TWENTY

THE END

1985 – 1988

“In the ’70s, I looked back on my life and decided to give myself an emblem…. Well, what do you think I chose for mine? The question mark…. It gave me a kind of peace.”

—Louise Nevelson to Suzanne Muchnic, “More Space for Sailing: The Nevelson Legend,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1985, F19

In January 1986 Louise Nevelson was interviewed by Iris Krasnow, a writer for United Press International who specialized in celebrity profiles, and took that opportunity to reflect publicly on her life. Responding to Krasnow’s questions about aging: “All eighty-six feels like is one year more than eighty-five. I think living is moving. I would never retire,” a typical response for Nevelson. But some of what she told Krasnow was surprising. For example, she claimed that the teachings of the Indian spiritual master Krishnamurti had given her psychological stability: “The Indian philosophy says there is no world, but each one of us projects a world…. And you’re responsible for what actions you do. That has really given me my strength. Before that, I was torn apart…. I had no rudders.”¹

Nevelson had been mesmerized by Krishnamurti when she first heard him speak at Town Hall in New York City in 1928, and she continued to study his teachings to the end of her life. Now, in her final years, both the artist and her interviewer treated the metaphysical subjects that had once seemed so weighty with a certain lightness:

Nevelson says she has no belief in a Supreme Being and doesn’t care where she’s going when she leaves the earth…. “I’m 86, and I don’t give a damn what happens to me…. Why should I even think about going to heaven? I think that’s ridiculous.” So where does Louise Nevelson feel she’s headed? “Just where they put me, I guess.”

Yet, she acknowledges that her steel monuments that grace many of America’s cities will cinch her spot in art history and that being famous is “nice.” But, she adds, “It doesn’t overwhelm me, because it was so long in the making. Does Beethoven care about these things? He’s dead anyway. This immortality is a joke. I don’t think about it.”²

Not surprisingly for someone so dedicated to the creative life, Nevelson’s close friends and relatives were all involved with the arts, as creators, critics, curators, or collectors. To questions about her friends, Nevelson responded: “I have a group of best friends…. For instance, Dorothy Dehner, Dorothy Miller. Then John Cage and Merce Cunningham and Edward Albee … Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg…. I prefer artists—I find they have another dimension. When I see some of my friends who aren’t in the art world, I realize how many blind spots they have. They miss the seeds in the apple.”³

When asked about marriage she was more than frank: “I was never married in the true soul sense,” she remembers. “Marriage is like a chain.” She kept her husband’s last name for “my son’s sake…. I don’t even like the word ‘marriage’ too much, because I think we should be free. Candidly, I think to go to bed with a man every night, like a husband, must be a nuisance. I look at couples, and they don’t even look like they should go together in bed. Look, in my profession almost all the men around are gay. I think they are more interesting than the couples where, if the husband says something, the wife has to agree and vice-versa.”

“As for her own lifestyle, which includes a home she shared with her biographer, right-hand assistant and friend, Diana MacKown, Nevelson isn’t concerned what people may think.”⁴ Rumors had been circulating for years that the two women were lovers. “Look, darling,” she said. “What people think doesn’t bother me. After all, what do they know about me? They don’t even know about themselves.”⁵

She also reveals her lifelong ambivalence about motherhood. She calls her relationship with Mike “pretty close,” then adds: “But, listen, he’s entirely different than I. He’s got a lot of his father as well as his mother. And he probably wouldn’t battle the way I did. Why should he? He’s living in a different time.”⁶

Naturally, Mike Nevelson has his own view of their relationship. He says:

I’m prejudiced because I’m her son and I have my own attitude. My concepts are also distorted by my feelings…. Growing up I had to take care of mother but we were not close. We were not close because she was always going off somewhere. Once in a while she would take me to the Art Students League [1929–30]; she would put me in the hat-check room because I shouldn’t be seeing the nude models…. When I went to sea [1942] I did not stay at her house; but would stay in a hotel and give her some money [all his pay went to her] because she would be with some man. I’d call her and let her know I was in town.⁷

The tight relationship between mother and son that Louise Nevelson mentions in this late interview was partly based on her guilt about having abandoned him fifty-five years earlier when she left for Munich. Mike Nevelson had experienced a second abandonment by his mother in 1963, when Arne Glimcher became her dealer and friend. Before that, she and her son had been corresponding regularly but seeing each other infrequently because Mike lived in Maine and didn’t often get to New York. Then at her request, he moved to Connecticut and had three years of closeness to his mother during the Janis fiasco, when—at age forty-one—he had finally achieved the status he long sought: to be a supportive and loving adult son who could truly help her. As he describes it: “My job was to have women be helped by me. I was happy in Maine and my mother begged me to come to Connecticut and move into her house.”⁸

The vast majority of children want to become functional, independent adults. But because of Mike’s desire to support his mother when he was a young man and again during the Janis disaster he was understandably upset when that opportunity to help his mother and be close to her was disrupted by the arrival of Arne Glimcher, who could give her anything she needed.

Arne Glimcher’s entry into her life at that time—and his ability to provide for her in ways that her biological son could not—was devastating. How could he ever compete with a man who could buy his mother a chinchilla coat, give her an exhibition every year, and make her an art-world phenomenon? The friction between the two men vying for her love was almost biblical, and Nevelson’s choice of Arne was almost a foregone conclusion. Anyone who could give her the opportunity to make and exhibit her art was guaranteed to win her heart.

