garde artists in Europe, and he was not afraid to follow Nevelson in whatever direction she went. She had made her name and fame with wood walls and wood assemblages. Marconi loved her work in wood but was also open to her work in metal, which she was just beginning to master.

The exhibit opened in May 1973 and was highly praised in the major Milanese paper, Corriere della Sera. “The show is a huge success,” Marconi wrote Nevelson, “and the gallery is constantly crowded…. Sales are excellent and I think you will be happy with the results. I am especially pleased that so many of your pieces will stay behind in Italy. Thank you for giving me the possibility to get to know your work at such close quarters.”⁶⁶

Marconi arranged for the show to go to five other European cities after it closed in Milan: to Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum in Aalborg, Denmark; the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; the Centre national d’art contemporain (CNAC) in Paris; and, finally, to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Unlike many European dealers at the time, Marconi saw that a New York artist like Nevelson had important new things to say to the European art world: “It was the moment for America; Paris was in decline.”⁶⁷ He saw Nevelson as a proponent of the new realism, since she was using objects from the real world, castoffs from the industrial world—and transforming them.

Nevelson and Marconi hit it off immediately. When they went out to dinner on her arrival in Milan, Nevelson gave him a silver tape measure from Tiffany’s, saying, “With this, you can measure my sculpture in inches” (rather than the standard European centimeters). They both laughed and Marconi was charmed, and at the same time she jokingly made him aware that her innate sense of measurement meant she would never rely on mechanical devices to tell her what her eye could plainly see. Her graciousness, elegance, and proud carriage convinced Marconi that “she was a woman who wanted to be aristocratic, a ‘signora.’ ” But it was her determination and devotion to her art that made him love her. He recognized that “she was grasping her true moment in life with the awareness that opportunities can slip away too easily.”⁶⁸

Gianni Ummarino/Studio Marconi. Louise Nevelson with Giorgio Marconi at Studio Marconi in Milan, Italy, ca. 1973. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Now, many years later, Giorgio Marconi’s memories of Nevelson remain warm. “It pleased me to do things for her,” he said. He understood her as an artist who had “chosen a kind of solitary life to concentrate on her work. She had the double personality of a man and of a woman—a man by temperament, but also a very feminine woman.” Marconi helped build Nevelson’s reputation in Europe in the early 1970s, but by 1975 he recognized that she had chosen Arne Glimcher to promote her—“Arne did everything for her. He made it possible for her to have a happy life”⁶⁹—and understood that he should step back.

Marconi kept many of the Nevelson works he had exhibited in 1973 and regularly added to his already sizable collection. When Nevelson’s son Mike was ready to sell off the estate after her death, Marconi bought thirty-five percent of the available work, which entered his Fondazione Marconi. He still promotes large exhibitions of her work—recently an exhibition in Rome in 2013, with sixty-seven works from his collection. As new movements and newer artists came along, some European dealers and critics lost their enthusiasm for Nevelson, but Marconi never did. His support was unwavering.

In Minneapolis, Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center, was planning a large retrospective of Nevelson’s wood sculpture that would travel to five American cities. On the first page of the exhibition catalogue for Louise Nevelson: Wood Sculptures, Friedman decisively sets out his agenda. The fact that the show was wood sculpture was prominently featured in the press release for the show: “Wood is indisputably Nevelson’s medium…. Although she has … overseen the translation of several of her earlier wood pieces into large Cor-Ten steel sculptures, the genesis and essence of her art is in her special use of wood with which she creates seemingly weightless shapes whose iconography relates them to the past as well as to the present.”⁷⁰

Friedman’s traveling American exhibition set the stage for what would become the conventional opinion in the American art world about Nevelson’s sculpture: Her work in wood was superior to her work in other media.

Nearly three decades after the Walker exhibition, Friedman repeats the same story about Nevelson that he had always told the world: “She was destined to work with wood. It was more than sculpture—it was a fusion between sculpture and architecture. Her large wood works were depthless. Her best work was done in the 1950s and 1960s. She had an uncanny eye—an artist who could give substance to shadows.”⁷¹

The catalogue includes photographs of ten details of large works from the exhibit, which allow one to experience up close her ability to transform the discarded shards of anonymous others. Friedman was the first to actually illustrate something critics had noted previously—the subtle details of Nevelson’s wood sculpture warrant as much close attention as the overall compositions.

