Al Schell. First Lady Betty Ford and Louise Nevelson standing with Bicentennial Dawn, 1976. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin photograph. ©Temple University Libraries, SCRC, Philadelphia, PA
“Working in the open is especially difficult as you are in competition with the scale of the universe…. Space is the greatest luxury whether it be in a room or out of doors.”
—Louise Nevelson, Nevelson at Purchase, 1977
In January 1975 Pace Gallery had an exhibition of five American sculptors—Joseph Cornell, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, and David Smith—five of the most famous American sculptors of the century. From late January to early March the Walker Art Center traveling show, Louise Nevelson: Wood Sculptures, was in Cleveland. In February and March Nevelson’s latest work was exhibited at the Galleria d’Arte Spagnoli in Florence, a show organized in collaboration with Giorgio Marconi.
While these exhibits were up, Nevelson went with Arne and Milly Glimcher to Iran, India, and Japan—the biggest trip she had ever made. The United States Information Service (USIS) paid the expenses for Nevelson and Arne Glimcher, who gave lectures in all three countries. The USIS was the cultural arm of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and its main job was using public diplomacy to promote positive views of the United States. The travel was timed to coincide with exhibitions of Nevelson’s work in Tehran, Bombay, Tokyo, Osaka, and Sapporo.1 In a terse reference to this huge trip Nevelson simply said, “the State Department sent me.”2
Nevelson never traveled alone but, according to the recollections of Dorothy Miller and the Glimchers, she was very easy to travel with.3 Arne Glimcher explained that she usually solved the luggage problem by wearing all her clothes at once (she took the rest as carry-on). “She’d put on about three outfits and then would stuff a plaid man’s shirt and a fur vest in her bag. She used to say she was ‘an atmospheric dresser.’ It didn’t matter whether it was summer or winter. What mattered was what was right for that day.”4
The largest and most important exhibition of this international trip was held at the Minami Gallery in Tokyo. Kusuo Shimizu had developed the most avant-garde gallery in the city, showing Jasper Johns, Sam Francis, and Jean Tinguely in the 1960s, and Nevelson in the 1970s. As expected, attending the opening of Nevelson’s exhibit were many well-heeled Japanese businessmen. More surprising was the sizable number of powerful Japanese women executives, including the celebrated fashion designer Hanae Mori, who was an icon for liberated women in Asia.
None of the high-status women were invited to the dinner following the exhibition. When Nevelson found this out, she was outraged and told Glimcher that she refused to go as a protest for her mistreated Asian sisters. He persuaded her that not appearing would be considered as an insult to her hosts. She agreed, knowing that she and Milly Glimcher would be the only women at the huge event.5
As part of the festivities the geishas who sat among the Western guests did a special dance to honor the Americans. Of course, Nevelson danced with them.6
Shimizu later wrote to Nevelson thanking her for her presence at the exhibit, which many considered the “best art exhibition for those several years in Japan.”7 He also expressed his gratitude for the lectures she gave in Tokyo, adding that she had impressed artists, critics, and young students “with her personality and inexhaustible strong will for creation.”
The Glimchers and Nevelson traveled to Kyoto, not for an exhibit but to see the ancient city and its remarkable temples. The USIS reports on her visits were “all overwhelmingly positive.”8 In the Hokkaido Shimbun, one of the world’s highest-circulation newspapers, Kegoro Kiji, a Japanese artist, wrote an article entitled “Louise Nevelson, Her Works and World”: “Pieces of wood and fractions of furniture come to echo with each other, when collected and arranged by Artist Nevelson; they are no longer road-side wood pieces and legs of a broken chair; they start breathing by becoming an entirely different living body, and invite viewers to a world of fantasy.”9 Kiji had put into very few words what Nevelson always wanted to accomplish with her art. She felt appreciated and comfortable in Asia, convinced that her audience there understood her work better than in Europe.10 The experience of being well understood in Asia continued to the end of Nevelson’s life. She had learned that her meditative approach and metaphysical inclinations were entirely in sympathy with Asian cultures.
Aside from the warm welcome she received on her quick tour of Asia, Nevelson was able to visit some impressive sights, including the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, Iran; the Taj Mahal in India; and the glorious Buddhist temples in Kyoto. Seeing these very large, splendid sites expanded Nevelson’s vision, and she would subsequently produce works that reflected her enlarged view. Her vision had also been expanded after visits to the towering Central American Mayan ruins in the 1950s. There she felt the magical power of Mayan and pre-Columbian art and began to identify with ancient architectural sculptors of the New World pyramids. That identification was an important, but mostly silent, influence, which led her to the first large wood walls in the late 1950s. It had also led to a new confidence in her own artistic vision. Many of the enormous artifacts of the cultures she had seen in Persia, India, and Japan were older than the pre-Columbian civilizations, and most were grander and more visible than many of the Mayan ruins hidden in the jungle. Visiting the monumental architectural works in the Middle and Far East moved her farther along the path of seeing herself as an environmental architect who could use large—even huge—works to change the perspective of the viewer. The influence of her most recent travels became evident in the large-scale steel sculptures that she made soon after her return, as well as in some of the enormous wood walls and architectural wood projects that would soon follow. In fact they informed much of her ambition and art during the next few years.