“Every time I spoke to my mother,” Mike told an interviewer, “I’d ask, ‘Can’t I send you some money, a fur coat?’ She’d always say, ‘I don’t need it. Don’t send anything.’ ”⁹ Each time she told him that, he may have felt worthless in her eyes.

Over the years of her growing success and celebrity, Mike was increasingly shut out of her social activities and the emotional intimacy he longed for. Too many of Nevelson’s friends reported that he was a negligible figure in her life in the last several decades. Edward Albee had this to say (somewhat apocryphally): “I knew Louise Nevelson for twenty years. In all that time, I never once heard her mention her son. I think that says something.”¹⁰

To add to Mike’s loss, Diana MacKown came into the artist’s life at almost the same time as Glimcher. Between Glimcher and MacKown, Louise Nevelson was very well taken care of. Then, as her celebrity increased, she became friends with successful male artists, writers, and designers—Albert Scaasi, Edward Albee, Bill Katz, John Cage, Merce Cunningham—who were glad to be near the star. They surrounded her and left little room for anyone outside the orbit.

Mike’s principal role became to rescue Louise whenever a crisis occurred. As he described it: When her electricity was going to be cut off “she turned over the bill to me to make sure that she had money in the bank to avoid such problems,” or when she found “a dead man on her doorstep she asked me to take care of that too.” As her son recalls the 1970s and ’80s when he was balancing her checkbook, “she called me all the time to keep me involved. I kept fifty thousand dollars in her checking account and she would send me her checkbook by certified mail then I and my wife Marianne [who was an accountant,] would go over it and send it back.”¹¹ Her neighbor, Sal the barber, referred to Mike as the “bambino from the country.” And yet, aside from dealing with the various crises and helping her manage her money Mike was rarely included in her life. Some of that appeared to be his choice; for example, he did not attend the big celebrations for her at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland in 1979 or 1985, though he had been invited to both by Péladeau.¹² After she died, it is easy to imagine that it might take Mike many years to fully recover from his feelings of loss and rejection.

Diana MacKown. Louise Nevelson with Merce Cunningham, 1980s. Courtesy of Diana MacKown

In January 1986 Nevelson jetted off to Paris on the Concorde to attend the opening of her exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard.¹³ Bernard gave her a gorgeous party with four hundred guests—including Glimcher, Cage, Cunningham, and Albee—and put her up at L’Hotel, an elegant boutique hotel on the Left Bank, in the very suite where Oscar Wilde had died.¹⁴ Nevelson told a reporter for the International Herald Tribune: “My hunch is that this show will put me over the hump…. I always call my shots, and honestly I tell you this exhibition is going to go! I know it. I feel it.”¹⁵ The sixty-four artworks—some of her finest—included nineteen collages of wood, metal, and paper from the Volcanic Magic series, all completed in her banner year of 1985.

By the summer of 1986, Arne Glimcher and Don Lippincott had been discussing how much more metal sculpture Nevelson was likely to produce, given that she was now eighty-six. After one such discussion, Lippincott sent Glimcher a letter outlining five works that should be made “as quickly as possible.” Evidently both men sensed the time available for her to finish these works was running out.

Four of the possible works described in the letter—including Night Tree (Nevelson’s first direct work in Cor-Ten), Night Wall VI, Ocean Gate II, and Night Gesture I—had already been created in versions that were forty to fifty percent smaller than the usual monumental size in which they were made as large-scale public works. The fifth work, “a proposal for Singapore,” had not yet been created and never would be. At the end of the letter, Lippincott noted that “hopefully next week we will be able to make considerable improvement on the existing ‘partnership sculpture,’ ”¹⁶ which was called Sky Horizon (or Iron Cloud).¹⁷

During the summer of 1986, the Guggenheim Museum in New York gave a small show, Homage to Louise Nevelson: A Selection of Sculpture and Collages, which included works she had donated the previous year. The bulk of the exhibition consisted of three monumental sculptures: The Floral Garden (1962–85), Dawn X from the late 1950s, and White Vertical Water (1972). White Vertical Water, towering twenty feet upward from the ground-floor level of the museum, is a one-off—rarely exhibited but remarkable in its rippling, flowing rhythms.

The Guggenheim exhibition merited a long piece in Newsday, “Sculpting a World to Her Vision,” by Amei Wallach. Wallach had written about Nevelson several times before and had developed a perspective about her and her work. This time she wrote: “Unbridled fecundity and a penchant for repeating successful effects have dulled the initial impact of Nevelson’s vision in recent years. However, whatever ‘What, again?’ feelings we harbor in the face of her ritual repetitions are dispelled by what is taking place in the Guggenheim rotunda,” where, Wallach writes, “Nevelson manages to claim that tricky space with six soaring tiers, spiraling to the roof above in a way that few other artists have matched.” She observed about Nevelson’s persona: “This time Louise Nevelson has dispensed with the eyelashes…. No lashes, no coat, no makeup. Just one kohl line under each eye. Just silver lamé pajamas and a wren-colored scarf splashed with black paint. A working scarf. Just a woman of 87 at loose ends, a little—who wants to talk.”

