Photographer unknown. Louise Nevelson with Pastor Ralph Peterson, 1977. Source unknown.
“I was never accepted [in Rockland]. I was always on the outside. We never went to Sunday school like the rest. The other girls would sleep with the sailors, then go to confession. But I would never do anything like that, not until I was married.”
—Louise Nevelson to Emmett Meara, “Sculptor Louise Nevelson resents ostracism in Rockland as youth,” Bangor Daily News, June 5, 1978, 5
The Erol Beker Chapel of the Good Shepherd at Saint Peter’s Church in the heart of New York City is one of the few modern religious buildings in the world designed or decorated by an artist. The Matisse chapel at St. Paul de Vence on the French Riviera and the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas, are two other well-known examples. Many factors came together to make Louise Nevelson, a nonreligious Jewish woman, its creator.
In 1970 when New York City hovered on the brink of bankruptcy and some corporations were moving elsewhere, Citicorp’s CEO, Walter Wriston, initiated a project to build the company’s new corporate headquarters in the heart of midtown. When one of Wriston’s colleagues suggested that it was the wrong time to be spending money in Manhattan, Wriston blew up: “This is First National City Bank. We made a commitment to the city, and we’re sticking with it.”1 Mayor John Lindsay was delighted by the bank’s plan and made it clear that he would do everything to encourage the project.
Citibank bought the entire existing block in midtown Manhattan between Fifty-Third and Fifty-Fourth Streets and Lexington and Park Avenues in order to make room for what would eventually become Citicorp Center. The new building, the bank decided, would be for “mixed use” and replicate the vitality of the diverse group of smaller buildings (one of which was a strip club) that would be torn down.
At one edge of the proposed construction site, on the prime corner of Fifty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue, stood the seventy-year-old Neo-Gothic Lutheran Church of Saint Peter, whose innovative young pastor was Rev. Ralph Peterson. Saint Peter’s staid congregation had selected Peterson because he was different from the usual Lutheran ministers and some members of the church’s search committee recognized it was time for a change. They were also desperate.2 The size of the congregation had fallen off, and only fifty to seventy-five people came to Sunday services.3 Peterson’s ebullience, vitality, and open-mindedness to new ideas fired up many in the congregation. He had been chair of the Jazz Ministry of the National Council of Churches, and the search committee knew that the arts were central to his understanding of humanity.
Soon after he became pastor in 1966, Peterson instituted some changes that established the church as a place to “celebrate joy and life.” He initiated an open-house program, a noontime theater where Jesus Christ Superstar and Elephant Man were first staged and where jazz vespers and readings by poets and writers took place at night. Bringing artists into the public experience was part of his mission in New York City. “I think religion and the arts are intimately related,” he explained. “Creation is an ongoing miracle.”4
The old church stood in the way of Citicorp’s new project. When the bank approached Peterson and offered to pay an enormous amount of money to get rid of the old building—which was in structural disrepair and costly to maintain—he saw it as “a fantastic opportunity.” “Take it all down,” he urged his congregation, “and use the property as a level to build the kind of urban church the times call for.”5 With a business savvy not usually expected of a minister, Peterson negotiated with the bank, allowing the old structure to be razed and an entirely new one built in its place. The bank agreed to set aside nine million dollars to pay for the construction, and the deal was done. And part of the deal was that the church would be a separate free-standing structure.
At that moment Peterson began to think about what he really wanted for the new church. He was familiar with Matisse’s chapel at Vence, and he knew that he wanted to create a new kind of church that would serve as a “living room” for New York City—a place that would be an oasis for the spirit, where people could come to celebrate whatever spirituality suited them and become aware of the vitality—what Nevelson called “the livingness”—of life. His vision included an interfaith chapel designed by a major artist. While negotiating with the bank, Ralph Peterson made an executive decision that would lead eventually to Nevelson’s chapel.
He knew that his ideas were grandiose, but Peterson had wisely selected for the church’s Art and Architecture Review Committee a panel of experts who shared his vision. Nevertheless, his vision needed external support if it were going to be realized.
As noted before, in the late 1960s the Percent for Art program had been established and designated architectural projects were obliged by state or municipal law to include art. Citicorp was participating by budgeting one percent of the construction cost for artworks in the new building. The architects assigned to the large project realized that the only place in the new complex that could incorporate art into the design would be the church. Diane Harris Brown at Pace Gallery contacted Easley Hamner, the thirty-five-year-old architect at Hugh Stubbins Associates in Boston, who was responsible for designing the Saint Peter’s portion of the new Citicorp complex and suggested that one of Pace’s artists be considered for providing the chapel’s “decoration.” Nevelson, who had long been one of Hamner’s favorite artists, quickly became Hamner’s first choice and he recommended her to Peterson.6
Pastor Peterson had seen parts of Dawn’s Wedding Feast at the Whitney Museum’s retrospective in 1967 and again in 1973 at the Walker Art Center’s exhibition in Minneapolis.7 Nevelson’s installations of white-painted sculpture matched his positive memory of a space of tranquility at St. David’s House of Prayer at Korsvägen in Sweden, a building made of white wood roughly hammered together, which was both a meditation hall and a chapel. Peterson chose Nevelson as the right artist to design the chapel.8
The Saint Peter’s Art and Architecture Review Committee agreed with Peterson and Hamner that Nevelson should design the chapel’s interior, and once that decision was made the enthusiasm for the project picked up momentum. “Everyone got excited,” said Barbara Murphy, a very influential member of the committee. “It just seemed so right and brilliant.”9
The next step was a meeting—of the pastor, the architect, Barbara Murphy and the artist—at Nevelson’s home on East Spring Street. Arriving on a Saturday morning at ten they rang the doorbell and waited and waited. Eventually Diana MacKown looked out the window, saw the group and, suddenly remembering the appointment, rushed down to let them in while Nevelson got dressed. Meeting the group in the second-floor living room, Nevelson felt instantaneous rapport with Peterson. “It was love at first sight,” he said.”10 “It was mutual,” she said.11 She expressed keen interest in the project, and added, “I hope you brought lots of money.”12 Ralph Peterson blanched. But he too was eager to go forward with the deal. What was supposed to be an hour’s meeting lasted four hours. Toward the end of that meeting Nevelson threw her arms around Peterson saying, “You old fucker, you’re an artist like the rest of us.”13
Soon afterwards Peterson, Easley Hamner, and Arne Glimcher drove to Great Neck, New York, to see the large white bema wall Nevelson had made for Temple Beth El. They were impressed, and in the men’s room at Temple Beth El they agreed on the price Nevelson would be paid to design the chapel. Peterson looked to his congregation for a donor. By 1975, Erol Beker, a Turkish-born industrialist, had stepped forward with a generous gift that entirely funded the cost of the chapel.
