Germano Celant
Louise Nevelson
Acknowledgements
My acquaintance with Louise Nevelson and the time I spent with her date back to 1971. As my monograph on her work was being prepared to be published by Fratelli Fabbri, Milan, and Praeger, Munich, in 1973, I met with her on several occasions, either in her studio on Spring Street, in the company of her assistant Diana MacKown, or else at the Café Roma in New York, where we would go have a latte macchiato. It was the beginning of my dialogue with her and with her oeuvre. After she passed away, this dialogue between us was consolidated thanks to my curatorship of the exhibition of her work at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1994, and it is being renewed today with the publication of this book. Her work is the highest example of an enterprise undertaken by a person who, having felt like an artist ever since she was a child, was forced to assert her creative potential through suffering and struggle, reaction and construction. A complex historical pathway replete with sculptural results that has had fundamental repercussions on the history of modern art. This effect, in consideration of its imaginative breadth, is difficult to circumscribe, and it is continually changing in terms of its interpretation. My contribution is a further invitation to know about this adventure while interweaving the facts of the artist’s personal life with her art, something that would not have been possible without a personal knowledge of Nevelson and without our conversations. It is a tribute to the intensity of an artist who fought to see her identity and her specific
language acknowledged, just as much as it is a factual study of her solitary history in an adverse and difficult cultural world. To make this project come true I was able to count on the generosity of the Nevelson heirs, Myron and Maria, as well as on the initiative of the greatest supporters of her work, Arne Glimcher, Giorgio Marconi, Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer, who, with patience and largesse, believed in and supported my research and the publication of its results. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the teams of the Pace Gallery, New York, the Fondazione Marconi, Milan, and the Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, for their vital contributions. I was also able to count on the enthusiasm and expertise of Jeff Burch in New York, who was assisted by Jon Mason, Research and Archive Director, for the scientific research, the drafting of the exhibition history and the bibliography, and by Holly Machel and Cynthia Honores for the iconographic documentation. In Milan, the availability and the professional skills of Nadia Forloni in researching the unpublished material, and the care with which Deborah D’Ippolito gathered the images and the data were of crucial importance. In Zurich, the project was able to count on the help of Guido Comis, Edoardo Pepino, and Maria Florut who, over the course of time, offered precious advice in regards to documents and photographs. For the historical and scientific research that makes up the central part of the volume I am indebted to Viviana Bucarelli
for having drafted the chronology and offered her professional help in the early selection of the images; heartfelt thanks also go to Francesca Cattoi for having put together the final results, enriching them with new data and important iconographic material, and for having completed the excellent and meticulous editorial, with the ever-perfect assistance of Marcella Ferrari and Mariví García Manzano. I also wish to thank Massimo Vitta Zelman and all the staff at Skira, Milan, namely Stefano Piantini, Marcello Francone, Emma Cavazzini, Francesco Baragiola, Paola Lamanna, Emily Ligniti, Sylvia Notini, Giovanna Rocchi and Sara Salvi of Graphic&Digital Project, for the complex task of publishing this monographic text, which was difficult to create despite the fact that it corresponded to a method that has been tried and tested. Lastly, my warmest thanks go to Paris Murray Celant for the time she spent rereading and consolidating the English translation of the text, and my dearest thanks go to Argento who continues to put up with my temporary seclusion for writing purposes. Thank you all. Germano Celant
Contents
13
A Mulier Faber: Louise Nevelson Germano Celant
38
1899–1929
46
1930–1940
60
1941–1949
78
1950–1955
94
1956–1958
108
1959
126
1960–1962
148
1963–1964
166
1965–1966
176
1967–1968
198
1969–1971
222
1972–1973
238
1974–1975
264
1976–1977
298
1978–1980
314
1981–1984
330
1985–1988
Chronology 360 361
Bibliography List of Illustrations and Texts Appendix
379 385 391
Exhibitions Selected Books and Exhibition Catalogues Selected Periodicals
Note to the Reader Louise Nevelson’s oeuvre is introduced by a chronology against a gray background with the year/s indicated at the top left. In this section of the book the columns on the left-hand side list: historical and political events in bold; artistic and cultural events in roman type; the artist’s solo and group shows in blue. The columns on the right-hand side list the most important events in the artist’s life, backed by documents that have been shaded for emphasis and reproductions of her works as well as the works of other artists who were her contemporaries. Nevelson’s wall installations are reproduced on a full page against a white background with shading, while her works made to be placed on the ground or on a base are set against a shaded background. The quotations in the chronology as well as those facing the reproductions of the works are the artist’s.