Speaking candidly to Wallach, Nevelson observed, “What’s the use of thinking is there a God or isn’t there? I’ve done my job. I suppose it freed me to stop thinking about some things.” Regarding her work, she said: “I happen to be prolific and I’ve shown all over the world.” Asked how she deals with thoughts of death, she said: “Well, I think this, I’ve lived.”¹⁸

In addition to the six solo shows Nevelson had in 1986 (three in New York City and one each in Paris, Lausanne, and Cambridge, Massachusetts), her work was included in seven group exhibitions. Despite her age she remained eye-catching, eccentric, and unpredictable—all of which was noted by The New York Times writer, Carol Lawson, reporting on the city’s social scene. “Louise Nevelson was undaunted by the summery weather [on May 22]. Dressed in a long black satin skirt, a velvet brocade jacket and a black mink hat she arrived … looking costumed for a czarist winter ball.” The setting was the palatial Manhattan apartment of Maurine and Robert Rothschild, who were hosting a reception for the Farnsworth Museum. The advanced age (eighty-seven) of the glamorous-looking artist was “a topic of disbelief among the guests,” Lawson writes: “I don’t understand how she looks like that,” noted one guest. “Edward Albee took one look at Miss Nevelson’s outfit and gasped, ‘Louise, take off that jacket,’ he insisted. ‘It’s summer.’ Miss Nevelson stood firm, her creative spirit intractable.”¹⁹

In September, a major exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York paired ten of Nevelson’s sculptures, mainly from Mirror Shadow, a series she had been working on since 1980 (and that she would continue until the year she died) with paintings by Agnes Martin. The press release noted that the new wall reliefs “represent a dramatic change from Nevelson’s classic, internally organized sculpture.”²⁰ Reviewers agreed. William Zimmer of The New York Times wrote: “Louise Nevelson is up to something new … There is a new dynamism that wins one’s admiration … numerous overriding circular [areas]” and “linear elements that counterpoint this roundness.”²¹

In fact, these most recent works in the Mirror Shadow series (Mirror Shadow XXIV and XXV) are more daring than the earlier ones. They have nothing to do with Nevelson’s former enclosures and everything to do with outrageous outbursts of energetic forms, which are so tightly composed that the rollicking absurdity of squares and circles that barely stay on the wall goes almost unnoticed. The vastly varying forms and textures shouldn’t hold together, but they do. The scale of each seems more sizable than it actually is. She purposefully emphasizes dynamic diagonals and yet manages to produce a compositional harmony that is both balanced and aimed toward infinity.

These would be Nevelson’s last sculptures in wood. And her last entirely new work in metal, Iron Cloud, or Sky Horizon, belongs to the same freewheeling, fearless mode as the late pieces from the Volcanic Magic and Mirror Shadows series. Sky Horizon is a fitting finale: begun in April 1984, completed in October 1986, and sold to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in May 1988. The enormous arrow shaft points dramatically downward, perhaps a reference to what she knew would be her final resting place. Yet there is plenty of “lace” to soften and feminize the work’s aggressive masculinity and terminal tension. Always the consummate composer, Nevelson makes the sharps and curves counterbalance each other, their silhouettes as undaunted as she was to the end of her life.

What drove her during this period? Was Nevelson like Violetta, the consumptive heroine of La Traviata, who had her last burst of strength and wild hope just before dying in her lover’s arms? Or was the octogenarian simply fearless because she knew she might not be around when the reliefs and steel sculpture were finally sold and installed?

On January 6, 1987, the artist attended the opening of Louise Nevelson: A Concentration of Works from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the Stamford, Connecticut, branch of the museum. Four hundred people showed up at the opening reception. Nevelson was in fine fettle, reviewing the show of forty-six of her works on the arm of Richard Solomon, director of Pace Prints. Tom Armstrong, the museum’s director, toasted the “special relationship” Nevelson had had with the Whitney over the years.²² She had participated in thirteen Whitney Annuals, eighteen major group shows, two sizable solo shows (in 1970 and 1980), in addition to her first retrospective there in 1967.

The museum had been steadily collecting her art, and she had reciprocated, giving the Whitney fifty-five pieces over her lifetime. Her patrons and friends, Howard and Jean Lipman, had donated ten works and promoted her repeatedly at the museum,²³ and now the museum seemed on the verge of making a permanent Nevelson gallery in a new wing of the Manhattan museum. (Neither the new wing nor the Nevelson gallery were built.)

One reviewer of the Stamford show called the artist “one of the great metaphysical architects of this century…. She is a latter day icon-maker. If I were ever asked to design a religious space, a Nevelson wall endowed with layers of allegorical, mystical and visual symbolism, would be its high altar.”²⁴

William Zimmer, writing in The New York Times, offered a measured critique of the Stamford show: “Although she is one of the most substantial artists in America, Louise Nevelson deals with themes that are highly delicate and evanescent … a distinct combination of staunchness and mystery…. Although there is a sameness to Nevelson’s work, a searching out of differences between pieces provides real rewards.” And: “Nevelson can be merely decorative, as in handmade paper reliefs, … but the brand-new, rather irregularly arrayed collages of wood, metal and paper, titled, with customary Nevelsonian drama Volcanic Magic, reveal that this artist never slumbers.”²⁵

The big revelation from this exhibition was that once again, in her eighty-seventh year, Nevelson was striking out in a new direction. It was as though she had rediscovered a new way to make a dynamic conflict of light and shadow but without restricting herself to a monochrome hue.