In late 1974, Pastor Peterson formally commissioned Nevelson to design the five-sided interfaith Chapel of the Good Shepherd, twenty-nine feet by twenty feet and eleven and a half feet high, with seating for twenty-eight people. She started working on the project immediately, and by January 1975, using a wooden model twenty-four inches long and sixteen inches wide with a removable ceiling, she had completed two maquettes of the chapel. One was midnight blue and, as deemed by most who saw it, beautiful and mysterious. While Pastor Peterson thought that the dark version would be good for meditation, he thought Nevelson’s white model was closer to his idea of “a place in which New Yorkers will be able to pray and know that they are alive, a powerful space and a great witness to the Spirit.”14
Peterson and Nevelson were perfectly in agreement that the chapel should serve as “a ‘tap root.’ A ‘jewel,’ a ‘symbol’ … tranquil, a place for peace, reflecting permanence…. Its space has to accommodate the kind of prayer privacy we feel alone, sitting apart from others. Drop-in strays should not be herded together.”15 More important than any details, dimensions, or issues of space and money, the mission statement focused on the “dream.” “We must not lose our focus ‘outward’ to the City and the commitment we represent to remain in this City and somehow to make it work better—to become a caring heart in the middle of Manhattan.”16
For the two years Nevelson and Peterson worked together on the project and there were essentially no disagreements. Peterson assured Nevelson that “every element of the chapel would be her uncompromised choice. Never once will I tell you what anything should look like.”17 Because she wanted to create a “place of purity,” she designed all the sculptural elements in white-painted wood on white walls. She designed the altar, the sanctuary lamp, three hanging columns, and the pastor’s vestments as well as the placement of the pews. “It was New York City at its best,” said Barbara Murphy. “Duke Ellington played at Saint Peter’s. And now we had Louise Nevelson, the most famous American art star of the time”18
Two projects were going on simultaneously: the Citicorp building and the chapel in the church. Easley Hamner understood Peterson’s progressive vision and worked with Hugh Stubbins, the architect for the bank’s structure, to develop a separate identity for the church, which would be sharing many common elements with the Citibank building, though no structural features. Working with the church’s design panel and using “Life at the Intersection”—the planning document written in 1971, very early in the process, by Peterson and his team at the church—as template, Hamner looked in on meetings now and then. But when the panel members were close to presenting their plan to the bank, Hamner objected, saying that the space was too much like a church designed for a suburban community or a small city like Stamford, Connecticut. As an alternative, Stubbins proposed a box structure. But both Peterson and Barbara Murphy objected.19
The situation was becoming tense and awkward, but the bank gave the architects another month to come up with a new model. As was characteristic of Hugh Stubbins, he quickly and spontaneously arrived at a new design, which he scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin or an envelope (depending on who’s telling the story) while traveling. His new idea, a model of originality, was a cube with a slotted top.20 It was not a particularly religious concept, but it worked. Stubbins’s split wedge seemed to echo some of the novel qualities of the Rock Church, an architectural landmark in Helsinki that Peterson admired. Fortunately for Peterson and the future of the church, Citicorp’s CEO, Walter Wriston, supported Stubbins’s design.
While the new church was being built, Peterson had approached the rabbi at Central Synagogue—the oldest synagogue in America, which was a block from the new church on Fifty-Fifth Street and Lexington Avenue—about having Sunday services at the temple while Saint Peter’s was under construction. The rabbi, Sheldon Zimmerman, welcomed Peterson’s request, as such services would not interfere with Jewish services on Saturday. They even held some joint services with both the Star of David and the cross placed together on the bema wall.21
That the unveiling of Nevelson’s model for the chapel would also take place in the synagogue was classic Peterson. It was also pure Nevelson. “I want to break the boundaries of regimented religion,” she explained, “to provide an environment that is evocative of another place. A place of the mind. A place of the senses. I want people to have harmony on their lunch hours.”22
For Nevelson, the chapel was simply “a holy place,” as she told one reporter. To her, there was “no distinction between a church and a synagogue. If you go deep enough into any religion you arrive at the same point of harmony.”23 She also saw it as “a place to go in despair—find a quiet, warm beautiful place … where people can solve what bothers them.”24
At one point Ralph Peterson had been asked about his selection of Louise Nevelson as the chapel’s designer. He responded: “God is not a Lutheran. I don’t think the background of the artist is as important as the inspiration. Nevelson was chosen because she is the greatest living American sculptor.”25
Nevelson noted: “It speaks for the truly ecumenical and human spirit of this venture that the pastor and the congregation chose me, a Jewish woman artist, to do these designs…. In that New York project, those working on it together have managed to break down all the secular, religious and racial barriers by creating a community of goodwill. I hope other American cities will follow this example.”26 Like Peterson, Nevelson believed in breaking boundaries between religions, institutions, and anything that impeded a vital connectedness between people.