In 1975 she had three major commissions to complete: Bicentennial Dawn for Philadelphia; a large steel sculpture, Transparent Horizon, for MIT; and a chapel for Saint Peter’s Church in New York City. Furthermore, she needed to produce new work for her next Pace Gallery show in New York, which would open in February 1976.
Transparent Horizon was the first of what would soon become an ongoing series of commissions for large-scale metal art.11 The work was commissioned by MIT via their Percent-for-Art Funds. Since 1968, MIT had been using a fractional amount of the cost of all its new buildings and renovations for artistic purposes, and by 1975 it had amassed an outstanding collection of American art.
I. M. Pei, the architect for the new building, knew Nevelson through Glimcher (he had designed the latest iteration of Pace Gallery), admired her work, and selected her from a list of possible candidates to make the sculpture for MIT’s new chemical-engineering building. When she met the university’s Committee on the Arts, she was, according to Pei, her usual self—a presence, an imperial person—dressed in one of her striking outfits.12 After looking at the various maquettes she had assembled for the project, Pei urged her to make the work large—something he usually asked of the sculptors with whom he collaborated.
Transparent Horizon was large—twenty feet high, twenty-one feet long—and weighed approximately ten tons. It is an amalgam of two earlier aluminum works, Tropical Tree IV and Black Flower Series IV, made in 1972–73. In late November 1975 Lippincott modified the two works to make them fit together as a new whole—a process Nevelson had long since mastered, and one that recalled her habit of recycling from the days of her work in wood. Tropical Tree IV was the smaller of the two, and Black Flower Series IV loomed above it, connected by a long, curving tongue-like shape. (This may be the reason why some MIT students described the work as “an elephant devouring a rhinoceros.”13)
The sculpture was installed in front of the Landau Building and dedicated on December 10, 1975.14 Shortly afterwards, students buried it beneath a mound of snow, removing it from view for the winter. Spurred on by a zealous undergraduate who believed that art had no place at a school specializing in science and engineering, Transparent Horizon became a target of vandalism, a scapegoat for students looking to attack something—anything—about the university.15
An insightful student viewed the work several years after its installation:
When I was an undergraduate at MIT (from 1978–1982), defacing Louise Nevelson’s sculpture “Transparent Horizon” was a university tradition. It was generally known by any number of nicknames (e.g., “Transparent Hoaxes,” “Random Horizons”) which the irreverent residents called it. They regularly spattered it with paint, graffiti, food and, on Halloween, pumpkins in various stages of degradation. Some students griped that the sculpture had displaced the sandlot that formerly hosted a volleyball net; others complained that no one had asked the dormitory residents nearby about its siting.16
The students’ frustration, then, had less to do with aesthetic concerns about the work, and more to do with the fact that they hadn’t been consulted about its installation.
The tradition of MIT students defacing and denouncing Transparent Horizon quickly grew to such proportions that I. M. Pei was asked to intervene. He volunteered to bring the most vocal malcontents to meet with Nevelson in New York. When the group arrived at Nevelson’s studio the artist was sitting on a dais wearing one of her elegant Chinese robes. Knowing that I. M. Pei came from an aristocratic Chinese family, she was determined to show respect by dressing in a way that honored Pei’s ancestry. She was much less upset than the architect, who was very distressed that a valued work of art by someone he deeply respected had been desecrated. She surprised the students when she told them that she had no problem with their not liking the work. But according to Diana MacKown, Nevelson’s underlying message was simple: “Even if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t damage a work of art. Protest some other way.”17 Pei recalled that, “The meeting helped the [students] who didn’t like Nevelson previously.”18
Nineteen seventy-six was America’s bicentennial year. Nevelson started on a high note, beginning with her huge commissioned white-painted wood sculpture in Philadelphia. The title of the work, Bicentennial Dawn, was pegged to the timing of its installation at the “dawning” of the bicentennial year in January 1976. The dedication was intended to be spectacular. And it was.
When it was time to look at the site for the sculpture, Nevelson was shown an ordinary lobby off a side street. She turned to the officials accompanying her and said: “Show me the whole building.” She found a large ceremonial corridor separating the outside entrance from the inner part of the building and peremptorily declared, “I will fill it with art.”19 Given Nevelson’s status in the art world at the time and her commanding presence, the architects and public officials agreed to her choice.