In the Hudson Review, artist and art critic Maureen Mullarkey observed that, “Much has already been written about Nevelson, and her originality no longer seems new. Her emblematic ordering of random forms has become familiar. The subtle harmonies of her fretted, skeletal improvisations are immediately identifiable.” Respectfully, the reviewer concludes that Nevelson “represents the kind of ambition that is almost extinct…. Her first loyalty was to her own gifts and the perfection of her work. Her achievement is a reminder, discomfiting in its rarity, that excellence is paid for with one’s life.”²⁶

The question about life and death would now come up more and more frequently for Nevelson. It was a lifelong question she posed to herself and it always related to her view of herself as an artist: “My mother asked me when I was very young and I told her that I was going to be an artist. She said, well you must know that art will be a hard life. And I said it isn’t how you live, it’s how you die. And that’s really what I’ve lived by.”²⁷

As the year 1987 continued, Nevelson’s work was on exhibit in the new Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Metropolitan Museum.²⁸ A few months later, an article in The New York Times about plans to expand the Guggenheim and Whitney museums provoked the only letter Louise Nevelson ever wrote to a newspaper. She knew that the Whitney expansion was meant to include a separate gallery for her work and surely hoped that something similar might happen at the Guggenheim Museum. The Times titled her letter: “Go, Go Guggenheim.” Short and to the point, she wrote: “I love Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, but I always thought that museums were for art. Let’s get this proposed annex building built and put great art where it belongs.”²⁹

And that was the artist’s last public word before she no longer was able to speak for herself.

In the summer of 1987, Nevelson rented a weekend house in Westhampton. She entertained friends from the city, including Sam Green, Bill Katz, and Marisol. Katz, who loved to cook, would arrive from the city with food and make dinner at the house. She visited with old friends who were also at the beach in the summer. Emily Genauer and her husband came over and stayed up talking late into the night.³⁰ “She had grown somehow recondite,” Genauer recalled, “and talked of the mysticism that moved her deeply from her first meeting … with its most famous exponent Krishnamurti.”³¹ “She worked on collages and small compositions,” Genauer reported, “and seemed to be fine with the exception of a dry cough every so often.” Of all the people visiting her that summer, she had known Genauer the longest, since the critic had reviewed Nevelson’s work positively as early as September 1936 in the New York World-Telegram.³²

During that last summer she had a dream about sitting around the kitchen table back in Maine, talking with her mother. This amazed her because she hadn’t dreamt about her mother in many years.³³ Such a dream coming, as it did, so close to the end of her life suggests some not quite conscious awareness that she herself was ill and would soon be dying.

But not before she flew to Youngstown, Ohio, in a private plane with Brendan Gill, urban sophisticate and longtime New Yorker writer and architectural critic. She was going to the Butler Institute in Ohio to receive the Butler Medal for Life Achievement in American Art. “She talked a blue streak all the way [on the flight] and was in high spirits throughout the ceremonies,” Gill recalled, and had “an air of being in the midst of life [as] she presided over the occasion.”³⁴

Not long after she returned from Ohio she began to feel sick. A check-up in September at Manhattan’s Doctor’s Hospital revealed a spot on her lung that might indicate a tumor. She had always feared cancer because it had felled her mother, her brother Nate, and her youngest sister Lillian.

She wasn’t sure at first whether to have the recommended surgery to remove what proved to be a tumor on her lung, but finally decided that she had more life to live and more sculpture to make. Diana and Mike were with her before she went into the operating room, and Diana recalls that she quipped: “Now the fun begins.”³⁵ The surgery was described as “successful,” but she went back to work with less energy. She spent a quiet Christmas Eve dinner at home with Emily Genauer, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Edward Albee.³⁶

Recalling how much Nevelson had enjoyed the warm weather in St. Marten the previous year, MacKown had rented a small house for them in a quiet part of the island. They left a few days after Christmas. Sitting on the beach shortly after her arrival, Nevelson told Bill Katz that she had been thinking about how civilized the Dutch were, because in Holland euthanasia was acceptable. Katz, who had not known about her recent surgery, was shocked to see how frail she had become.³⁷

A few days later she had lunch at Jasper Johns’s home. Johns called Katz and told him he thought Louise should return to New York immediately and be hospitalized. Diana accompanied her on the flight back, and Katz, who had already gone back, picked them up at the airport. They drove straight to Doctors Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a cerebellar tumor. The lung cancer had metastasized, and radiation treatment was advised. Nevelson acceded to the treatment but was exhausted by it and seemed to be dying more each day.

In February 1988, Nevelson went from whispering to muteness. Diana read short stories to her and brought her wood, paper, and glue in an attempt to interest her in working—but without much success. Knowing how little energy she had, MacKown kept most people away. In Nevelson’s illness as she had been in her health, Diana was the watchdog at the gate. Nevelson herself made the decision to have “Occupant” instead of her name put on the door of her hospital room to keep from having unwanted visitors.

