An Appreciation : Nevelson Cast a Mystique All Her Own

Louise Nevelson, who died Sunday, looked like a Gypsy ballerina with her great soulful doe eyes swathed in mink lashes, head turbaned, ears bangled with baubles the size of Ping-Pong balls. She looked like a fortuneteller doyenne fashion model, a Jewish expatriate who was born in Kiev and drank tea from a glass.

Born in ‘99, died in ’88 at 88. Nice symmetry in that, especially if you lay the 8s on their sides quadrupling the sign for infinity.

She was a New York artist par excellence embodying its glitz and panache, its individuality, shrewd social aplomb and sinewy toughness. Her work played best there. Her walls of wooden detritus, newel posts, lumber and thingamabobs painted slate black or gold had something in common with the Manhattan skyline that looks so grandiose when you are at the bottom of it and so toylike from a jet.

Not that her art isn’t personal. Her family--named Berliawsky--immigrated to Rockland, Me., in 1905 and her father became a lumber contractor. It’s as if she spent her whole life playing in her dad’s lumber yard. That happens in art. There’s an earthworks artist whose pop was an archeologist and a kinetic junk assemblagist whose old man was an engineer. Sometimes it just seems like fate.

Louise Nevelson talked about herself as if she were fated. Still a little girl, she startled herself by announcing to a teacher that she was going to be a sculptor. She may have surprised herself even more when she married New York shipowner Charles Nevelson at 21. They had a son, and she tried hard for 11 years to be a proper well-heeled wife, but in the end it was just impossible to be that and herself at the same time.

Her fate may have been clear but the path was not. She studied drama. She went to Europe to learn from Hans Hoffman but wound up as a Viennese movie extra. Well, there is a certain glamour in being a Viennese extra rather than just an extra extra.

She studied modern dance and thought about killing herself. When she finally knuckled down to being a sculptor, there was no turning back. Decades of hard times followed years of rough going.

When was it we finally started hearing about her out here in Angeltown? She had made really fine work in the ‘50s, wooden assemblages that made you think about Giacometti’s Surrealist years, Noguchi’s spare abstractions or Ernst’s images of primitive kings and queens. Nevelson’s art was abstract but its wooden members suggested people--dancers in graceful and mysterious ritual. They make you think that her theatrical and terpsichorean flirtations were less studies than simple confirmations that drama and rhythm were already within her.

Nevelson’s work hit Los Angeles along with the rest of New York art in the ‘60s. It’s funny but we thought of her in the same breath as Pop art, Op art and Minimalism. She was part of the first wave of celebrating contemporary art as an In Thing. She even designed some jewelry, big jewelry, naturally, to go with large ambitions and heroic egos.

In that ambiance it was easy to read Nevelson as simply the oldest of the “new” artists who would go on to that institutional fame that obliges museums to have a piece in the collection and corporations to have her on the short list for a plaza commission along with Henry Moore, Claes Oldenberg and Noguchi. In Los Angeles, Crocker Bank settled on a Nevelson.

She was like a brand-new artist who had been around forever. She carried a mythic presence that admitted of the influence of no other artist and betrayed no particular stylistic affinities. She said she had never heard of the German detritus-environment maker Kurt Schwitters until after her own environmental work.

She suggested the energy and scale of Abstract Expressionism, the eccentricity of Assemblage and the organization of Cubism without clear ties to any of them. It might be argued that she was a pioneer of today’s elaborate one-of-a-kind “installations,” but the case is not easy to prove.

Nevelson was not fated to make a clear formal contribution. She was not a “school” artist. Nevelson was fated to be herself--not always the easiest role for any of us to play. Her works broadcast the same scenario as her persona--dramatic and mysterious set pieces populated with ambiguous personages of royal bearing. They evade their existence in modern times. Like refugees fleeing Europe, they wind up in the United States only in the most banal sense. They settle in a placeless fantasy land whose penumbra of mystery and solemn ancient ritual is surrounded by an aura of glamorous make-believe.