Anthony Haden-Guest – Louise Nevelson

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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 20
heavily, fell into such a depression that she actually found the daylight painful. Many good artists were suffering similarly at the time but Nevelson was also a “woman artist.” Cue magazine reviewed her thus on October 4 1941: We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns. No wonder Nevelson said of this period in a television interview when she was 78: “You have blinders like a horse. You don’t look too much. You have a place to go.” In 1943 Jimmy Ernst, the son of Max Ernst, and his partner, Elenore Lust, gave Nevelson a solo show, her third, at New York’s Norlyst Gallery. It was called The Circus. That too was excellently received. Again not one piece sold. When the work was returned to her studio, Nevelson, who was running short on space, picked out a few bits and pieces for recycling into future work, hauled the body of the show out to the lot behind her Tenth Street building and burned it. Success came when Nevelson was pushing sixty. How many hopefuls these days would give it that long? Then the sales came, the fame built. Life in 1958 described her as “A sorceress at her desk.” But her long-contained rage was always ready to explode. When Alfred Barr asked her where she had been all these years, Nevelson snapped “Right here in New York, working - where the hell have you been?” Laura Lisle relates how she sat at the bar at one of her openings, in tears, and saying again and again “It’s too late, it’s much too late.” Actually, the timing had been absolutely right. Nevelson’s work had always looked interesting, but seldom seemed wholly resolved. Only now was she beginning to produce the unerring series of sculptures and collages such as these. Only Philip Guston, fourteen years her junior, comes to mind as a comparable late bloomer. And Guston, of course, had been an early Above Louise Nevelson with Bill Katz, Marisol, Jasper Johns, Alfonso Ossorio and Victoria Bar; Photographer unknown; Farnsworth Art Museum Nevelson Archive. Louise Nevelson, Robert Indiana and others, 1973; Diana MacKown, photographer; Louise Nevelson papers, Archives of American Art. 21
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Anthony Haden-Guest – Louise Nevelson

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