34 / 1899-1929
Louise Nevelson
1899-1929 / 35
1899 1929 1907 • Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquires the work in 1939. 1910 • New York, Gallery of the Photo-Secession: Max Weber organizes a memorial exhibition of works by Henri Matisse, whom he met while in Paris between 1905 and 1908, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery. 1912 • Pablo Picasso executes the sculpture Guitare from sheet metal and wire. The work is a three-dimensional transposition of cubist painting principles, and represents a break with the traditional approach to modeling and sculpting, thus influencing subsequent developments in twentieth-century sculpture.
C1. Pablo Picasso Guitare, 1912 Sheet metal and wire, 77.5 x 35 x 19.3 cm
36 / 1899–1929
1. Berliawsky family, Louise as a child on the right, circa 1903–1907
1899 Louise Nevelson was born to Isaac and Minna Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia. She is the second of four children—Nathan, Louise, Anita, and Lillian—in a Russian Jewish family that resides near Kiev. Living in a climate of persecution and through the 1881 massacre, her father Isaac, like many other Jewish families, decides to leave the country. He hopes to start a new life in America with his family. 1903 Following his brothers, Berliawsky takes off to the New World and holds a variety of jobs while awaiting his family’s arrival: woodcutter, laborer in the lime industry, grocer, antiques/“junk” dealer, and eventually property owner. While her father is away, Louise is deeply traumatized by his absence. For six months she refuses to speak. At this time she develops her visual sensibility and her observational capabilities. 1905 Minna with Nathan and Louise immigrate to the United States and reunite with Isaac, settling in Rockland, Maine. Located on the coast, Rockland has an interesting mix of traditional residential styles of architecture, some of the world’s deepest lime quarries, grand ocean tides, and incredibly rich tree foliage. Louise is very impressed by the deep pine forests, and acquires the sense of the “livingness” of wood as a material.
3. Childhood drawing, 1905–1916 4. Rockland High School diploma, 1918 2. Class photograph, Louise is the fourth girl from the left, 1913
At a quarantine depot in Liverpool, Louise has the first visual experience she can still clearly remember: a sweetshop at night, with rows of glass jars glittering under the electric glare, each jar filled with a different sort of colored candy: toffees, bull’s eyes, peppermints, fruit gums. She recalls: “It looked like heaven. It was very magical.”T1 There is a link between her vision in the candy store and the recurrent images of her late work: the jammed boxes, each holding a variety of forms. Early on Nevelson studies music and displays an interest in drawing. Her high school art teacher, Miss Cleveland, gives her lessons. She does some early drawings of furniture.
“When I was a little girl, she said, I was always cutting into the brown soap we used to have and making things out of it. I came from a small town, and the teachers called me ‘the artist’ from the first grade on. Later I was like a horse with two blinders. It never occurred to me to do anything else.”T5 “My life had a blueprint from the beginning, and that is the reason that I don’t need to make blueprints or drawings for my sculpture. What I am saying is that I was an artist. Early in
school, they called me ‘the artist.’ I am not saying that they learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it.”T6 “My theory is that when we come on this earth, many of us are ready made. Some of us, most of us have genes that are ready for certain performances. Nature gives you these gifts. There’s no denying that Caruso came with a voice, there’s no denying that Beethoven came with music in his soul. Picasso was drawing like an angel in the crib. You are born with it.”T7
“From the first day in school to the day I graduated, everyone gave me 100% in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go where you get 100%.”T2 “I was an artist when I was four. Artists are born, you know. They have to have the right equipment. Once you know you have it, life is not easier but you are working on the positive side.”T3 “I remember going to the library, I couldn’t have been more than nine . . . The librarian asked me what I was going to be and of course, I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist.’ ‘No, I added, I want to be a sculptor, I don’t want color to help me.’”T4 As a child she constantly rearranges furniture and tends to collect marbles, fabric, old lace, and wood.