Nevelson’s compositions for the chapel stand alone as individual sculptural elements as well as being part of a complete environment. Comparing the actual Frieze of the Apostles with the model she made earlier, it is notable that Nevelson imposes a more complex order on top of an already ordered composition—similar to the way she had organized Sky Covenant in Boston. She transforms the twelve quiet, boxed rectangles on the right with sweeping horizontals that both unify and enliven them. The thin strips weaving back and forth on the semicircular discs below the rectangle are another device that energizes the whole. Rarely simple in her choices, the artist adds some vertical elements to the right-hand rectangular portion of the sculpture, which provide continuity with the narrow, upward-pointing vertical element in the composition’s center. She wisely removes three downward-pointing wood finials that had been in the model and which anchored and interrupted the overall flow from right to left and back again.
The rectangular structure over the entrance to the chapel is entitled Grapes and Wheat Lintel. It is simpler than the other sculptures in the chapel, almost representational, yet its subtleties become evident with close study. The curving arch begins on the bottom left panel and continues two panels later on the lower right. The circular “grapes” of the fourth panel are echoed in the first panel, and the thrusting vertical sheaves show a syncopated rhythm from one end of the lintel to the other.
On the west wall of the small chapel is the very large Sky Vestment, which is difficult to see in its entirety because the bottom section is blocked by the pews. More than any other part of the chapel, Sky Vestment enforces the overall environmental aspect of Nevelson’s design for the room. The huge triangular wall sculpture is particularly dynamic, with its diagonal elements aimed toward the top of the work. What look like giant clothespins crown the groupings of two or four slender shapes of pointed wood orienting the eye upwards. Depending on the viewer’s state of mind, someone seated next to this large frieze might feel overwhelmed and small, or captivated and drawn upward.
Hilton Kramer, one of Nevelson’s most steadfast admirers, was not enchanted with her work for the chapel. Writing that, “The chapel looks less like a homage to the glory of God than a homage to the glories of Cubism,” he considered it an “odd conjunction of art and religion.”27
A few days after Kramer’s review, Easley Hamner wrote Kramer a private letter observing how different were their perceptions of Saint Peter’s. “It is difficult for me to believe that most observers, whether knowledgeable about ‘art’ or not, can fail to respond positively to a visit to the chapel. [It] was intended to provide a place in which even the casual observer would be caused to contemplate that which no one can know. I feel that Mrs. Nevelson has indeed captured that sense of mystery which is part of the core of worship.”28
In the end Nevelson herself was very pleased with the chapel she had decorated, which was to become one of her few environmental works to find a permanent home. “Being in a space that permits you to contemplate is like being in love. I meant to provide an environment that is evocative of another place, a place of the mind, a place of the senses.”29 To no one’s surprise, the chapel has become one of the most popular sites for weddings in the city, particularly international weddings.30
The publicly celebrated dedication of her new white chapel took place two weeks after a surprise exhibition, at Pace Gallery, of Mrs. N’s Palace, her largest-ever environmental wood sculpture—her own sacred and contemplative space. Many critics described these almost simultaneous “openings” as a battle between two gigantic works of art. In retrospect, the situation could be understood also as a competition between the artist’s two ardent supporters, Ralph Peterson and Arne Glimcher. They both loved Nevelson and her work and, judging from the extensive publicity each successfully generated, for the chapel and Mrs. N’s Palace respectively, it seems they both wanted to be identified as her number-one supporter.
Peterson had worked closely with Nevelson on the overall concept of the chapel, as well as on it details, for several years. Glimcher had worked side by side with her on Mrs. N’s Palace. When it was time for the work to be included in her forthcoming Pace exhibition, Nevelson—Recent Wood Sculpture, Glimcher took the remarkable step of announcing, in a quarter-page ad in the Sunday New York Times on November 20, 1977, that: “The Pace Gallery will be closed November 21 thru 24 for the installation of MRS N’S PALACE opening November 26.” The Pace exhibition ran to January 7, 1978.
The Pace catalogue, beautiful as usual, depicted large and small black-painted wood sculptures (Rain Garden Zags and Moon Garden Scapes) and six photographs of the recently installed chapel, as yet without its pews. Also on view were photographs of “Selected Monumental Commissions,” including Sky Covenant at the Temple Israel in Boston; Windows to the West in Scottsdale, Arizona; Night Presence in New York City; Transparent Horizon at MIT; Bicentennial Dawn in Philadelphia; Sky Tree in San Francisco; and the maquette for the Louise Nevelson Sculpture Garden at Legion Memorial Square in New York City. There were no photographs of Mrs. N’s Palace, because it had not been finished by the time the catalog was printed, but it contextualized the work among her other monumental projects and environments.
Working from a cardboard model in a large rental space, a contractor built the basic structure of the “palace.” In the following two weeks, with the help of two carpenters and Arne Glimcher, Nevelson constructed Mrs. N’s Palace. Her largest single piece of wood sculpture, it measures twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep by twelve feet high. Nevelson covered both the interior and exterior walls with black-painted-wood relief elements that she had been accumulating in her studio over many years.
The entire structure rested on a base of black mirror glass and was dimly lit with hidden fixtures.31 Sculptural reliefs hung from the ceiling, protruded from the walls, and were grouped on the floor in such a way that they formed narrow corridors. Two schematically abstracted wood figures stood just inside the entrance of the room. According to Nevelson, they were a king and queen, distinguishable by their prominent sexual characteristics.