Nevelson’s granddaughter, Maria Nevelson, was studying painting at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and recalls talking with her grandmother about composition when she went to visit her at the hospital. Nevelson lifted her hands up, as if to instruct her, but then dropped them, exhausted by the effort.³⁸ She had completely stopped speaking and was not alert most of the time.

Louise Nevelson wanted to die at home and was brought back to her house and moved into what had been Diana’s room at 31 Spring Street because it was central. (Diana moved into three small rooms on the third floor.) By that time Mike Nevelson, with his wife Marianne, had moved into the top floor of the 29 Spring Street house and was “monitoring the situation,” and seeing his mother as often as possible.³⁹ Ten days before she died, Diana called Nevelson’s two granddaughters, urging them to come to say their last goodbyes. Diana recalls that this upset Mike because he wanted his mother to himself—an experience that had been all too rare during her lifetime.⁴⁰

Arne Glimcher visited her only a few times in the last weeks of her life. He was sure she didn’t want him to see her in her fragile state, but he talked to her nurses every morning. Glimcher recalls that, “The day before she died, the nurse asked her if she was afraid. Nevelson wasn’t talking, but she shook her head, yes.”⁴¹ At his last meeting with Nevelson, which was at her home, “She didn’t open her eyes or speak, she just squeezed his hand.”⁴²

Diana MacKown. Louise Nevelson with Arne Glimcher, 1974. Courtesy of Diana MacKown

Shortly before she died Diana came into her room and saw a remarkable sight. Nevelson had put both her arms straight up in the air, which Diana interpreted as a gesture invoking some spiritual connection. After her arms came down Diana went to her side and, holding her hand, said goodbye. She then left the room and told Mike that his mother was dying and that he should be with her.

Louise Nevelson died on the morning of April 17, 1988.⁴³

Any discussion of Nevelson’s legacy as a person and artist requires an understanding of the dispute that immediately followed her death. That dispute was extensively covered in the press by journalists who interviewed all the parties involved.

Louise Nevelson had stipulated that her entire estate would go to her son and that he would be the executor. Within two days of his mother’s death, Mike had a metal door installed to block Diana’s access to the third floor of 31 Spring Street, which housed the studio and the living quarters she had shared with Nevelson and relegated Diana to two rooms in that building. He also barred her from the two adjacent buildings that Nevelson had owned.⁴⁴ To his daughter Maria, who had been attempting to be emotionally supportive of Diana, “the metal door seemed cruel—like the Berlin wall.”⁴⁵ Mike also asked Diana to surrender her keys to the garage and to find another place to keep Black Beauty, the 1976 Ford station wagon that had been his mother’s primary means of transportation.⁴⁶

No one was allowed to come into 29 Spring Street, including Mike’s three daughters. Everyone staying in 31 Spring—mostly Diana and Maria—wondered what on earth was going on, what was the secret, “what was he hiding?”⁴⁷ As they eventually discovered, during this period Mike took every beautiful object from Nevelson’s home, every piece of her art—sculptures, collages, paintings, including twenty-five of the terra-cottas and ten other works Nevelson had signed over to Diana in 1985 and 1986.⁴⁸ Mike put the art into a truck and drove it to his home in New Fairfield, Connecticut, where it was stored in a barn on his property.⁴⁹

Throughout the last years of his mother’s life, Mike kept reaching out to her, trying to be close, and she kept pushing him away. When asked if he ever complained about not being able to contact her on the phone, he responded: “She needed Diana, I suppose. I wasn’t going to keep calling. All I knew was, I was spending a lifetime saying, ‘Look at me. Look at me. I love you.’ She’d say, ‘Ah, ech.’ I’d say, ‘Listen, can’t we spend a little more time together.’ And she’d say, ‘I have a meeting at the museum tomorrow, then somebody’s coming to interview me.’ ”⁵⁰

According to her many statements, his mother felt remorse for having left him when he was a child and for regularly leaving him out as an adult.⁵¹ Did she also feel remorse for taking some of his work—refurbished antique wood pieces—and chopping them up to use in her own work?⁵² She had worked hard to create the world in which she could bask in the glory of her creative accomplishments and her creative friends. Mike himself saw the situation poetically, stating: “Nevelson is the moon and Mike is the son.”⁵³

Yet, Mike Nevelson didn’t fit in that world, and she mostly excluded him from it. Furthermore, she kept on talking to everyone about the “guilts of motherhood” and explaining the various reasons why she shouldn’t have had—and in fact had never wanted—a child.⁵⁴ How could he not have felt anger, sadness, and disappointment when his mother kept saying she was sorry he was born? As time would reveal, the psychological burden she carried as a “bad mother”—and the decisions she made as a result—would have long-term consequences, affecting both her reputation and her artistic legacy.

Nevelson knew that works she had created in the late 1970s and ’80s were done under contract to Sculptotek (the shell company Mike and his attorney created in 1976 to manage the income from Nevelson’s work), but she probably believed that she was free to give away works she had created earlier, for example the terra-cottas from the 1940s and ’50s. She intended for Diana to have them and sell them and, therefore, have some stable income.⁵⁵ By leaving work to Diana and giving away twenty-five works to museums in 1985, she was attempting to isolate her acts of generosity from the regret she felt about the repeated abandonments of her son, which likely motivated her to allow Sculptotek to be established.

