Biography

Louise Nevelson was a pioneering American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and steel outdoor sculptures. Nevelson’s sculptures, much like her celebrity, are the products of the artist’s interest in elaborate scale. They are sweeping, intricate in their expansiveness and as delicate as they are imposing. Her work—even those pieces that move from the floor to the wall—convey a kind of permanence that seems nonnegotiable, almost rooted, as if they are a fundamental part of the walls and buildings that hold them. A student of Diego Rivera, Nevelson took cue from the vastness of murals in ways that had only been explored by the abstract expressionist painters of the time. This scale proved crucial to experiencing Nevelson’s work less as individual objects of art, and more as wholly new environments, “new worlds,” as she called them, visually commanding and defined by a single aesthetic. This aesthetic is defined by “crates” stacked and piled with an exhaustive variety of molded and found wood and often covered in a monochromatic palate; to see them one thinks of dense urban spaces. Theatrical and totemic, her created worlds invite her viewers into a space dominated by myth and symbol but grounded in an almost mathematical precision which gives their presence an unwavering confidence. This intensely architectural nature reveres the precise design of Constructivism while also exploring Nevelson’s unique and highly emotive aesthetic through the combination of grids and extreme angles.

Nevelson’s practice closely engaged the city she lived in, her materials taken directly from its streets and her sculptures evoking its skyline. In 1978 a fire devastated the organ at St. Marks Church on the Bowery, nearby her East 7th Street apartment in New York. Decorative remnants of the church organ rescued from the fire were given to Nevelson, who used these pieces in a series of sculptures made in the early 1980s, including Cascades-Perpendiculars II (Night Music) (1980 – 1982). A tall, free-standing sculpture, Cascades-Perpendiculars II suggests the commanding architecture of the church, while its decorative wood pieces evoke sonic structure.

This work by Louise Nevelson joins SJMA’s growing permanent collection holdings by the artist including Sky Cathedral (1957) and Collage (1974).

Biography
Nevelson was born in Poltava Governorate, Russia (now Ukraine) in 1899 and died in New York City in 1988. She studied visual and performing arts at New York’s Art Students League; she later studied alongside artists Diego Rivera and Stanley William Hayter, eventually joining the Works Progress Administration through the Educational Alliance School of Art. Nevelson has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, including exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Nevelson’s work is in major collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble, France; and Tate Gallery, London. Nevelson represented the United States in the 31st Venice Biennale. She was president of the New York chapter of Artists' Equity (1957 – 1959) and president of National Artists' Equity (1962 – 1964). Over her long career she received a National Medal of Arts, a MacDowell Colony Medal, the Brandeis University Creative Award in Sculpture, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. (acquisitions meeting February 20, 2018)

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