When Nevelson arrived in Minneapolis for the opening of the Walker exhibition she was good copy, and the press had been primed. Friedman had done a masterful job arranging for interviews, live TV appearances, a dinner party with major donors, and luncheons with the local journalists. One of the most savvy art writers to interview Nevelson was Don Morrison of the Minneapolis Star. He paid respect to Nevelson the artist and beyond this he intuited something more profound about her personality, writing that “she is grand furthermore as a person…. She assumes no regal pose, but radiates the unmistakable presence of one [who] worked around the clock in the most starveling years, who finally was recognized, honored and paid extremely large sums for her creations. Now 74, she still works around the clock because her work is the wholeness of her person.”⁷²

In his next article on Nevelson, a review of her show, Morrison spent much of the piece arguing for a cogent way to see Nevelson’s assemblages—one very close to her own view. “The compelling power, the fascination, the mystery of her assemblages must lie in her gift of expressing a personal abstract vision by bringing together objects shaped by other hands for other utilitarian or ornamental purposes…. As one of the major artists of our time, her role has been to amalgamate whole histories of association and function into new configurations … this consolidates the million-fold detail into a single presence.”⁷³

While other critics and curators had noted Nevelson’s gift of putting scraps of wood together in just the right way, Morrison comprehended her way of working as a collaboration with the numerous anonymous workers who had preceded her. This observation provides an interesting and new perspective on Nevelson’s character. Though she united the scraps of wood made by diverse individuals with a monochrome tint, she allowed attentive viewers like Morrison to recognize the unique qualities of each piece of wood. The original scrap might be present only as a fragment divorced from its original purpose, but its shape and texture was not changed. The nails or nail holes remained. Nevelson had taken the fragment and made it part of a larger composition, like an orchestra conductor who artfully combines the many sounds issuing from many diverse instruments.

About a thousand people showed up at the Walker for the big opening, including Arne Glimcher, his wife Milly, his mother Eva, Dorothy Miller of MoMA, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Auchincloss, and groups of wealthy art lovers from Cleveland and St. Louis.⁷⁴ Nevelson “was gracious and spoke to each and everyone of us who said hello or asked a question. Indeed her presence gave a complete aura of excitement to the entire show.”⁷⁵

Louise Nevelson: Wood Sculptures traveled to five major museums over the next two years: the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Modern Art; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and finally, at the beginning of 1975, the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Friedman had drawn his negative conclusions about Nevelson’s metal work from her earliest attempts in that medium—the too-quickly-produced Seventh Decade Garden aluminum sculptures (1971) and the too-easily-dismissed Atmosphere and Environment series in aluminum and steel (1966–74). In Seventh Decade Garden she had not yet found her own voice; in the Atmosphere and Environment series, the rigid grid reduced her spontaneity, but not completely. Unless one studies those works carefully, it is hard to see her inventiveness. Ironically, she was just completing her breakthrough work in metal—Sky Covenant—at the time the Walker exhibition opened in the winter of 1973–74.

Nineteen seventy-three was a watershed year in American political life, as a Senate committee convened to investigate the break-in at the Democratic National Committees headquarters at the Watergate office complex. The country was mesmerized—eighty-five percent of U.S. households watched some part of the hearings that were broadcast live.

“I’ve been following the hearings regularly,” said Nevelson. “You bet your life I have! While I’m working, I take my television and have my eye on it. I think if you don’t, you’re out of your mind.” Nevelson understood the traumatic effect on the nation of this “second-rate burglary…. The issue isn’t only Watergate,” she maintained. “It isn’t the Ellsberg case. It’s the whole structure of American life…. What did [Nixon] want when he went to the White House? He wanted uniforms! And look at the way he treated the students—calling them bums. And when the veterans walked on his lawn, he was ready to shoot them…. For the sake of America and for the world, I would immediately demand a resignation.”⁷⁶

She offered this opinion to a reporter from New York magazine: “Each individual in the world, not only in America, will be influenced—as we were all influenced by, and still suffer from, the Communists, the Nazis in Germany, and the McCarthy era in America. So, of course, Watergate has affected my life totally, and I myself feel at this point in history as I’ve never felt on any public issue in my life.”⁷⁷

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson knew that politics could be a matter of life and death and that those who ignored the world around them might not survive very long. Cynical as she was about the many Americans who still didn’t get the message about Watergate, she was nevertheless hopeful that the people she knew—many of them in power, like Nelson and David Rockefeller—would side with the truth and overturn the bad direction in which the Nixon White House had taken the country.