“Sometime,” Mike responded to a New York magazine reporter when asked when his mother’s remains would be buried. Looking toward his office where a small black granite box sat on a shelf in his Connecticut home, he continued, “For the first time in my life my mother’s ashes are here in the house next to me. I’ve got my mother home at last with me, and I’m not ready to give her up. I’m not running to put her in the ground.”⁵⁶

Along with her ashes, the only thing he had left of her after her death was her work. No wonder he was reluctant to share it—especially with Diana, who had displaced him, who had cut his contact with his mother to the minimum, whom his mother had once considered adopting so she could be co-executor of the estate. In response to that idea Mike told his mother: “Diana doesn’t like me. If you do that I resign.”⁵⁷ It must have been too painful for him to think of Diana as a sibling with whom he had to share anything. Now he was going to handle the problem by shutting Diana out completely.

In order to pay the huge taxes on his mother’s estate, Mike Nevelson wanted to sell the two houses and garage in which his mother had lived and worked. As he put it: “The IRS hit me for everything including work I had made; we were wiped out by the gift tax [which] claimed everything that was made was by Louise Nevelson. I owed $442,000 to the IRS.”⁵⁸

For that reason he began eviction proceedings to get Diana out as soon as possible. Toward the end of Louise’s life, Diana had been paid $250 per week, plus room and board, travel, and health insurance. When her salary was abruptly stopped and she had no means of support, Mike believed the pension he had provided for her in the original Sculptotek plan was enough to take care of her. “When she decided not to work for Sculptotek any more that was it.”⁵⁹ People who were aware of Diana’s role as Louise Nevelson’s devoted assistant were shocked by Mike’s seemingly heartless treatment.

Dorothy Miller, former curator at MoMA and a friend of Louise’s since 1933, claimed that, “Diana took complete care of Louise in the last 25 years, so Louise was totally free to work. She was more than a daughter.”⁶⁰ Willy Eisenhart said that Louise “absolutely intended to provide for Diana. Diana did everything for Louise, and she freed Louise’s mind and spirit. Without Diana, I think Louise would have died a lot younger.”⁶¹

To all of the accusations of Louise’s art-world “family”—who didn’t know or care about Mike—Mike had a seemingly endless supply of explanations: “If my mother had wanted Diana to have money, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to put it in her will…. But she excluded Diana from the will.” And: “If his mother was so unhappy with him—as Louise Nevelson’s crowd says—then why, Mike Nevelson asks, did his mother appoint him as executor of her estate?”⁶² “I’m the executor of the estate and I’m following my mother’s will.”⁶³ In addition, he observed: “It was at her insistence that I took over the running of her business affairs. I played a common role as a son.”⁶⁴

Mike claimed that, “My mother had this habit over the years of giving things away, without keeping track.”⁶⁵ He justified his taking the terra-cottas by claiming that the work belonged to Sculptotek and not to his mother, and thus she had no right to give them away. “When I straighten out who has the title to which pieces,” he said, “then Diana will get the sculptures.”⁶⁶

“Look, my mother didn’t care about money,” Mike explained, “she didn’t care about clothes. She didn’t care about family. She cared about her work living on after her. She trusted me to take care of her affairs because she knew that I would die for her if I had to.”⁶⁷

In the two years after Nevelson’s death, Mike and Diana had a continuing legal battle over the artist and her work. Mike was so adamant about withholding his mother’s artwork from Diana that she hired a lawyer, C. Leonard Gordon, to get Mike to return the work Louise Nevelson had given to her.⁶⁸ If Mike didn’t relent, Gordon was prepared to bring suit against him for punitive damages. He felt that Diana’s claim should include $325,000 to compensate her for her decades of service. Gordon threatened a RICO suit or even a palimony suit, explaining to Mike Nevelson’s lawyer that speculation about a sexual relationship between the two women was already “out there” in the mind of the public.⁶⁹

Agreeing with Nevelson’s closest friends—Edward Albee, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Bill Katz, and Willy Eisenstat—about the falseness of that speculation, Mike said: “Listen … my mother was a turn-of-the-century woman, a Victorian woman in some ways. She said some outrageous things, maybe, but one thing I can tell you: My mother liked men. Anyone who knew her at all knew that.”⁷⁰

In the end, Diana MacKown got back the terra-cottas along with two large relief walls, the value of which was more or less equal to the compensation her lawyer had requested. And that was without a trial.⁷¹ Though Diana had powerful friends who believed that she had been badly treated, she was not interested in pursuing the issue through a lengthy and expensive court case.

The question of money—and who wanted it and who didn’t—comes up in all discussions and legal decisions about mother and son. As discussed earlier, Mike Nevelson had established Sculptotek upon the advice of his lawyer, as a way of both helping his mother out with her financial affairs and also a way of avoiding gift and estate taxes.⁷² An unnamed relative supported this claim: “Sculptotek was set up because Louise was totally incapable of handling her financial affairs…. It was her son’s and the gallery’s way of helping her. Whatever the problems might have been between Louise and Mike in earlier years, she turned to him because she felt he was the one person she could trust.”⁷³

This is a remarkable statement given that Nevelson was in her mid-seventies at the time Sculptotek was formed, at the height of her powers, and had completely trusted Arne Glimcher to deal fairly with her financially since 1963. It must also be noted that Arne Glimcher has stated unequivocally that Sculptotek was entirely Mike’s idea and that, since Louise had agreed to it, he and Pace Gallery had no choice but to accept the plan of making Mike the master of his mother’s money.⁷⁴