The contract fee was settled and she began to design the maquette, which was shipped to Washington, D.C., for presentation to Design Review Panel of the General Services Administration (GSA). Project architects along with Arne Glimcher convened with the panel, and a shouting match ensued. Karel Yasko, Assistant Commissioner for Design and Construction in the GSA, objected to the work, claiming it would be a fire hazard, a maintenance problem and an obstacle course, forcing people to zigzag around the work upon entering or leaving the building through the foyer. At the very least, Yasko wanted the bases underneath the three groupings of columns removed.20
Glimcher argued, convincingly, that, “Without the base, the piece doesn’t work—the base is a unifying factor. If the bases are to be removed, the entire work will have to be redone.”21 As for the zigzagging, he explained that the sculptor “divided the spaces so that people are encompassed in the space and cannot avoid being exposed to creativity.”22 Yasko was overruled. A pleased Nevelson stated: “The GSA Art-in-Architecture Program allowed me to fulfill one of my major ambitions—the creation of my only major interior environmental sculptures in America.”23 It was the first but would not be the last.
Nevelson’s ninety-foot-long sculpture, the most ambitious permanent work she had ever done, was designed as a “contemplative experience in search of awareness that already exists in the human mind.”24 Spread out over the glass-enclosed area, which is just over ninety feet long, the work responds to changing light from early dawn to late afternoon.
Three groups of white-painted wood columns are placed on platforms, which set them off from the brick floor. The central group is eighteen feet wide and twelve feet deep. Its total height is thirty feet, because several elements, including a half-round disk representing the rising sun, are fixed to the ceiling and descend to overlap the largest columnar group that rises eighteen feet above the base. The two side groupings are half as high—fifteen feet tall, twelve feet deep, and twelve feet wide. Single, tall, unadorned columns, six-by-six inches, stand in each grouping, anchoring the three separate compositions into a unified whole.
Al Schell. First Lady Betty Ford and Louise Nevelson standing with Bicentennial Dawn, 1976. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin photograph. ©Temple University Libraries, SCRC, Philadelphia, PA
While each of the three compositional groupings has a strong aesthetic presence, the whole is remarkable as an integrated work. It is difficult, almost impossible, to see the entire composition from the front, generally a Nevelson preference. By insisting that viewers walk through and around the work, the artist forced them to experience its complexity. Each of the groupings has a complex coherence of its own, and when seen from several angles the parts work both alone and together.
The grouping on the left is sedate and compact. It contains a mix of unadorned tall rectangular columns, columns made of six boxes, and semi-humanoid vertical sculptures on bases. From some angles, the anthropomorphic figures seem to converse with their open-mouthed silhouettes facing each other—another witty Nevelsonian device. Nevelson was given to visual puns and no detail escaped her eagle eye. Most of these details are lost and seemingly unimportant in the face of the larger whole. After all, the brilliance of this work is that it works both as a sweepingly majestic ninety-foot-long structure as well as a series of intimate exchanges between a viewer and the work’s details.
For the ceremonial dedication, a journalist who was present describes, “The lobby [of the courthouse] became a palm garden filled with gigantic plants; uniformed waiters and waitresses served drinks and exotic hors d’oeuvres; and a forty-two-piece orchestra played…. Tuxedoes and long gowns were the prescribed dress.”25
Exactly on schedule, the five or six hundred guests moved toward the lobby area adjacent to the foyer as Louise Nevelson, President Gerald Ford’s wife Betty, and other luminaries appeared on a platform from which they gave speeches praising the artist and the GSA’s new administrator, Jack Eckerd. With its Art-in-Architecture Program, the GSA had just become the most important landlord and supporter of the arts in the United States.26 The program had been mandated to spend half a percent of the construction cost of any federal building project on art. Nevelson’s work cost $175,000—about one percent of the construction cost.
