Anthony Haden-Guest – Louise Nevelson

served for domes, and the lids of brass
kettles and coffee-pots from the oak dresser
in the hall made minarets of dazzling
splendour. Chessmen were useful for
minarets too.
He worked hard and he worked cleverly,
and as the cities grew in beauty and
interestingness he loved them more and
more. He was happy now. There was no
time to be unhappy in.
I don’t want to be simplistic, just to suggest
that Nevelson’s Scavenger Aesthetic, the
urge that drove her to make her sculptures
and these collages, has deep, primal roots,
both formal and romantic. Nevelson would
later speak of her life as an immigrant child
amongst the Maine Yankees and she related
it to the fact that she began to see “almost
anything on the street as art.”
Louise met Charles Nevelson, a well-to-do
entrepreneur, through her father. She was in
her late teens and had been set on being an
artist since she saw a statue in the Rockland
library when she was nine. Nevelson took
her to New York when she was 20. She
stayed in the Martha Washington Hotel for
Women on East 29th and they went to see
the bracingly new Flatiron Building and the
Statue of Liberty. She rhapsodised about
“the water and the sky and this wonderful
oversized thing. It looks like she reaches to
heaven.”
Louise and Charles married in 1918 but
she was increasingly pulled apart by the
demands of home-making and making
art. “I continued my studies, and then my
child was born. The greater restriction of
a family life strangled me, and I ended my
marriage,” she observed flintily. Her child
was a son, Myron. Nevelson would earn a
reputation for ruthlessness but her friend
Marjorie Eaton would tell of her obsessive
guilt at her desertion of her family, of her
talking of it incessantly as she painted.
Reading accounts of Louise Nevelson’s
development as a young woman artist,
working her way into middle age, is
agonizing, but not quite as agonizing as it
must have been to live, because she was
such a late developer that it is essentially a
long preamble, a bildungsroman, with the
important buildings only popping up in
the last chapters. And, like Mark Rothko,
Nevelson would neither forget nor forgive
her years of privation.
An account of her life is also an account of
the art world before the fame, the money.
Nevelson joins the Art Students League;
there are squabbles; getting left out of
groups; studying with Frederick Kiesler,
the radical Viennese architect, with Hans
Hofmann and with Baroness Hilda Rebay,
a force behind what was on its way to
becoming the Guggenheim Museum for
Non-Objective Art; and working, although
not as closely as she sometimes liked to
suggest, with the Mexican muralist, Diego
Rivera.
There was her outspokenly active sexlife
- “I love romances and I like to have
affairs” - which included flings with Kiesler
(probably) and Rivera (certainly). And
there are other more unexpected elements,
such as Nevelson’s interest in Spiritualism,
Buddhism, dream analysis and the like.
Laura Lisle, author of Louise Nevelson: A
Passionate Life, quotes Hans Hoffman’s
observation that “the fourth dimension is
the realm of the spirit and imagination,
of feeling and sensibility,” and notes a
suggestion that the Fourth Dimension is the
unseen fourth wall in Cubism. There’s not
much occult hoopla in the art world these
days. It pursues other gods.
The art world differed in another
substantial way. Nevelson struggled for
thirty years, working in near obscurity and
making no sales. She was given a show by
Karl Nierendorf, a dealer from Cologne,
who had opened a gallery close to MOMA
at 20 West 53rd Street. It soon became one
of New York’s best. Her show opened on
September 22, 1940 and got a number of
reviews, mostly favorable.
Nothing sold.
Nevelson, who was already drinking
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