All the arrangements Mike had created to protect him from having to pay gift taxes on his mother’s estate went for naught. In May 1996 the U.S. Tax Court determined that Mike owed more than one million dollars in back taxes and penalties for the period of 1977 to 1988. In 1996, the Estate of Louise Nevelson, deceased, Mike Nevelson Executor, sued the IRS concerning federal gift taxes, which the IRS had determined were deficient. In plain language, Mike had not paid the taxes on the value of his mother’s work—taxes he had owed the IRS for all those years. As executor, Mike had claimed that “he cannot sell the estate’s assets in the near future because he will receive less than fair value.” He also claimed that Louise Nevelson’s federal gift taxes remained unpaid because he had yet to receive a bill from the IRS.⁷⁵

Both of Mike Nevelson’s claims “[were] found to be without merit” in court.⁷⁶ But during those eight years Louise Nevelson’s work was off the market. While the value of her work was being evaluated by the IRS tax court, neither the estate (Mike Nevelson) nor Pace Gallery (previously Nevelson’s exclusive agent) would sell the art. Mike could not have known how damaging that long hiatus would prove to his mother’s reputation.

Three years after the tax court decision, in 1999, Mike brought a lawsuit against the company of his former lawyer, Maurice Spanbock (Carro, Spanbock, Kaster and Cuiffo, CSK&C), who had helped him set up Sculptotek in the first place. The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York summarized the issue thus far as:

Plantiff Sculptotek, Inc., a corporation wholly owned by Mike Nevelson, was created upon the advice of CSK&C for the purpose of organizing the financial affairs of Louise Nevelson, and in an attempt to cause her artwork and the income from it to pass outside of her taxable estate. After Ms. Nevelson’s death in 1988, the IRS determined that the corporate entity Sculptotek should be disregarded, as it was a sham corporation used to gift the decedent’s income and assets to her son, and that all of the assets of Sculptotek should have been included in the sculptor’s gross estate. It further determined that all of the salary paid by Sculptotek to her son, Mike Nevelson, between 1977 and 1988 constituted taxable gifts. This IRS determination was based primarily upon a finding that Sculptotek failed to adequately compensate the decedent artist, whose works generated the bulk of the assets held by the corporation.⁷⁷

The court found that Mike had a right to sue.

Eight long years after Nevelson’s death, the dispute with the IRS was over, and “the estate,” in the person of Mike Nevelson, could begin to sell her work. He hired Jeffrey Hoffeld, Arne Glimcher’s former associate and vice president at the Pace Gallery, to be the exclusive agent to oversee that task.⁷⁸ Because of their longstanding enmity, Mike Nevelson wouldn’t work directly with Arne Glimcher. Pace Gallery had to return a large number of Nevelson works it had had on consignment, but it was allowed to sell pieces that the gallery owned outright. Hoffeld sold some of her work through other dealers, but, until Mike Nevelson sold the bulk of the estate in 2005, seventeen years after her death, much of Louise Nevelson’s work was effectively unable to be bought or sold.

For so many years Arne Glimcher had been the Nevelson dealer. When that changed after her death and the confusion about who could actually represent her unfolded, along with the persistence of scandal attached to so much about her estate, it interfered with what had been an uninterrupted trajectory of success. Finally, fifteen hundred works by Nevelson still in the estate’s remaining inventory were sold in a sealed bid auction on November 5, 2005. They were bought and divided in a three-way sale by Pace Gallery (New York), Galleria Gio Marconi (Milan), and Galerie Gmurzynska (Zurich and Zug).⁷⁹ In the art world, seventeen years is a lifetime to be kept “off the market.” The damage was done.

Was it true—as Mike Nevelson had claimed in the IRS lawsuit—that he would not get enough money from the sale of his mother’s artwork to pay the estate’s gift taxes? Or did he want to keep everything of his mother’s as long as he could, no matter the fiscal consequences? Selling the houses in which she had lived and worked evidently made sense to him, because he needed the money to pay taxes and perhaps also because he had been largely excluded from her life there. Holding on to her work until 2005 also made sense—psychological sense—to a twice-abandoned son whose love for his mother had never been sufficiently reciprocated.

Louise Nevelson’s ashes have finally been buried without fanfare in a country cemetery in Acworth, New Hampshire, near the current home of Mike Nevelson, and in spite of her expressed wish to be buried in the family cemetery in Rockland, Maine.⁸⁰

“She died and her work disappeared.”⁸¹ It was clear to Arne Glimcher, what had happened. “Mike took everything off the market. He ruined her market and destroyed her reputation. She was the most famous artist in the United States at the time.”⁸² After her death, Glimcher and other dealers were wary of showing her work because every time there was a Nevelson exhibit, the media concentrated on the scandal—son versus longtime helper, or son versus the IRS—and that sidetracked any attempts to focus on her art. The lawsuits went on until 1999.⁸³ Publicity, which should have been about her work and her career, was sucked into scandal-mongering.