Together, Betty Ford and Louise Nevelson pulled the handle of a large ceremonial switch, and the orchestra played the opening notes from Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. At the start of the music, the sculpture was in total darkness, then: “One by one, its twenty-nine columns were slowly illuminated until the entire sculpture was a blinding white. At that precise moment, the music reached a crescendo and fireworks exploded over Independence Mall in the background.”27
Writing in the New York Post, Emily Genauer described the dedication of “the enormous white-wood sculpture in the new Philadelphia courthouse” as the “most exhilarating art event this week … in the whole country.”28 During her speech at the event, Betty Ford stated: “Our country can’t go on without art and culture.”29 Louise Nevelson agreed: “The United States permitted a creation of mine to be given to the country. This is an historic thing. We can’t forget. We must continue to feed the art spirit with government related art programs.”30
Writing in his newsletter Prometheus about Bicentennial Dawn, Paul Makler addressed a phenomenon peculiar to some artists, Nevelson included, that it is difficult to fully understand or appreciate her work without actually being in its presence. “Nevelson has succeeded in making sculpture that creates an environment. Her work is at its best when one is surrounded by it. The environment she creates is full of familiar things and shapes but is still mysterious and evocative. Originally something in the artist evoked the art. Now the art functions to evoke new responses in the observer. Thus this art is a matter of interaction. Formal analysis will … describe the elements of rhythm, contrast and balance, but it will not address itself to the mysterious and surreal, … [which] gave the formal elements their reason for being.”31
Bicentennial fever, matched by the now voguish feminism, inspired Life magazine in 1976 to issue a “Special Report: Remarkable American Women 1776–1976”—not just the famous ones, but rather a mixed gallery of 166 known and unknown women who had either done notable things or lived extraordinary lives. Subjects ranged from Eleanor Roosevelt to Lizzie Borden, Belva Lockwood, a lawyer, and Jeannette Piccard, at that time an illegal (in the eyes of the church) Episcopalian priest. Nevelson was included in Life’s “Remarkable American Women” feature, which pleased her, but she was put on the same page as Grandma Moses, which didn’t. The magazine’s editors recognized in both women their remarkable persistence, and quoted Nevelson: “I had no choice. Either you keep working or cut your throat. So if you wanted not to cut your throat, you kept working.”32
Two big events dominated the fall coverage of Nevelson, adding to her sense of an enlarged status. One was Diana MacKown’s book, Dawns + Dusks, which was effectively Nevelson’s autobiography—done in the only way possible—through a compilation of many interviews she and other writers had had with Nevelson.33 Nevelson was definitely not a writer but was almost always glad to talk, and MacKown was canny and persistent in her pursuit of Nevelson’s life story via interviews.34 MacKown described the process: “Over a period of four or five years, I’d just get out the tape recorder and record. She might get up at 4 a.m. and have a revelation. She’d start talking and I’d hit the recorder button and later transcribe the tapes and gradually I had a book.”35 The book’s aim was to capture the flow of her life and the nature of her many observations on human nature and everything else.
One of the promotional blurbs was written by New York Times art critic John Canaday: “I want everyone to love this book, and I hardly see how anyone who reads it can fail to.”36 Indeed, the book was a big success, not just in New York and other art-world centers but also in Rockland, Maine, where Ivy W. Dodd, publisher of the local newspaper, the Courier-Gazette, wrote enthusiastically to the head of publicity and promotion at the publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons: “In this area where so many paint, pot or sculpt, there are many young beginning artists and I feel it’s a must for them to read. To know what it really takes to be an artist and to create something worthwhile.”37
Two years later Wendy Seller, then a twenty-nine-year-old sculptor, who has gone on to have a successful career as an artist and teacher at Rhode Island School of Design, wrote to Nevelson that she had read her book Dawns + Dusks twice: “I needed right now to know … that at 76 you were still on a perpetual high, and still growing, and still loving your work.38
It is a valuable book because it depicts the person with all her complex facets and was written (that is, spoken) by the artist herself. Sometimes the language is awkward, like that of a recent immigrant to America, but sometimes her eloquence shines through—she could be quite articulate, especially when she was passionately defending creativity. It becomes clear why Nevelson was often chosen to represent her fellow artists, as when she was president of Artists Equity.
The second big piece of news of 1976 was the public announcement and exhibition of Nevelson’s model for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd to be created in Saint Peter’s Church. This architectural gem would be part of the new Citicorp Center at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. It was not Nevelson’s first commission of sculpture for a religious building, but in this instance she was being asked to design an entire chapel that would be a comprehensive sculptural environment in an important new building—Citicorp Center.
Lillian Mildwoff, the younger of Nevelson’s two sisters, died on December 22, 1976, of pancreatic cancer, which was a devastating loss for Nevelson.39 The two women had always been close, and spoke very often on the phone. But they had not seen much of each other for a long while because of Nevelson’s long-lasting anger at her brother-in-law, Ben Mildwoff, as well as their very different lifestyles.40 Nevelson visited Lillian a few times once she knew about her illness: The last time was within a day or two of her death, when she was on the way to a book signing. There was a touching moment of intimacy when Louise offered to share her cigarillo with Lillian and the dying woman took a few puffs.41
As with both of her parents’ deaths, Nevelson was publically stoic, not attending Lillian’s funeral, but inwardly hit hard. The death of her favorite sister would have a profound sculptural resonance that became evident two years later.