1899–1929 / 37
1919 • On October 22 Berlin accepts the peace conditions established by the US. This marks the start of the peace process that brings World War I to a close, with the defeat of the German and Austrian armies. • Milan, Palazzo Cova: Giacomo Balla’s Marchesa Casati with Eyes of Mica and a Heart of Stone, 1916–1919, is displayed. The work is published on the cover of the periodical Il Mondo on March 30 (Rome, V, no. 16) and is described as a plastic assemblage made from cardboard, glass, colored tin foil, and wood. 1920 • Prohibition, which bans the sale of alcohol, goes into effect in the US, until 1933. • The League of Nations is founded, but the US Senate votes against joining it. • In August the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, granting women the right to vote, is passed. • In New Jersey, Marcel Duchamp, Katherine S. Drier, and Man Ray establish the Société Anonyme Inc., which is dedicated to promoting culture and exhibiting modern art. • Max Weber begins teaching at the Art Students League of New York. • Kurt Schwitters starts working on Der Merzbau in his home in
Hanover. This is a vast architectural construction, showing the influence of the constructivist concept of the total environment, where the architecture, furniture, and art of a room are integrated to create the total arrangement and structure of the space. The actual center of Der Merzbau was a free-standing sculpture, begun in 1920, which Schwitters called the Säule des erotischen Elends (Column of Erotic Misery). Der Merzbau continues to grow as Schwitters works on it until December 1936, when he flees the Nazis. After abandoning the work, the artist states it was unfinished and that in principle it could continue indefinitely. Schwitters never returns to Germany and the Merzbau is destroyed in an Allied air raid on the night of October 8–9, 1943. • Vladimir Tatlin completes the designs of the Monuments to the Third International and between March and November prepares a model of the tower, which is exhibited in December in Moscow at the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Thanks to Nikolai Punin, an art critic, historian, and friend of Tatlin, the monument’s project is published and described in an article that same year. It is greatly acclaimed abroad, especially among Berlin dadaists. • Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner issue their “Realistic Manifesto,” outlining the tenets of constructivism.
“New York is a city of collage, a collage with kinds of religions, and a whole thing is magnificent . . . There is no place like it.”T12 Yet her marriage to the city is stronger than that to her husband. “Marriage was the only complication in my life . . . My husband’s family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven. You were not allowed to be a creator, you were just supposed to be an audience. This empty appreciation didn’t suit me, and from the beginning of my marriage, I felt hemmed in. I was a creator, and I had to make things.”T13 “I was shy, I was so shy that I couldn’t open my mouth. I think that the role that society creates for women had a great deal to do with it.”T14 So she starts to study painting, acting, modern dance; she also takes singing classes. All these interests contribute to drowning her marriage. “I think romance is great, and I think love affairs are marvelous, and I certainly think sex is here to stay, and I love it. As long as you meet as companions and perform as lovers, that’s fine. But the minute you get that $2 paper, a marriage license, that
C6. Kurt Schwitters Der Merzbau, 1920–1943 C5. Flatiron Building, New York