Less than a year earlier, Nevelson’s beloved youngest sister, Lillian Mildwoff, had died after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. Repeating a past pattern of behavior, Nevelson did not attend her sister’s funeral. Instead, she built a monument that would, as one of its purposes, commemorate a deeply felt loss. Unlike the earlier sculptural environment, Moon Garden + One, where the king stands alone in the sepulchral surround, in Mrs. N’s Palace the king and queen are united for a last voyage into the darkness. The royal couple had been made by the artist many years earlier and saved until a suitable resting place could be found. Now they would be joined forever in a space worthy of their memory—a royal marriage preserved through death. As the artist said in an interview, “I couldn’t have finished the king and queen until I found the right place for them, and [placing them] goes into creation, into space, into time, and into shadow …. That is the fourth dimension.”32
Mrs. N’s Palace, 1964–77. Painted wood, mirror, 140 × 239 × 180 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 1985. Photograph © Tom Crane, 1977; courtesy of Pace Gallery
As the piece neared completion she titled it Mrs. N’s Palace. “Mrs. N” was Nevelson herself, as she was affectionately known by her neighbors in the downtown Italian community where she had lived for twenty years. The “Palace” was a fitting abode for an artist who had thought of herself for years as a royal person. Turning the scraps of wood she had accumulated into a setting for royal figures was the ultimate “projection of what might have been” a house in which she “would have chosen to live,” as she later put it, one that evoked her oldest dreams and unconscious wishes.33
Stepping onto the black mirror glass, a viewer enters the remarkable enclosure and becomes part of Nevelson’s world. To some, the space inside the room feels astonishingly large, as if one had truly walked into another dimension. To others it feels claustrophobic, as though they have just been seduced into a narrow-sided sepulcher. Most likely both of these sensations were part of the artist’s life experience and conflicting aspects of her emotional life. For Nevelson, the imaginary world of her art represented a cosmic consciousness, an inner awareness that allowed her to both transcend and represent the everyday imperfections of the human condition through her art.
Time magazine’s art critic Robert Hughes began his review of Mrs. N’s Palace by describing Nevelson’s physical appearance: “Nobody is more recognizable: the fine, blade-nosed Aztec face with its monstrous false eyelashes, like clumps of mink, is as manifestly the property of an artist as Picasso’s monkey mask…. The traditional problem of dandyism is that it usually leaves so little room for work: it is the work. Not with Nevelson. She will be 78 next year, and there is no more prolific or respected sculptor in America.”34 He called Mrs. N’s Palace a “masterpiece.”
“When you step inside the ‘house,’ ” he wrote, “some parts of it are invisible: darkness laid into darkness. As the eyes adjust, so the forms gradually appear, and this gradual unfolding of complexity is very moving…. There is no way of seeing Mrs. N’s Palace as a whole. It discloses itself in time, and each passage of shapes is apt to erase and replace one’s memory of its predecessor.” Calling it both sculpture and shelter, Hughes concluded: “Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements of Nevelson’s poetic but wholly sculptural sensibility.”
Most of the press reviews about Nevelson’s white chapel and the new black palace in December 1977 and January 1978 focused on a relative assessment of the two works. It was an easy comparison—one room-size set of white-painted sculptures on the walls of the chapel was set off against a room of black-painted sculpture. Almost all the reviewers divided their discussion unevenly—the chapel usually got more attention than the palace. But the palace was nevertheless accorded great praise. In other words, critics saw them as a complementary pair, and they were marketed that way—the nearly simultaneous openings were no coincidence. Lila Harnett, the reviewer for Cue magazine, wrote: “Since the Pace show coincides with completion of Saint Peter’s Chapel, the two environments invite comparison. White and black, open and sunny as opposed to closed and mysterious. Two sides of the artist? Nevelson leaves it up to the viewer.” Harnett discusses the Palace only briefly after a lengthy discourse on the chapel.
Nevelson has constructed another very personal environment titled “Mrs. N’s Palace” that she hopes to keep intact. She says this is the “palace” she never had. It comes “as close as any work to what I’ve wanted all these years.” …
It is a Nevelson universe created with her distinctive wood vocabulary, and while she dislikes talking about individual works, she is quick to say that this black environment, this “palace,” is dear to her. It seems to be a home in which her soul could live, with nooks and crannies to accommodate the secrets of her multifaceted personality. Compared with the more open, luminous white Saint Peter’s chapel, this work could harbor her innermost thoughts, protect her past.35
Had Harnett intuitively discerned the artist’s painful early life, filled with memories and fantasies of loss and fear in Ukraine? Though Nevelson would not ever discuss that part of her childhood, putting a royal king and queen—traditionally parental figures in Nevelson’s iconography—at the entrance of this dark palace suggests that the artist has tried to reconcile her past and her present. She has given the unfulfilled individuals she knew her parents to have been an honorary position at the entrance to a transformed home. She now had the tools needed to transform that home into a royal palace.
After paying his customary tribute to Nevelson’s “unremitting” productivity, Hilton Kramer, described the palace as—“a work of stunning beauty”—“a sculpture with an interior and an exterior conceived on an architectural scale.”36 He noted that usually after Nevelson’s exhibitions closed and the works were dispersed, “All that remained of the whole was a vivid memory. Mrs N’s Palace is thus the first such environmental construction designed to remain intact.”
Since 1943 Nevelson had been creating “environments.” At the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in 1958, she had closed off the windows and severely limited the lighting for Moon Garden + One. Every exhibition since then—especially when she or Arne Glimcher had control over the installation—was conceived of and created to be a unique, one-off environment. The 1967 Whitney retrospective had an irreplaceable corridor—Tropical Rain Forest. Two years later, the installation and the lighting of the show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston were both dramatic and virtually unreproducible. Even in the few existing installation photos of the Purchase exhibition, we can see the outsize steel and aluminum sculptures in a cohesive setting.
Fortunately, the two environments created by Nevelson in 1977 have outlasted the moment: Mrs. N’s Palace is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum and the Chapel of the Good Shepherd at Saint Peter’s Church on Fifty-Fourth and Lexington Avenue can be seen whenever the church is open.
For Nevelson, family was family, though longstanding friendships sometimes trumped blood ties. She was always in touch with her brother Nate and sister Anita in Rockland. She also maintained a regular, if not always close, relationship with her son Mike, whose three daughters were now spread out around the country. In February 1978, when she was in Palm Beach for exhibitions at the Hokin Gallery, she was able to see her oldest granddaughter Neith, who was also an artist, as well as her great-granddaughter Issa, who lived in nearby Coconut Grove. Of all her three granddaughters Nevelson had spent most time with Neith, who had lived with her for about a year in the mid-1960s before moving to Florida. As her daughter-in-law, Susan Nevelson, recalled: “Louise was never motherly but was always involved behind the scenes.”37
Lee Brian. Louise Nevelson and family at Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; left to right: Diana MacKown, Nevelson, Neith, Neith’s husband, great-granddaughter Issa, 1978. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
While Nevelson usually held her biological family at a distance, her friendships with fellow artists were much closer, sometimes appearing instantly and briefly as with Georgia O’Keeffe on a single visit, other times longstanding over decades, as with June Wayne or Marjorie Eaton. Her artist friends were her true family. She became very close to Merce Cunningham and John Cage, as well as Edward Albee and Jasper Johns. Merce Cunningham was particularly special to her because of her longtime interest in dance, and she gave several benefits to support his company.
