Sky Cathedral #2 (1957) now on public view.
SAN JOSE, California (January 18, 2011 CORRECTED January 20, 2011)—The San Jose Museum of Art has acquired a major work by prominent American artist Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). Sky Cathedral #2 (1957) is one of the earliest of the “walls” in Nevelson’s highly esteemed “Sky Cathedral” series. The wall-mounted sculpture, which measures approximately twelve feet in length, has been installed in the Museum’s lobby. The sculpture, the first work by Nevelson to enter SJMA’s permanent collection, is a gift from Beverly and Peter Lipman.
“This extraordinary early, signature work by Louise Nevelson is a game-changing donation to the Museum’s collection,” said Susan Krane, Oshman Executive Director of the San Jose Museum of Art. ”We are grateful to the Lipmans for gifting this pivotal work to SJMA, which strengthens its holdings of assemblage art and adds national context to its growing representation of women artists. The very personal story of this work and the artist’s ties to the Lipman family make this gift all the more meaningful. This gift caps a wonderful year of donations of art that include works by Frank Lobdell, Catherine Opie, Monique Prieto, Bill Owens, Hiroshi Watanabe, Salomón Huerta, Chris Jordan, Markus Linnenbrink, John Bankston, and many others. Beverly and Peter Lipman and the Lipman Family Foundation have played an instrumental role in the exciting growth of SJMA’s collection and the evolution of this dynamic community resource.”
“Louise Nevelson was one of the early artists I got to know as a child, as she was a close friend of my parents,” said Peter Lipman of the Lipman Family Foundation. “She was a wonderful character with a commanding presence in the New York art world in the 1950s. This piece is very special to me. It was in my father’s office until he retired, then in my parents’ house, which they built specially to display Sky Cathedral as a centerpiece. I’ve lived with this piece for much of my life, and now it is wonderful to give the piece to the San Jose Museum of Art—a place where I can come and visit it often.”
Peter Lipman’s parents acquired the piece directly from the artist’s brother. Peter Lipman’s mother, Jean Lipman, who was longtime editor of Art in America, was close to Nevelson and wrote the 1983 book Nevelson’s World.
Nevelson’s work defies categorization, according to JoAnne Northrup, chief curator at SJMA. “Her work succeeds in its ability not only to transcend style, but also to walk a fine line between sculpture and painting. It exists in both camps and challenges the division between the two. Utilitarian and angular, the ‘Sky Cathedral’ pieces are less ornate than some of Nevelson’s other works, and use shapes defined by sharp edges and hard, industrial lines. There is a tension in them that is electric even as it seems held in time.”
Sky Cathedral #2 (1957) is expansive: it measures 57 x 147 x 14 inches. As is typical of Nevelson’s work, it is constructed of “crates” piled with a variety of molded and found wood and stacked into a wall-like configuration. It predates a famous example in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was originally made for her brother's Thorndike Hotel in Rockland, Maine.
The installation of the Nevelson also coincides with the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits (January 29-June 5, 2011). Among the 100 photographs included in the exhibition (which is organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum) is a dramatic 1986 portrait of Nevelson herself.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Louise Nevelson was born in Kiev, Russia, in 1899. She relocated to the United States with her family in 1905 and went on to study visual and performing arts at New York’s Art Students League. In the 1940s she joined the Works Progress Administration through the Educational Alliance School of Art. Her diverse influences included her studies with Hans Hofmann in Munich, her work on a mural with Diego Rivera, sculpture classes (taught in Yiddish) by Chaim Gross, and studies with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York. She traveled throughout Europe as well as to Mexico and Guatamala to see pre-Columbian art. Over her long career she received numerous prestigious awards including a National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan and a MacDowell Colony Medal. Nevelson’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Tate Modern, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble, France; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and other public and private collections worldwide. Nevelson died in New York City in 1988. The United States Postal Service commemorated Nevelson with a sheet of five stamps in 2000.
2010 ACQUISITIONS
The acquisition of Sky Cathedral caps off a year of significant growth to SJMA’s collection. Other notable acquisitions in 2010 include: a group of drawings and the painting 2.22.93-4.8.93 Bleeker (1993) by Frank Lobdell, a gift of Morgan and Betty Flagg; Catherine Opie’s photograph Melissa & Lake, Durham North Carolina (1988), a gift of the Lipman Family Foundation; a selection of photographs from Bill Owens’s “Suburbia,” “Work,” and “Leisure” series, given by Robert Shimshak; Salomón Huerta’s 2007 painting Untitled (Head), a gift of Yvonne and Mike Nevens; a group of photographs from Chris Jordan’s series, “Midway: Message from the Gyre” (2009), purchased by the Lipman Family Foundation; 19 photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe from the SJMA-commissioned series “San Jose Japantown” (2009), a gift of Susan and Bruce Worster; John Bankston’s painting To the Island (2002), a gift of Rena Bransten; NOBODYWINSWHOFIGHTSALONE (2009), by Markus Linnenbrink, a gift of The Anorcase Foundation and Patricia Sweetow; and the painting Bad Habits (1995), by Monique Prieto, a gift of William and Barbara Hyland, the Museum Collections Committee, and the Docent Council.
SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
The San Jose Museum of Art is a distinguished museum of modern and contemporary art and a lively center of arts activity in Silicon Valley. The leading institution in the area dedicated to the art of our time, SJMA is committed to providing access for its extraordinarily diverse populations and to pioneering new approaches to interpretation. Established in 1969, SJMA presents art ranging from modern masterpieces to recent works by young, emerging artists. SJMA’s permanent collection of more than 2,000 twentieth- and twenty-first-century works of art, including paintings, sculpture, installation, new media, photography, drawings, prints, and artist books, has a special focus on West Coast art, seen in an national and international context. The San Jose Museum of Art is located at 110 South Market Street in downtown San Jose, California. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 408-271-2787 or visit www.SanJoseMuseumofArt.org.
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Programs at the San Jose Museum of Art are made possible by generous general operating support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Margaret A. Gargill Foundation, the Koret Foundation, Adobe Foundation, a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José, and, with support for exhibition development, Yvonne and Mike Nevens.