40 / 1899–1929
becomes a business—it’s a partnership. And not only that, it gives the mates the privilege of all barriers down, and for God’s sakes who can handle that! It’s a lot of work and it’s not that interesting. I wouldn’t marry God if he asked me.”T15 1921 Nevelson inadvertently becomes pregnant. She grows panicky and depressed at facing motherhood. “I wasn’t ready for motherhood; I didn’t know how to live.”T16 1922 February 23: she gives birth to her only child, Myron Irving Nevelson (known as Mike). She begins studying voice with Estelle Liebling, a former opera singer and teacher at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, when Mike is only four months old. She studies briefly at the Art Students League. 1924 She enrolls in Anne Goldthwaite’s Saturdayafternoon drawing classes at the Art Students League. The Nevelsons move to Mt. Vernon, an upper-middle class Jewish suburb where Louise lives in isolated domesticity and finds herself thrown further into depression. Her sister lives with them for a year and her family at-
tempts to rally around her, seeing how unhappy and depressed she is. 1926 Nevelson meets Frederick Kiesler, the young Austrian-American theoretician, architect, and avant-garde theater designer, through Pricess Norina Matchabelli, an Italian actress who plays in Max Reinnhard’s 1911–1912 London production of The Miracle. He will have a big influence on her, also in relation to her later appearance. This is the first time that she becomes interested in the Fourth Dimension. Kiesler introduces her to the idea of “correalism” or “continuity,” which concerns the relationship among space, people, objects, and concepts. Meanwhile the shipping business and other interests that the Nevelson brothers are involved with fail and Charles leaves the company. Louise and Charles begin having financial troubles. They move to Brooklyn where their standard of living is greatly reduced. 1927 In the summer, she goes to Maine and enrolls in a landscape painting class. In October, she enrolls in the Theatre Arts Institute, organized by Kiesler and Princess Matchabelli in Brooklyn. Matchabelli and Kiesler are interested in spiritualism and the Fourth Dimension.
6. Louise Nevelson, 1915–1920
8. Charles, Louise, and Myron Nevelson, 1920s 9. Louise Nevelson, 1922–1930s
1899–1929 / 41
1959
C26. Richard Stankiewicz Railroad Urchin, 1959 Iron and steel, 129.5 x 104 x 50.8 cm C25. Carl Andre First Ladder, 1958 Carved wooden beam set into a wooden base, 2 elements: beam 172 x 9 x 15 cm, base 20 x 20 x 20 cm 139. Stalagmite, 1958–1959 Wood painted black, 207 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm 146. Rain Forest Column VIII, 1959 Wood painted black, height 274.3 cm 147. Totem II, 1959 Wood painted white, 280.7 x 34.3 x 35.5 cm
• Between 1958 and 1959, Carl Andre makes his first sculptures in wood, carved in pieces of timber. Influenced by Constantin Brancusi, he realizes a group of works such as First Ladder, 1958, and Last Ladder, 1959. • New York, Stable Gallery, Richard Stankiewicz, January: the artist displays his works made by assembling salvaged metal objects. • New York, Hansa Gallery, George Segal, February 2–21: the artist exhibits paintings, drawings, and life-size plaster figures. • Lincoln, The University of Nebraska, University Galleries, Sixty-Ninth Annual: Nebraska Art Association on the occasion of the Lincoln Centennial, March 1–31. • Chicago, Devorah Sherman Gallery, Sculpture of Louise Nevelson, March 29–April 30. • New York, New York Coliseum, Art U.S.A., April 3–19. • New York, National Association of Women Artists, 67th Annual Exhibition, May 7–24.