For much of January 1977 Nevelson was involved in a protest action against the French government, which had released the Palestinian terrorist Abou Daoud, one of the leaders of Black September and mastermind of the murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. On January 13, a few days after Abou Daoud was released, Arne Glimcher and Louise Nevelson sent a joint cablegram to the president of France, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, urging artists, collectors, and humanitarians to withhold gifts to the new and soon-to-be opened Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou at Beaubourg. “As Americans and citizens of the civilized world we deplore this example of official accession to terrorism.”42 Nevelson refused to send her promised work to the opening exhibition, saying that she thought the French decision recalled “the Hitler era, because it gives to the world another symbol of one person who can get away with terrorist actions.”43 Glimcher asserted that he would “never again do business with the Beaubourg.”44
As part of their protest, Nevelson’s beautiful white wall, Homage to the Baroque, never got to France.45 The French art world was puzzled by the unexpected response to a pro-Palestinian policy, which had been in place in France for decades. One American dealer asked: “Doesn’t anyone in New York know that for years it has been French policy to favor the Arabs at Israel’s expense?”46 Glimcher answered: “The issue is not a boycott based upon the sudden perception of the policy of France toward Israel; that policy was known. It is, rather, a protest of terrorism as a viable political tool.”47
The Glimcher family was unequivocal in its support of Israel and all things Jewish. By joining with her dealer and friend in this protest, Nevelson took a strong public stand. Whether she would have done so without Arne Glimcher is impossible to know.48
Fighting for the forgotten dead of the Munich Olympics could have absorbed some of Nevelson’s sadness about the recent death of her youngest sister Lillian. She also buried herself in work, her usual antidote for pain. And there was much for her to do in early 1977. A major exhibition of her metal sculpture was coming up in a few months at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, and she had to prepare twenty-two large metal sculptures. She also had to get Sky Tree, her largest steel sculpture to date, ready for installation in San Francisco by mid-February. In addition she was preparing a show for Pace, Recent Wood Sculptures, for November as well as working to complete the sculpture for the chapel at Saint Peter’s Church, which would open around the same time as the Pace show.
In November 1976 Nevelson was asked to create a sculpture for the Embarcadero Center in downtown San Francisco. This was a $250 million, eight-and-a-half-acre redevelopment project funded by David Rockefeller and Prudential Insurance Company of America and designed and built by John Portman. The cost of the sculpture and Nevelson’s fee ($250,000) would be covered as part of Percent for Art. Nevelson received the commission while the building was under construction, and when Arne Glimcher heard the news, he suggested she make “one of her trees.”49 Nevelson loved the idea.
The result was a fifty-four-foot-tall steel sculpture called, appropriately, Sky Tree, which would be installed in the atrium space on the ground floor and extend upwards through each of the building’s five levels. Nevelson insisted that there should be vegetation—ivy or flowers—surrounding the sculpture at each level.50
“A Tree Grows in a Lobby” read the headline in the San Francisco Examiner: “A towering tree that differs in many respects from the forest variety—chiefly that it is made of steel, not wood—was planted yesterday in the interior of one of San Francisco’s highest and most impressive skyscrapers…. The tree, which will be rooted in an atrium, will be watered by a reflecting pool. Lights underneath it will beam through the water.”51
Before coming to San Francisco to dedicate the work, Nevelson had traveled by car from New York to Washington, D.C., for dinner at the White House. Ted Sylvester, a reporter from Rockland, writing for the Bangor Daily News, provided a charming anecdote about the event: “When President Carter wanted to invite her to the White House for dinner, he couldn’t get through to her because of her having an unlisted phone number. Finally … the President convinced the phone company to contact Louise and ask her if it would be all right to release her number to him. As we hear it, Ms. Nevelson got quite a kick out of the fact that the President of the United States would go to so much trouble.”52
“After dining with the Carters, she flew into San Francisco late Wednesday afternoon for a press preview, followed by visits to a local gallery and Gardner Tullis’s experimental printmaking workshop,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The 76-year-old sculptor radiated vitality as she chain-smoked slim cigars and, alluding to Shakespeare and the bible, music and dance, talked about her most recent creation and its place within the framework of her art and life.” “It’s enclosed like a box,” Nevelson explained to the reporter, referring to the buildings that surrounded the sculpture, towering against the skyline behind it.53
Sky Tree had developed from a wood maquette, which was then enlarged into a second model in Cor-Ten steel. It took its final form in February 1977 at Lippincott’s, where Nevelson supervised the movements of cranes and forklifts involved in its creation. The sculpture was then hauled across the country and set up in San Francisco. Because of its immense size (twenty-nine tons), the truck, was limited in the roads it could use, and took a zigzag route across America, covering over forty-one hundred miles.54
In an essay she wrote later that year, Nevelson described the process of going from a maquette to the large-scale public work: “I build up elements and tear them down and work until my eye is satisfied. When a maquette is enlarged … I never merely enlarge. I rethink and add and change edges and thickness of forms—as well as adding new pieces. My works are always in process until they are installed and, even then, I’ve made changes.”55
Centerview, the local San Francisco paper, described the installation of the huge work in March 1977 as involving “wall-to-wall spectators … an excited news media … dignitaries from the political, business and art world … big band music and brass fanfares … picnic lunches and wine.”56
Looking at Sky Tree from what appears to be its most photogenic profile, one can see how cleverly it matches the buildings surrounding and towering above it. Its curves complement the grids of the unadorned office buildings, but the straight lines and vertical thrust make it work perfectly well with its neighbors. Approaching the huge work from different levels and angles, it unfurls, at every upward step revealing new forms and shapes.