At almost the same moment that the show at the Walker Art Center was trumpeting the superiority of Nevelson’s work in wood over her work in metal, she had just created one of her best metal sculptures, Sky Covenant. This pivotal sculpture has largely gone unrecognized as such in critical opinion. For the first time while using the primarily two-dimensional grid format, she began to experiment with movement in and out of three-dimensional space as never before in her work in metal.

In the previous sculptures of the Atmosphere and Environment series, all the cells in the grids were flat. She had played successfully with transparencies, all of which had been set up outdoors to be seen through. In Windows to the West, she insisted that the viewer be able to see through it to the desert. Sky Covenant was the first of the series designed to be set up against a solid backdrop, but she had figured out a way to dynamically offset the limitation of not having a landscape behind it.

Sky Covenant had been commissioned by the art committee of Temple Israel in Boston, of which Irving Rabb—an uncle of Dick Solomon, director of Pace Prints—was a co-chair.⁷⁸ An important art collector in Boston, he had made an eloquent and persuasive case for Nevelson and her work.⁷⁹

Sky Covenant—twenty-one feet high, twenty feet wide, and weighing approximately twenty thousand pounds—completely covers a concrete wall to the left of the entrance to the new wing of Temple Israel. Made and installed only a month after Windows to the West, it bears an obvious connection to the Atmosphere and Environment series and is the last of that series. Like all the others in that series, Sky Covenant was made up of a grid of twenty-five equal-sized open boxes, each filled with Cor-Ten steel shapes. While the transparency of the overall work is not unique to this sculpture, what is original is the varied placement of the separate elements within the cells. They catch the light at different angles and complicate the overall design, which changes dramatically as the viewer walks back and forth in front of the sculpture.

Wedge-shaped triangular elements partially frame some of the cells that make up the grid. As the eye adjusts to take in the entire composition, these wedges become parts of larger circular or oval forms that echo back and forth across the whole. One result of the to-and-fro tilting is a constant flicker of light and shadow on the surfaces, silhouettes alternating with multileveled internal compositions, many of which have a formal integrity that would allow them to stand alone. Much like a kaleidoscope, each turn of the head or step along the width of the sculpture reveals new patterns that were neither evident nor even visible a moment earlier.

The artist was working with metal in much the same way she had been working for decades with wood. Flat metal scraps, which were once straightforward square or rectangular panels, now had edges with triangular bites or suggestive protrusions. These bits and pieces clearly had an earlier life as parts or remnants of someone else’s sculpture. They are brought together here and transformed into a concert of glittering reflections or obtrusive outcroppings. The artist had not previously done such a symphonic syncopation in metal. By having the interior elements exceed their frames toward the viewer, Nevelson pushed herself beyond the aesthetic boundary that had constrained all her previous large-scale steel compositions. Photographs rarely make this particular innovation clear. And yet it must have been clear to the artist that she was manipulating dimensionality as never before in metal or in this series.

Perhaps the setting of the sculpture against a rough cement wall was an invitation to vary a style that was now five years old. In 1967–68 when she made her series of Plexiglas sculptures, the process obliged her to keep the variations within the grid relatively simple. With the technical expertise of the workers at Lippincott, however, Nevelson could do more or less what she wanted to do with the metal. Indeed the sculpture possessed what the Temple’s architect, Greg Downes, had described as the “ordered complexity” that characterized all of her best sculpture and could in fact be considered her trademark compositional aim—bringing order to chaos.⁸⁰ Perhaps just before she stopped using the grid format for her large-scale metal work, Nevelson felt safe enough with its familiar structure to leap off into space and launch herself into the fourth dimension.

According to the artist, Sky Covenant was supposed to communicate “spiritual movement.”⁸¹ In his remarks at the dedication, Rabbi Roland B. Gittelsohn observed that:

You will not see obvious symbols when you … get your first look. Don’t look for a menorah, don’t look for a burning bush…. Look for the sum totality and see what kind of feeling that gives you…. This kind of art, at its best, is not too dissimilar from Torah. The beauty of Torah is that a person can read the same passage over dozens, scores … and on the hundred and first time, suddenly a new meaning, a new insight, which never occurred to him before spring literally out of the sentence or the words and grabs for his attention…. [T]he same thing is true of good abstract art.⁸²

This extraordinary work was installed in December 1973, capping an extraordinary year for the artist. She had received three honorary doctorates: from Moore College of Art in New Jersey, from C.W. Post in Long Island, and, perhaps the most prized, from Smith College in Massachusetts, an elite women’s college. By the end of her life she had been so honored thirteen times, with tributes including honorary doctorates from Harvard, Columbia, and New York University.