In late May, Nevelson was interviewed for a downtown paper, the Villager: “Nevelson in Little Italy: The Artist as Godmother of a Community.”38 She talked about art, her neighborhood, her life, and her affection for New York City. Her neighbors loved her for many reasons, not the least being her willingness to fight for the neighborhood and to work with her own hands to improve it.
“I met her when she was literally sweeping the block,” said William Katz, a designer, who recalled her words from that time: “My dear, if you want to have a kingdom, you have to build it.” Katz went right home and swept the street and sidewalk in front of his house.39 Another neighbor, Joseph Guidetti, director of the Guidetti Funeral Home next door to Nevelson, observed that, “She has a very dynamic, energetic aura that she throws off…. Her energy is endless; like a communicable disease, you catch it…. She’s a leader.” Later in the article he noted: “She’s respected by everyone—from the ten-year-olds to the eighty-year-old grandmothers. Everybody knows Mrs. N.”40
Gennaro Lombardi, owner of Nevelson’s favorite local restaurant, observed: “We needed leadership in this community, and we found it with Mrs. N. She’s planted trees on the block at her own expense and hoses it down regularly.” The reporter could tell how delighted the downtown community was when she had named the largest and most important work in her recent exhibition at Pace, Mrs. N’s Palace.
The article ends with the tale of a dream that was never fulfilled. Nevelson had a plan to give her two adjoining houses on Spring Street to the city as her legacy. She consulted with John M. Johansen, award-winning architect and one of the Harvard Five, about turning her houses into a museum. During the 1980s, Johansen came up with a plan for the conversion of the buildings, but the project foundered because it lacked sufficient funding.41
“I lived in New York nearly sixty years, and it’s been one love affair from the day I first put my foot in New York. New York is a city of collage…. It has all kinds of people, all kinds of races, all kinds of religion in it, and the whole thing is magnificent…. I feel that present, past and future, this city contains the greatest creative minds of our time. I love it and this is only the beginning of what I hope that I can communicate to this great land.”42
In 1978, Legion Memorial Square, in the heart of the financial district, was turned into a small park, Louise Nevelson Plaza. Arne Glimcher recalls that, “David Rockefeller, whose office overlooked the newly empty triangle of land bordered by Maiden Lane, Liberty Street and William Street, called me one day, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea for Nevelson to do a park there.’ ”43 The city persuaded several downtown corporations to renovate the park as a community project.
On June 20, 1978, the City Council of New York changed the name of the triangular-shaped island in the financial district to Louise Nevelson Plaza—the first plaza in New York City named for an artist, not to mention for a woman artist. The new designation became official on September 14, 1978, when Mayor Ed Koch dedicated the park with much fanfare and the by-now-standard release of balloons. Every detail of the park was designed by Nevelson—the placement of the sculpture, the paving stones, the benches, and the plantings.44
Nevelson was aware that, as with many of the buildings in downtown Manhattan, the skyscrapers surrounding the site were built so compactly that they resembled high mountains towering over a tiny valley: “In designing the work I had to consider the scale of the buildings nearby as well as the thousands of people who would use the plaza.”45 She had conceived of the space as a “people’s park … which would serve the neighborhood as an oasis from the city’s hurly-burly.”46
Her plan included seven black-painted metal structures—one seventy-foot-tall work in Cor-Ten and six smaller (twenty-five-foot-high) ones in aluminum. While she paid attention to how the various sculptures would be viewed at ground level, she gave almost equal consideration to the visual perspective of the thousands of Wall Street employees who would gaze down at it from various floors of the surrounding skyscrapers.47 Certainly she wasn’t forgetting how it would look from David Rockefeller’s office, sixty floors above the plaza.
The six small sculptures, which were placed on steel tubes, were designed to look as though they were flying like flags in the wind. Though some of these constructions have a strong aesthetic appeal, taken together they are not quite convincing as flags or even as works to be seen at eye level. This is not the case with the tallest structure in the plaza, which stands at the wide end of the triangle. It is the largest sculpture Nevelson ever made and—to my mind and eye—one of her most successful works in steel.
It reads remarkably well from every angle, always with a dynamism that builds from the bottom up. The tall, curving, square support setting off from the base plays against the gently leaning rectangular block at its side. The thin concave plates atop the tall, square support move the eye upward and into the composition of sharps and flats, which culminates in the piled plates at the top of the taller of the two principal square columns. A tour de force unfolds before our eyes as we walk around the piece to discover a precariously attached—could it be anything but precarious given its size?—pair of steel shapes seemingly suspended in midair. Finally, two thin tubes fly upwards, crossing themselves at mid-level and reaching toward the top of the towering buildings all around them, arriving as high as the fifth floor.
This large piece was recreated and became one of the two sculptural elements in The City on the High Mountain (1983–84) at Storm King Art Center.
At noon on Tuesday, December 12, 1978, at 1 World Trade Center, Kitty Carlisle Hart, chair of the New York State Council on the Arts, presided over the dedication of Sky Gate – New York, one of the largest wood sculptures Nevelson had ever made. It was being hung in a prime position—the mezzanine lobby overlooking the five-acre plaza in front of the Twin Towers.
