Louise Nevelson

(Ukraine-United States of America, 23/09/1899 - 17/04/1988) 

At just 10 years old, Nevelson had already declared her intention to become a professional sculptor and make a career of her favourite childhood toys – the scrap pieces of wood she found at the lumber yard her father operated after the family emigrated from Kyiv to the U.S. in 1905. Moving to New York in 1920, her career began by studying visual and performing art at the Art Students League, although her artistic output at this time was relatively limited due to her marrying and having a child. Unwilling to be the socialite wife her husband expected, Nevelson sold a diamond bracelet he had given her after their son’s birth and headed to Europe, leaving her soon-to-be ex-husband and son behind. 

While in Munich she studied with Abstract painter Hans Hofmann before visiting Italy and France where she discovered Cubism and collage. Returning to New York in 1932, she began exhibiting her work in group shows and again studied at the Art Students League while working as an art teacher for the WPA and as an assistant to Diego Rivera on mural projects. Using various mediums, including lithographs, clay and painting, her figurative and sometimes abstract experimentations characterise what she recalled as “a time of searching and finding myself as an artist”, and led to her first solo exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1941. 

Also around this time, Nevelson began working with her signature medium of scavenged wood that she gathered from junkyards and city streets and transformed into sculptures through an additive process, rather than the traditional subtraction of carving. It was not until the late 1950s that she would start painting her assemblages monochromatic black, which she claimed was the “most aristocratic colour” and unified the disparate foraged materials.  

Despite working actively for decades and having exhibited in major institutions, Nevelson only gained public recognition in her late fifties – her work caused a sensation at a MoMA show in 1958 and, in 1962 she represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennial and had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum. 

Image: Louise Nevelson, Cascade VII (1979). Wood painted black, 259.1 x 322.6 x 40.6 cm. Pace Art Gallery.