In his article in Art News, Thomas Albright noted: “As one moves upwards on the mall’s escalators, the viewer is literally thrust inside the environment created, as one circles the sculpture on any of the atrium’s three levels, an astonishing succession of vistas is presented. The gracefully organic forms of the Sky Tree rise in heroic counterpoint to the rigorous grid patterning of the skyscrapers, transforming and—in the best sense of this overused word—‘humanizing’ the view.”57 Nevelson made many trees during the 1970s beginning with Night Tree in 1971, the sculpture that led to her direct work in metal. Quite a few of those trees were grouped together creating environments—proverbial forests—Seventh Decade Garden. Some were so large, as with Sky Tree, that by their gigantic size they became the environment itself.
At fifty-four feet high, Sky Tree was the largest sculpture she had ever made—until she created a seventy-foot-high work for a plaza in New York City designed by and named for Louise Nevelson. David Rockefeller was a force behind both projects. Nothing was too big for the Rockefellers, and David Rockefeller had long been an admirer and promoter of Nevelson’s work.
In March, Louise Nevelson and Claes Oldenburg were both awarded medals for artistic achievement by the American Institute of Architects. No doubt this pleased her immensely, as she had often described herself as an architect and her work as fundamentally architectural. Everything that year seemed to reinforce her enlarged vision of herself and her work.
On April 1, Nevelson took part in what was billed as “a dialogue” on “The Artist and the Creative Process” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with two hundred Harvard and MIT students. The Boston Globe noted that “she resembles a breathtaking lunar moth being stalked by an avid throng of butterfly collectors.”58
When asked by the eager students how she got through long periods when no one was buying her work, she responded: “I never thought to question my art; it’s like breathing to me. Without it, I would have to cut my throat. It is what gives me my sanity, beauty and life.”59 When asked the meaning of art she readily responded: “Art is the transcending of materials and presence—it is the highest place we can go.” When asked for a comment on “feminist art,” she was quick to say: “Our organs are different, so inevitably our approaches are.”60 At the same time, she observed: “What makes anyone think a woman can’t do big things herself?”61
And, sure enough, she had just completed her largest works yet in steel and aluminum. Her recent travels had given Nevelson an impetus toward working large scale, but she had already been playing with scale when she worked with Plexiglas in 1967–68, particularly when she took the small-scale Plexiglas pieces and had them turned into large-scale steel sculptures. That process was too indirect and put the artist at too great a distance from the actual making of the sculpture, so it didn’t last long. But in 1972 she or Arne Glimcher or both had had the bright idea of making a large-scale sculpture out of a small-scale wood piece, which she had done almost twenty years earlier—Night Presence IV.
Three years later something similar happened with Voyage, a work that would turn out to be a breakthrough piece. The thirty-foot steel sculpture, had started out as a “partnership” piece, which meant Lippincott and Pace Gallery each committed themselves to half the cost of the work done on spec and would split the profit once the work was sold.62 Like Night Presence IV, Voyage was to be a blown-up version of a wood sculpture from the early 1950s, which consisted of four found-wood objects: an ax handle, a shovel handle, a piece of wood with a curved band-sawn edge, and a smaller irregular sphere penetrated vertically by an open cylinder.63
Sometime after the crew at Lippincott started work on it in February 1975, Nevelson and Glimcher came up to North Haven to see how it was developing. They placed the original small—relatively speaking—wood sculpture on the platform of the now-enlarged steel sculpture to see whether the change in scale worked. Nevelson decided that she liked the look of the very small piece sitting on the very large one and that she wanted a steel version of it to be part of the final work. Glimcher later called it a “rupture in scale.”64 In its Cor-Ten steel incarnation, Voyage was thirty feet high, roughly six times its original size as a wooden assemblage. And unlike Night Presence IV a miniature of itself was included in the large-scale version.