Nevelson had been one of the first artists contacted by Saul Wenegrat, who commissioned all the public art at the World Trade Center, as part of the Percent for Art program. At the dedication, she told the assembled audience that, on a flight from Washington, D.C., to New York City, she had looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline.48 She transformed the vision of what she saw into a thirty-two-foot-wide, seventeen-foot-high and one-foot-deep sculpture of black-painted wood, which she described as a “ ‘night piece,’ representing the ‘windows of New York.’ ”49 Mrs. Hart observed how fitting it was that Nevelson was selected for the commission, recalling that the artist had once called the Twin Towers, “these two magnificent cubes.”50
Sky Gate - New York was one of the many casualties of the attacks on September 11, 2001. It was lost along with works by Rodin, Calder, Miró, Nagare, Picasso, Klee, and Lichtenstein. None of the art that was destroyed in the World Trade Center attack was as precious as the 2,997 human beings who perished, but it was precious nonetheless.
In June 1978, Nevelson was interviewed by Emmett Meara, a young reporter from Rockland, Maine. “New York City is at my feet,” Nevelson told Meara, who noted that officials at MoMA considered her wood sculpture to be among the finest in the world. “There is nothing that they would not do for me.” Nevelson told Meara. “But,” as Meara wrote, “smouldering still behind that regal countenance, is blistering resentment against Rockland, Maine.” (The header of Meara’s piece says it all: “Nevelson still carries bitter memories of Rockland.”)
It was the city that she felt had shunned and, as Meara wrote, “ostracized her and left deep scars. She was tall, she was beautiful and talented. And she was Jewish. Even at the veritable top of the heap of the art community in the art center of the world, Louise Nevelson will never forget nor forgive her treatment in the coastal Maine city. ‘If I never set foot in Rockland again, it will be fine by me…. I cannot be bothered with Rockland. It is not even a dot on the map.’ ”51 But of course she had set foot in Rockland many times over the years to visit with her family. And ultimately she made her peace with the town as well.
The artist told the reporter she could still remember the names of the high-school classmates and teachers who snubbed her more than sixty years ago. But she also certainly remembered her champion, Lena Cleveland.
Between 1920 when she left and her return for a celebration in 1979, Nevelson had become a world-famous artist, but as far as Rockland was concerned, she barely mattered. Her accomplishments were only recognized, however belatedly, because the new director of Rockland’s Farnsworth Museum, Marius Péladeau, wanted to put Rockland and its museum on the art world’s map. Péladeau understood and sympathized with Nevelson’s outsider status since, with his French-Catholic ancestors, he too had grown up as an outsider in Yankee New England.52 During his first week at the museum, while familiarizing himself with the collection, he saw Nevelson’s Bronze Bird—a work the artist’s sister Anita had donated in 1954—and at once began to plan for a Nevelson retrospective. A short time later he was introduced to Nate Berliawsky and immediately asked him, “What is it going to take to get Louise to the Farnsworth?”53
Nate promised to pass this question along to his sister during their weekly call the following Sunday. And sure enough, Louise Nevelson replied that she would be willing to talk to Péladeau. When the director telephoned, he explained that the museum wanted to give her a big exhibition. She responded, “What do we do to get this going?” He immediately offered her a show in 1979.54
In May 1977 Péladeau and his wife visited with Nevelson in New York to discuss the proposed exhibition. Péladeau wrote a proposal for the National Endowment for the Arts and received a grant that allowed him to upgrade the project by including many more works than originally considered. Lenders were generous, and plans for a large show began.
Little did Nevelson, Péladeau, or Nate Berliawsky think that these plans would lead to any change of attitude on the artist’s part about her hometown. That development would unfold when Nevelson and her big exhibition arrived in Rockland in July 1979. In the meantime, from October 14 to November 30, 1978, Nevelson had her second solo exhibition in Chicago at the Richard Gray Gallery. The show presented some of Nevelson’s latest works, including painted wood sculptures from the Rain Garden and Rain Garden Zag series.
The novelty in the Chicago exhibition was the emphasis on maquettes in steel as potential inspirations for corporate commissions. At least three of the four maquettes would eventually be commissioned as large-scale sculptures. The press release for the show emphasized Nevelson’s many recent major public commissions, no doubt encouraging viewers to consider maquettes as models for possible large-scale public sculpture.55
Making large-scale public art was exactly the direction Nevelson wanted to go in the late 1970s, as it matched the moment of growing popularity for public art. For her, it was neither about money nor keeping up with an art world trend. She was getting older and knew she had not so much time left to establish her legacy. Monumental metal sculpture, placed in prominent locations around the country, ensured that she and her work would be known and remembered long after she had died. It also pleased her to know that she, as an aging woman, could keep on making sizable and significant works of art.
Nevelson functioned at Lippincott in a different way from other sculptors. As she worked in the shop, ideas would come to her, which could require considerable changes in a sculpture as it evolved. For example, she might start working from a four-or five-foot-high middle-size “model”—as in the works done for the Neuberger Museum show in Purchase—and then “go big.” Or she might make changes in the large pieces at their full scale. But over time she often found that the most effective way to add, subtract, or enlarge was to go back to the sculpture’s original maquette.
As Don Lippincott put it, “The small maquettes were better for such purposes, because they could be easily moved around and, even more important, you could get your eyeball around them more easily than the mid-size works—which were the same scale as yourself—and imagine how they might look if enlarged to very-large-scale.”56
An instructive example is the progress of Sky Landscape II from its first version as a direct welded aluminum work painted black (eight feet eight inches by four feet ten inches by two feet five inches), which was made in 1976 and exhibited at Purchase the following year.
The second version of this sculpture was a maquette done in 1977 and shown in Chicago at the Gray Gallery. This maquette was used as the model for the third and largest version of Sky Landscape II (nineteen feet high) done for the headquarters of Federated Department Stores Corporate in Cincinnati, Ohio.
According to the photos taken at Lippincott by Kate Keller in 1979, one can see that the workers used Nevelson’s maquette for guidance in the fabrication of the seven-ton sculpture. Numbers were pasted onto each element, thus enabling the workers to match the smaller version to the large-scale work. Nevelson’s presence throughout the process is a reminder that she could and did make changes to sizes, shapes, and positioning as the final work was being fabricated. Working exactly to scale was not what she (or most artists) wanted and would accept.