It will take some time to recover from the near silence of those seventeen long years. A generation of artists has come and gone knowing little of what they have missed in not knowing Louise Nevelson and her work. Ironically Nevelson herself predicted that she would go through a period of being out of the limelight. In her characteristic way she exaggerated her time out of favor. She told Diana MacKown: “I’ll be forgotten for 200 years. I’m going under the water.”⁸⁴

The scandals and the silence have somewhat slowed her path to lasting fame but immediately after she died Louise Nevelson was memorialized in countless obituaries. Starting with her hometown paper, The New York Times, John Russell wrote: “A pioneer creator of environmental sculpture who became one of the world’s best known artists died Sunday evening…. Mrs. Nevelson was an artist of the first rank, and among the most arresting people of her time.” He concludes with the statement: “Louise Nevelson was never touched by old age. She put it in its place and went on with the only thing that mattered to her: her work.”⁸⁵

One of the few obituaries written by a close friend was subtitled “Goodbye, Louise” by June Wayne for Women Artists News. Wayne, whose friendship went back to 1963 when Nevelson first went to work at Wayne’s Lithography Workshop, Tamarind, in Los Angeles, was candid about her dear friend’s true self.

She saw that her own success was an act of defiance of the powers-that-be in the art world. Yet she was never more fearful than when she seemed most brazen; her plumage was merely camouflage…. In spite of her lusty language, and occasionally lusty behavior, she was as easily startled as a bird. She was afraid of crowds and during the quarter-century of our friendship, she never went alone to openings or festive events…. When the long obituaries about Louise have been put into perspective, her struggle for acceptance in the art world will emerge as nothing more than a strategy for getting the money to keep making art. She was not seduced by her own celebrity, although the flamboyance seduced the public that adored her…. But art that we savour was paid for in fanatical, puritanical singleness of purpose, in renunciation of creature comforts and intimacies for which we can never repay her.⁸⁶

A memorial service was held for the artist in the Medieval Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 17, 1988. William Lieberman, director of the museum’s Twentieth-Century Art department, described Nevelson as “a great artist, a wonderful woman, an elegant lady and a good and generous friend.”⁸⁷ One more memorial took place a half-year later. First, a concert “In Remembrance of Louise Nevelson” was held at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall on March 28, 1989. It was organized by Bill Katz, Diana MacKown, and Jasper Johns. Edward Albee introduced “An Hour of Song” sung by Jessye Norman, accompanied by James Levine. The program included texts by John Cage, Isamu Noguchi, Merce Cunningham, and Prince Michael of Greece.

Three days later on March 31, 1989, an exhibit, Louise Nevelson Remembered: Sculpture and Collages, opened at the Pace Gallery. It was Arne Glimcher’s farewell gift to Louise Nevelson—a show of some of her last sculptures and most striking collages as well as an elegant package of photographs, a portfolio of remembrances by dear friends, previously unpublished interviews, and post cards of scenes from her home.⁸⁸

Reviewing the artwork for The New York Times, John Russell proclaimed that it was “not ‘a memorial exhibition.’ ” “On the contrary,” he wrote, “it speaks for Nevelson as a severe, classical artist who worked with vertical, horizontal and diagonal as her three trusted henchmen…. It is strong work, plain work, up-front work, and completely resolved.”⁸⁹

For the remembrances, Glimcher chose people who had been close to Nevelson and important to her for a long time: Emily Genauer, Diana MacKown, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Edward Albee, Hilton Kramer, Barbaralee Diamonstein, Jean Lipman. Each compiled some high points of their relationship.

Emily Genauer wrote about the first critical piece she had written on Nevelson in September 12, 1936, in the New York World-Telegram. Genauer and Nevelson eventually became close friends, speaking to each other every few days, traveling together to California, New England, and Greece.

Jean Lipman, who had written Nevelson’s World a few years earlier, recalled a moment when Charles Kuralt asked Nevelson toward the end of the TV interview how, at age eighty, she could possibly maintain the energy and quality of the work that had made her famous. Nevelson paused for a full minute and said: “Look, Dear, if you can walk, you can dance.”⁹⁰

Diana MacKown’s brief statement was modest and forward-looking. “It meant a great deal to me when Arnold asked me to assist with this show…. It is a joy to see [the work] out in the world. This show will have its own magnificence, and I know the work will cross continents of awareness.”⁹¹

Hilton Kramer, her longtime admiring critic from The New York Times, recalled his first visit to her home and studio on Thirtieth Street. “It looked like the refuge of a mad collector. But one came to understand the discipline and ambition and vision governing the creative life that was harbored in this enchanted house…. It was in that house that Louise changed the scale of modern sculpture … this was her crucial achievement, and it is what she will be remembered for when the glamor is forgotten.”⁹²

Barbaralee Diamonstein had known Nevelson since 1963. They became close over the years. Diamonstein saw her as “a complex cross between a princess and a peasant, a mother hen in a clerical collar who gave sermonettes and would deliberately lapse into Yiddish asides when she wanted either Barbaralee or Diana to ‘get it.’ ”⁹³

Arne Glimcher wrote “Louise Nevelson’s life was such an intricate pattern of fantasy synthesized with reality that separation of myth and fact is nearly impossible. A chronology of her life provides the barest skeletal outline of incidents to which she reacted. These reactions, evident in … art works, are only the visible and tangible evidence—the key—to the realization that Nevelson’s life itself was her greatest work of art.”⁹⁴