Voyage was the first documentable instance of Nevelson’s play with drastic differences in scale in a single piece, and it seemed to liberate her. Soon afterwards she was doing things with steel and aluminum she had never done before. By the 1976 Pace exhibition, her works in both black- and white-painted wood were showing drastic shifts in scale.
In the early 1970s Jeffrey Hoffeld had come to the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase as an assistant professor of art history and director/curator of the newly built Neuberger Museum in Purchase dedicated to contemporary art. As a college museum with ambition, it was billed as “The Art Museum of Westchester.”
The Neuberger was unique. It was designed by Philip Johnson, and the largest of its many galleries (eighty-nine feet by fifty-six feet by twenty-two feet) had a black ceiling and windowless walls. Nevelson had visited the museum in 1976 to see the exhibit of theater façades done by Cletus Johnson, a young sculptor who had once worked for her. Hoffeld’s policy in those early days was to show the work of unknown but promising artists, and Cletus Johnson fit that category.
As he showed Nevelson around, Hoffeld noticed that she was impressed with the building and its spacious interiors, in particular the largest gallery, which was almost five thousand square feet. He recalled, “She saw the challenge it presented to an artist.”65 Following a hunch, and though she was far from unknown, he asked her if she would be interested in having an exhibition at the museum. She accepted immediately. Hoffeld told her that she could have the large gallery to show “any group of works, as long as they had not been shown previously in a museum setting.”66 And a year later, on May 8, 1977, the first museum exhibition of Nevelson’s large-scale steel and aluminum sculptures took place.
Two very large outdoor works, Celebration II and Voyage, greeted visitors. Celebration II (twenty-eight feet high and fifteen thousand pounds) stood at the entrance to the campus, and Voyage (thirty feet high and weighing fifty-six hundred pounds) was on the plaza near the entrance to the museum. Inside the building, two white-painted aluminum works—Drum and Double Image—ushered viewers into the large gallery with its grouping of monumental black-painted works. The sculpture filled four galleries and included seven Cor-Ten steel sculptures (each about eleven feet by twelve feet, with an average weight of four thousand pounds) and fourteen smaller aluminum sculptures (about four hundred pounds each).67
Don Lippincott and Nevelson’s usual crew had put in almost seven hundred hours over ten weeks building wood platforms to accommodate the scale and weight of the sculptures and setting everything up in the large gallery. The artist and her dealer had directed the installation as well as the dramatic lighting to show these new works to best effect: “Overall darkness with spot lighting brings out the spatial concepts that dominate Nevelson’s sculpture and their relationship to surrounding space,” wrote a reviewer in Progessive Architecture.68 Hoffeld recalls that the works in the large gallery looked “majestic, powerful and elegant—as if the room were made for them.”69
The effect of the whole exhibit inspired critics to heights of hyperbole. David Shirey wrote in The New York Times: “Like the magus she is, she has turned an enormous windowless hall … into something that is an entity unto itself, a singular experience, a Nevelson universe with its own beat, spirit, its own magic.”70 And, he observed, “Everything is huge …. One of the outstanding characteristics of this artist’s sculptures is that they are monumental of scale,” he wrote. “No matter what their size … they have such configurations, such internal thrust, such esthetic dynamism that they extend beyond their own dimensions and establish a harmonious rapport with the scale of the environment.”
The Neuberger Museum at Purchase show gave Nevelson the opportunity to take her sculpture in steel and aluminum to a new level. Retrospectively there seems to be no question that the opportunity to exhibit so many large pieces in the huge gallery space coincided with Nevelson’s perception of herself as an architect of work that could compete with all outdoors. Nevelson had been making large walls of wood throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Going from the early work in metal—the slapdash Seventh Decade Garden in 1971 through the laborious and not widely accepted Tropical Trees—Nevelson worked her way up to large, monumental pieces and the comfort of feeling that she could bring what she saw in her mind’s eye into existence.
Lonny Kalfus for The New York Times. Installation view of Louise Nevelson exhibition at Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, 1977. © Lonny Kalfus
By the time the Neuberger Museum exhibit opened, she had done more than a dozen large-scale metal sculptures for outdoor spaces.
In an interview with Arne Glimcher, Nevelson described the relationship between her work with wood and metal: “In the wood, if there is a certain form I want, I will occasionally have to cut it…. When I’m working in metal, it is the same thing…. If I want a half circle, a quarter circle, or a rectangular form rolled into a curve, or whatever I want, [the men] have the technology and the machinery that can give it to me immediately.”71 She could not so readily make wood fragments curl into curved forms.
In his review of the Neuberger show, Hilton Kramer noted that Nevelson had easily made the transition from her earlier and more private work to “an essentially public art,” which was entirely in keeping with the trend to large-scale sculpture appearing in the urban plazas, Government office buildings, shopping centers and huge sculpture gardens that were popping up all over the country.72 With Lippincott’s help, Nevelson had mastered the new mode. It was a perfect fit for a person who was not satisfied with the world as it was but wanted to create a different, better, and more harmonious world with her work.