On January 30, 1979, at a private ceremony in the White House, Louise Nevelson, along with four other female artists—Isabel Bishop, Selma Burke, Alice Neel, and Georgia O’Keeffe (in absentia)—received awards from the Women’s Caucus for Art.57 All the recipients were over seventy-five years of age and were among the few women who had ever been given museum retrospectives. The ceremony was attended by Joan Mondale, the wife of Vice President Walter Mondale and the Carter administration’s spokesperson for the arts, especially women in the arts. Afterwards, the honored artists met President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter.
Later that year Nevelson was again in Washington, speaking about her work and career with Barbaralee Diamonstein at the Smithsonian Institute. Diamonstein had frequently interviewed Nevelson for TV, radio, and print media. In an article written for Art News in May 1979, she described how the artist saw herself at age seventy-nine. Never at a loss for wit with a touch of sarcasm, the artist gladly made fun of herself and her “look.” “I think candidly that I’m a bit dramatic.” Talking about children at the Metropolitan Museum who recognized her, she remarks that without the bandanna and false eyelashes “they’d never know me.”
TOP AND BOTTOM: Sky Landscape II (in progress at Lippincott, Inc), 1979. Cor-Ten steel, 240 in. City of Cincinnati © Kate Keller / Lippincott’s, LLC
“For all her confidence and joy in working, [Nevelson] confesses that the idea of reaching 80 troubled her. ‘I never minded anything before—60 or 70—but to confront eighty is quite a problem’ she says. ‘It isn’t that easy, it takes a lot to tango.’ ”58 And on the cover of the Art News issue in which this article appeared is a large photo taken in 1977 by Hans Namuth of Nevelson standing in front of her white sculpture for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, wearing a bright-red blouse, a bandana, her trademark eyelashes evident, and sporting one of her huge, sculpted pendants.
Now back to Rockland: Jeffrey Hoffeld at Pace Gallery, who had curated Nevelson’s show in Purchase, handled all the details preparing for the coming show in Rockland and was the gallery’s representative during the event.59
By the time the show opened at the Farnsworth Museum in July 1979, the Rockland City Council, on behalf of the citizens of Rockland, had resolved officially that: “Whereas Louise Nevelson, a childhood resident of Rockland, has attained international renown in her chosen field of sculpture, and whereas she has been acclaimed as ‘one of the foremost sculptors of our time,’ … the Rockland City Council … hereby pass this resolve in honor of Mrs. Nevelson, acknowledged as a ‘superstar in the world of art.’ ”60
In the run-up to the 1979 exhibition, Péladeau had raised eleven thousand dollars to buy for the Farnsworth Museum a white column from Dawn’s Wedding Feast—one of Nevelson’s works from her groundbreaking 1959 exhibit at MoMA. He had reminded possible donors that the Nevelson show would bring international prestige to the town, as well as numerous visitors whose presence would help the local economy. Moreover, the show would be traveling from Rockland to museums in Florida and Arizona, and the Rockland businessmen would be rewarded with notices listing their sponsorship of the exhibition.61
Given how much national and international publicity the Nevelson exhibition had garnered for the town and the museum, and how enthusiastically the citizens of Rockland had supported the three-day event, it is easy to understand why both the artist and Henry “Tim” Russell—the director of Boston Safe Deposit and Trust, the major corporate sponsor of the Farnsworth Museum—were beaming in a photograph taken at the celebratory luncheon on the day the show opened, as well as the gala champagne reception and panel discussion with Barbaralee Diamonstein.
Nate Berliawsky, who had always been a beloved and familiar figure in the town, attended all the festivities with his famous and glamorous sister. She could be seen on Sunday Morning Live on CBS, at the Farnsworth Museum, as well as at the festivities that French and Swiss national television networks spent four days filming. During her entire stay the siblings were always together. She was delighted to share her success with the man who had done so much to make it possible. As with his father, Isaac Berliawsky, Nate was able to connect well with his fellow townspeople. It had always been easier for a man, especially a genial businessman, to be accepted in Rockland. Unlike the women in their families, they were forgiven their otherness as Jews in a Yankee Protestant town.
Jan Adlmann, a fellow Rocklander who had become a successful art historian and museum director, was invited by Nevelson to write the essay for the exhibition catalogue.62 His mother had grown up next door to Louise Berliawsky and had been on the basketball team with her. Adlmann had known Louise when he was a young child interested in art and saw her whenever she came to town. He had also kept up with her later in New York when he lived near her Soho studio.
One of the high points of his catalogue essay was the way he compared Nevelson’s work to music:
As in a musical composition, a Nevelson … cannot be grasped instantaneously; its impact must build, and is cumulative…. Steady viewing reveals new harmonies from moment to moment, new counterpoints and new variations…. Living with a Nevelson wall … might be likened to having one’s rooms papered with the score to The Magic Flute—new profundities and new felicities constantly renew one’s perception, spring wonderful surprises, and replenish satisfaction from day to day.63
He ends his essay with a reference to the artist’s spirituality: “Nevelson emphasizes … that hers has always been a feisty struggle towards ‘awareness.’ … In her quest for transcendence, she has never faltered as one of the modern world’s most original advance guards.”64
Close to twenty thousand visitors saw the sculpture during the two-and-a-half-month-long exhibition.65 For Nevelson it was “the thrill of her life.”66 She had developed the skill of saying the right thing to the right person at public events, as had been noted by gallerists who were glad to have her charismatic presence at openings. But, on this occasion she was very likely telling the absolute truth.