Nineteen seventy-four was also shaping up to be a good year for Nevelson. The Marconi exhibit was about to open at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, after which it would go on to Paris and Berlin. The Walker show was headed to five major American museums, and Nevelson and her entourage would attend all the openings. The press coverage was fabulous, and many of her new works in the show had already been sold.

When the exhibition from the Walker Art Center arrived at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Nevelson stayed for three days, during which she appeared in her notable outfits and was wined and dined by the “crème de la crème” of San Francisco society.⁸³ She appreciated the warm reception, declaring: “I love it, I love it…. This is glamour and I love it.” The day after she arrived she met with sixty reporters for a two-hour press conference in which she talked and talked and talked.

The art critic of the Los Angeles Times, Henry J. Seldis, devoted most of his article on Nevelson’s show to the impact of her work on the viewer. “Wandering through the magic forest of Louise Nevelson’s wood sculpture … one enters projections of spiritual essences which seem to have become ever more harmonious…. Having evolved her personal mystical sculptural language, from an early concern with Cubism and a lifelong search for inner realities far more valid than overt appearance, Nevelson, at 74, has squared the circle by creating an art whose spirit is as elusive as its forms are tangible.”⁸⁴

Photographer unknown. Louise Nevelson during honorary degree ceremony at Smith College in Northampton, MA, 1973. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Seldis then reported one of the most penetrating interviews the artist had given in years. Knowing of his obvious sympathy for her and his profound, respectful understanding of her work, Nevelson opened up. She made uncharacteristic observations about her childhood that illuminate her work and life. “For the most part I felt initially alienated from my environment and because of this feeling of rejection I was very shy and self-conscious. I knew that if I was going to be what I am now—a famous artist, a public person—I had this shyness to overcome.” With years of study she had found her way past that shyness. Studying voice, dance, dramatics was all for the same goal: “I simply wanted to free myself.” By her mid-fifties all that study had paid off. It seemed as if Sholem Aleichem’s prediction of her future greatness would come to pass.

Nevelson explains to Seldis that it took her so long to achieve recognition, because of both “the public’s failure to understand the need to create her own reality and … the negative attitude toward women artists which has been prevalent for so long.” Then, just after she described how immune she was to the influence of others and how she didn’t really care whether people were affected by her work, she pivots: “I don’t seek perfection or set out to make masterpieces. But I do hope that some people are moved by my sculpture just as I was moved long ago when first encountering Michelangelo.”⁸⁵

Next, Nevelson went to Paris and Dallas, following the shows organized by Marconi and Friedman. The month-long Paris exhibition, “The Permanence of Nevelson” (April 9 to May 13, 1974), was the artist’s first retrospective in France. Frances Beatty and Gilbert Brownstone, who were obviously sympathetic to the artist’s metaphysical notions, wrote the catalogue essay for the show. Opening with: “Each piece stands for a mystical world—a fourth dimension of endless allusion that is the essence of Nevelson…. Order and magic are the two principles in her work…. The control of animated, interacting elements through balance is the key to Nevelson—she refers to it as the skeleton of her work…. But it is also marvelously balanced, and filled with a purposeful tension.”⁸⁶ The order that characterized her work was especially appealing to French critics as it fit well with the classical tradition in French art.

Some critics noted the blue lights in which the works were bathed. One writer, while acknowledging that Nevelson was unique and had neither antecedents nor followers, found the blue aura and the catalogue essay a bit much. He referred to the “mystical aspects” of the discourse about Nevelson with Gallic disdain.⁸⁷ Another French journalist called her “the grand priestess of American sculpture” and seemed truly respectful of her pioneer status and originality as well as her ability to inspire young artists—male and female.⁸⁸

Michelle Motte wrote in L’Express, “A strange 74-year-old woman has arrived in Paris last Saturday to bring some order to her sculpture and to measure her own glory.” Motte notes how well Nevelson plays her role as one of the great living American artists. The audacity of her repartee, her outrageous positions, her alluring royal gothic veneer, as much as her sculpture, are part of her art. She notes that Nevelson has become a surprising ally of women’s liberation. In addition to her fight as an artist, she fights for all women: “Let us be ourselves, not slaves, but free people.”⁸⁹