No matter how grand her goals for her work, Nevelson was a warm, witty, down-to-earth, and extraordinarily energetic person with whom the craftsmen at Lippincott’s shop worked with pleasure and deep respect.
The two interviews that follow, from Robert Giza and Edward Giza, came from a New York Times article about working at Lippincott in 1977:
Robert Giza, 35 years old, has worked so closely with [Louise Nevelson as to be] her alter ego. Mr. Giza is a welder…. Before coming to work at Lippincott in 1967, he was a construction foreman and in his spare time repaired trucks. For the last three years he has worked six days a week, 50 weeks a year on sculpture, a good part of the time on Nevelson’s [work].
“Louise isn’t like anyone else,” said Mr. Giza, who has fabricated sculptures by Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Sugarman and other well-known contemporary artists. “She’s the only one who composes on the site. Others work from models and drawings. She makes all her decisions in her head, then experiments with them in the shop.”
But it is Nevelson’s zest for life that interests Mr. Giza almost as much as her art…. “I could listen to her for hours.”
“She talks about everything—life, marriage, her shows, where she’s been. I find it hard to believe she’s 77. She has the energy of a woman half her age. There were plenty of nights when I’d go home and go right to bed. Yet she was back at 6:30 the next morning, ready to work.”
Mr. Giza’s older brother, Edward, 37, is the shop manager at Lippincott…. [He] admires Louise because, “she’s in command,” he said. “She doesn’t like to be interrupted, and when she stops for coffee, she takes her whole crew with her. That’s her crew—no one else’s!”
He also likes the way she dresses. “She always wears that Indian necklace and a bandana on her head,” he said. “She’s got quite a flair for clothes.”
But it’s the way steel undergoes a metamorphosis when she’s around that most fascinates him. Cor-Ten turning to butter? “Actually it’s more like cardboard that’s cut, folded, bent and attached,” he said. “But’s it’s her approach that’s so different. She creates as she goes along…. And we help her.” …
“You grow attached to her things,” Mr. Giza said, shifting his gaze to take in the full length of the 30-foot piece. “The one I like best is the other big one, [Celebration II], the 28 footer. It’s got weight, design, everything. It also has something new in it that she’s not used in her other pieces. It’s a flat spring of steel. She couldn’t do that with wood.”
The Giza brothers take pride in “finding solutions to Louise’s problems” and at times have even helped her make artistic decisions…. “We’re craftsmen. We do the physical work, but the inspiration comes from somewhere else.”73
In another interview with the Giza brothers, published in The Boston Globe, they say that they “enjoy their work because of the variety it offers and note that it has taught them to appreciate the art they once thought of as ‘weird.’ Now they argue with anyone who criticizes it. ‘You learn quite a bit about art as time goes by,’ said Edward. ‘When you work with a piece, you feel like you’re a part of it. Your feeling … is like the artist’s…. We’re like [the artist’s] hands, or like seeing-eye dogs.’ … As Giza observed, it is impossible to work with Nevelson without coming away deeply impressed by her energy and spontaneity.”74
The huge works she had been making in steel, what she saw as their mystical, mysterious quality, were proof to the artist that she had arrived at a point in which she could create fourth-dimensional work and that others would recognize her accomplishment. As Nevelson understood her new position: “Your concept of what you put into a space will create another space.”75 Steel “gave me another dimension, … the possibility of maybe fulfilling the place and space and environment that I have probably consciously, unconsciously, been seeking all my life.”76 Because she had made a work that went so far beyond the everyday human-size scale in which we all live, the gigantic size of Nevelson’s very large-scale steel sculptures seemed to propel them into another dimension for her.
Commissions kept coming, placing her large-scale steel sculpture all over the country. At least nine works from the Neuberger exhibition later became full-scale public-art commissions and were placed in such cities as Cincinnati, Ohio; Kansas City, Kansas; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Miami, Florida; and Washington, D.C. Celebration II, which had stood at the entrance to the Purchase College campus, was subsequently bought by PepsiCo and installed in the corporation’s sculpture garden across the street from the college.
Some of the impetus for Nevelson’s large works at this time was certainly the enthusiasm for large-scale public sculpture. Many sculpture parks were established in the 1960s, ’70s, and continued to be built through the ’80s, and Nevelson’s work was almost invariably included. But the principal reason she was eager to go big was her new understanding of herself that resulted from so many factors—the big trip at the beginning of 1975 and the many honors that followed soon afterwards, especially since they were often invitations to produce enormous works of art for the larger public.