Posters and photographs of Mrs. Nevelson filled shop windows along Main Street. “The indefatigable Mrs. Nevelson, long known for her dazzling dress and outspoken opinions, seemed to enjoy every minute of her three-day visit,” one reporter noted. “Whether conducting a press conference, posing for a CBS film crew and news photographers, or capping off a champagne reception at the museum with a late-night visit to a Camden disco, Mrs. Nevelson’s enthusiasm for her homecoming visit never seemed to flag.”67 “As far as I’m concerned,” she said at the museum’s reception, “life begins at 80 and I’m having a ball.’ ”68 All the press reports noted the artist’s remarkable energy, warmth, and friendliness; according to one reporter, she had “the same feeling for people as her brother, Nathan Berliawsky.”69
At one of the events, the artist spoke candidly to the Mainers who had come to see her. “You add a dimension of awareness every day…. Otherwise you have no reason for living,” she said. She was also very outspoken regarding her childhood in Rockland. “I had every reason to be shy so I learned to project. That’s why I studied dance and drama. I wanted my life to be full. You can’t take off one skin and put on another. You go with what you’ve got and you feel right.”70
Nevelson was talking about feeling “right” in New York, not in Rockland. Sweeping into the room twenty minutes late, as one Maine reporter noted, she graphically described to the assembled media how she and her family experienced life as immigrants in Rockland. “When you come here and don’t speak the language, you do become reticent. There were many negatives. I was affected and so was my mother, who retreated within herself.” After noting that Rockland “hasn’t changed all that much,” Nevelson described, her home in New York: “It’s not static …. I’m constantly recomposing little things. My home is [always] in a flux.”71 And “I could not have fulfilled my life anywhere else but the greatest city in the world. I needed a wide stage.”72
“The questions from the media were polite and non-controversial. No one asked her if she resented Rockland for having ignored her work for so many years…. She was asked about her philosophy of art and how she related this to today’s world.” One local reporter pointed out that, “Most of her answers … appeared to have come almost directly from her book Dawns and Dusks…. While most Rocklanders probably are filled with awe of Louise Nevelson, most will readily admit they do not understand her art.”73 This journalist who admitted to not being among the cognoscenti wrote that he was glad to have had the opportunity to view it and to meet her in the flesh. He also noted that, “Louise went out of her way to praise Péladeau for bringing her work to the Farnsworth.”74
The most balanced account of Nevelson’s homecoming came from Leslie Bennetts of The New York Times, who put the event into perspective:
She left almost 60 years ago, the headstrong daughter of an immigrant Russian Jewish family, escaping the small town whose boundaries, both mental and physical, had always made her chafe under their restrictions. Later she would write and speak bitterly of the narrow-mindedness and anti-Semitism of the “WASP Yankee town” where she’d grown up.
She returned last week in triumph…. The town welcomed her with … standing ovations. There were those who wondered why it had taken them so long, but all in all, it was a happy homecoming….
And the sculptor was in high spirits as she graciously accepted the acclaim. “I’d rather be kissed than not, so here I am,” she said cheerfully….
Two months shy of her 80th birthday, the sculptor looks like a woman 20 years her junior, and runs around like one 40 years younger….
These days people frequently ask what kept her going through those years of poverty, when money sent by her brother and sisters was sometimes her only income, and more often than not was spent on art materials instead of food.
“It’s a miracle that I survived and rose above it…. But nature endows you…. I felt art and I were one. No sacrifice was too much; it was just more important than whether or not I was sleeping on the floor or getting a good meal. Those things don’t really matter to anyone who sees the light. And I was sure I had it.75
The article included references to her brother Nate, one of Rockland’s “best-loved citizens,” and her sister, Anita, who recalled Louise’s tenacity. “You couldn’t beat her down. I would have given up a million times.” The Times reporter gave Louise the last word about many Rocklanders’ view of her as an eccentric: “Of course they laughed here. But I’ve lived long enough that I have the best laugh.”76
Péladeau’s support of Nevelson and his success at bringing her back to her hometown as a star and celebrity moved her and inspired her generosity toward the local museum. For several months before the exhibit, he had collected from admirers two to three hundred wood scraps, each one cleaned and labeled with the name of the donor and place of origin. The artist noted that she would use them up “in a couple of days” when she took them back to her studio in New York. Nevertheless, she was touched by the collection: “For me some of these pieces are already a work of art in themselves. It’s great from the creative point of view, but it’s also tremendous from the humanitarian point of view…. This will set a precedent throughout the whole world, that people will not throw things away, that they will cherish and reuse them.”77
Returning from a trip to see Nevelson in New York, Péladeau filled his station wagon to the brim with the sculpture she was giving to the museum. “Everything you do now is ‘News’ to the people of Rockland,” he wrote to her in September 1979. “Your visit here this summer, and the exhibition, have given the entire mid-coast area a new focus of attention. If there was some neglect in the past in recognizing your great talent, this summer has changed all that.”78
In the same letter Péladeau referred to plans for the Berliawsky-Nevelson Room at the museum as well as for the Nevelson Archives that had been established at the museum. Nevelson’s brother and son had already given decades’ worth of materials, and the artist subsequently contributed the correspondence she had not already given to the Archives of American Art. Scholars would have more to consult, and Rockland would be a recognized home for Nevelsoniana.
Péladeau believes that not only did the exhibition and the attendant festivities change the artist’s view of her old hometown, it also may have changed Rockland itself. Péladeau is convinced that, before the exhibition and Nevelson’s grand homecoming, Rockland had fallen on hard times—nothing more than a “fish-cutting town,” with many empty storefronts.79 The exhibition, the festive celebration, the visit by Nevelson herself with all the attendant publicity, gave the town a boost. Galleries started opening up and the town became several degrees more cosmopolitan.
Péladeau was determined that the recent Nevelson events would turn out to be “just the start of things” between Nevelson and the Farnsworth Museum. And indeed that proved to be true. There would be another Nevelson exhibition in Rockland in 1985, and she would continue to give her work and correspondence to the museum.
Frank, in one of her conversations with Péladeau, Nevelson said she now wanted to be buried in Rockland in the family plot on Park Street, which her father had created—but not until she was “darn good and ready.”80 Increasingly aware that she could be in the last decade of her life, she could finally imagine the idea of making a final return to the place she had grown up.