Attending openings of her travelling exhibitions was not all Nevelson had on her calendar. In between Paris and Dallas, she met with her brother Nate Berliawsky in New York, where he had come with Herbert Peters, new chef at his hotel in Rockland, to discuss the festive opening of “the Nevelson room” in the dining area one month hence. The chef was astonished at Nevelson’s energy. “She spent at least 15 hours in the two days with us, but she still did at least two days’ work.”⁹⁰ The gala opening of the Louise Nevelson Room at the Thorndike Hotel, where Nate had hung the oil paintings his sister had given him over the years, took place on June 21, 1974. In order to be at her brother’s event, the artist had passed up a fête honoring Henry Kissinger at Nelson Rockefeller’s Westchester estate Kykuit.

Nate had supported his sister through some of her hardest times in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was the only financially solvent member of the family. Reminiscing, Nevelson stated: “It is always nice to feel that you’re well settled in your own backyard. And having the room [the Louise Nevelson Room] restores something to my brother and brings him a direct share in my particular work and accomplishments.”⁹¹

While the socializing and traveling were going on, Nevelson was preparing for Sky Gates and Collages, another solo show at Pace Gallery New York, which opened in early May 1974 and filled two floors of the gallery. The largest work was End of Day-Nightscape I, an eight-foot-by-seven-foot wall, made up of fifteen End of Day panels—an enormous elegant composition made from printers’ trays.

By this time Nevelson had discovered that when the individual works were combined, as in End of Day-Nightscape, the visual excitement reached a higher pitch. The viewer’s eye was invited to dance to the visual fugues and gavottes she had created. If we let our eyes wander freely across such works, we soon discover their inherent harmony and the subtle interplay of lights and shadows, squares and triangles, rounds and rectangles. The artist seems able to guess just when we will get tired of a particular shape or configuration, so she changes the next sequence—either dramatically—or more slowly.

The newest works in the Pace show were the collages—a medium she approached with astonishing freshness every time she tried it. Now she was using corrugated cardboard and spray paint (her new toy), mixing the positive with the ghostlike negative traces of stencil shapes—an apparent randomness united with a deliberate compositional force. It seems Nevelson was repeatedly driven to create new formats and new versions, when she approached a familiar medium, as though the tried-and-true was never quite so satisfying as what had yet to be attempted or seen.

Hilton Kramer’s review of the 1974 Pace show for The New York Times set Nevelson up as a spellbinding artist from the 1950s, who was still going strong at age 75. “Art: Nevelson Still Shines” was the title of his article, and he observed that “scarcely a week passes without some museum, somewhere, playing host to a sizable Nevelson exhibition,”⁹² adding: “At 75, she remains enormously energetic and inventive, producing new work with an unrivaled copiousness.”

As the year wound down, Nevelson did not. When Barbaralee Diamonstein, a long-time friend and admirer who had a weekly radio program, Inside the Arts, interviewed her for an Art News piece, Nevelson was at her candid, confident best. “John Cage told me recently … there’s no room or desire for entertainment or vacation, and no matter how long he lives he can never do all he wants. I feel pretty much the same way…. My work is the mirror of my consciousness.”⁹³ She then said clearly and unequivocally that her work is about her feelings: “It [my work] contains the awareness of love, or sorrow, all the human emotions.”

Diamonstein had great respect for Nevelson the artist and the person and, when quoting her directly, Nevelson always seemed articulate and verbally expressive. This was also the case with a few select others—either because the interviewers skillfully edited her words or because they rewrote her, intuitively understanding what she meant to say. Some people very dear to her—like June Wayne and Martin Friedman—remarked that, though they loved her and her work, they could barely understand what she was saying when she was on tape or on film. To them she seemed unable to express even the simplest concepts in an intelligible way—while many others were impressed with her profundities and her quips. A plausible answer for this paradox was the trauma in her early life that had, literally, left her speechless for six months.

At the end of 1974 the artist was preparing for a big trip to Asia and the beginning of her work on a chapel for Saint Peter’s Church in New York City: an adventure and a challenge to which she could look forward with the wind at her back, given the accomplishments of the previous two years.