• New York, James Gallery, Invitation Annual: Show of Painting and Sculpture, May 8–28. • Paris, Galerie René Drouin, Une caverne de l’anti-matière, May 13: Pinot Gallizio constructs his Caverna dell’antimateria, covering the walls of the exhibition space with 145 square meters of industrial paint. • Fidel Castro becomes Cuba’s President. At the age of thirty-two, he is sworn in as Prime Minister in the Cabinet Room of the Presidential Palace in Havana. Castro led the resistance against the seven-year military rule of President Fulgencio Batista and commanded the 26 July Army, a guerrilla force that drove the old regime into exile on New Year’s Day. • On September 15, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev begins an unprecedented tour of the United States. The Soviet leader, regarded as more moderate than his predecessor Joseph Stalin, is
greeted warmly by President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Andrew’s Air Force Base. On September 18, Khrushchev addresses the United Nations in New York, calling for total nuclear disarmament within four years. One week later, Eisenhower and Khrushchev begin the first-ever superpowers summit at Camp David in Maryland, and the two leaders agree to relieve world tensions by compromising on crucial Cold War issues such as the status of Berlin. Khrushchev’s American tour, which ends on September 27, is heralded as a new high in US-Soviet relations. • Washington, DC, Gres Gallery, Surrealism: Imagery to Reality, September 30–October 27. • New York, Reuben Gallery, Allan Kaprow: Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, October 4–10: during six consecutive evenings, Kaprow presents his very complex theatrical work, which is an assemblage of live sound recordings, scents,
The columns in the subway had as much meaning as many of the things that are in museums.T115
106 / 1959
1959 / 107
Well, within your being you have a sense of scale and measurement, because anything outside in the world you have inside your consciousness and consequently you identify with this scale and weight and measure and you’re there with it; you’re just there with it. For example, I had the straight walls and somehow it came to me that I would like to give circle to the straight. And, before I knew it, I did it. And then I wanted great enclosure so I thought of black. It’s very simple. Everything is here and it’s up to you to use it. It’s not any great shakes to do these things. And again you can think of modern dance, the way the body flows. I told you that, for many, many years, I studied modern dance. Well, that modern dance also has all this; you’re not just jumping, but you have space and the body has space. Look, all these places are empty; there’s air in them and they have space and, if we recognize that this is architecture and we recognize what we are made of and how we are made and put together, the rest is an extension. And I can still go back to say that it’s your consciousness and your awareness of all this. It is kind of a remarkable grandeur and you use this because you identify. So all that I have said all along the line is that I don’t want to make anything; what I am doing is living the livingness of life, the livingness of the livingness, and using all these things to extend this awareness.T76
145 (EX 163). Sky Cathedral’s Presence I, 1959–1962 Wood painted black, 273.1 x 257.8 x 52.7 cm Following pages 156. Night Sun III, 1959–1968 Wood painted black, 301 x 242.5 x 20.3 cm 157. Night Sun II, 1959–1968 Wood painted black, 256.5 x 213.4 x 25.4 cm
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CHIEERE CREDITI A PAOLA
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1985 1988
1985 • A Lebanese terrorist hijacks an American passenger plane and holds seventeen people hostage for thirty-nine days. • Mikhail Gorbaciov assumes power in the USSR. • San Francisco, Ivory/Kimpton Gallery, Louise Nevelson, March 21–April 20. • Texas, Amarillo, Amarillo Art Center, Eight Modern Masters, April 20–June 23. • Maine, Rockland, William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, The Art of Nevelson at Farnsworth, September 22–November 17. • The Guerrilla Girls are founded in response to the poor showing of women and minorities in New York galleries and museums. • New York, PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, The Knot: Arte Povera, October 6–December 15. The show is curated by Germano Celant. • New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Transformations in Sculpture: Four Decades of American and European Art, November 22, 1985–February 16, 1986. • Florida, Palm Beach, Hokin Gallery, Louise Nevelson.
628. Cover of John Harvard’s Journal, 1985
599. Volcanic Magic VIII, 1981 Paper and wood on board, 101.6 x 76.2 cm 724. Untitled, 1985 Cardboard, metal, paint, paper, and wood on board, 102 x 81 x 8.9 cm
328 / 1985–1988
1986 • Fort Lauderdale, Museum of Art, An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture Since 1940, January 12–March 30. • Düsseldorf, January 23: Joseph Beuys dies. • Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Louise Nevelson, January 23–February 22. • Washington, DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Relief Sculpture from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection, January 26–April 13. • Lausanne, Galerie Alice Pauli, Louise Nevelson, April 11–May 31. • New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Homage to Louise Nevelson: A Selection of Sculpture and Collages, July 24–September 1. • New York, The Pace Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Mirrors–Shadows, September 19–October 25. • Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, September 25–November 30: the exhibition shows how some artists, like Jeff Koons and Joel Otterson, play on
the collapse of sculpture into commodities, while others, like Haim Steinbach and General Idea, emphasize the prominence of design and display. • New York, Claude Bernard Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Collages, October 7–November 8. • Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, List Visual Arts Center, Bakalar Sculpture Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Works in Wood, October 10–December 31. • New York, Lever/Meyerson Galleries, Ltd., Hans Hofmann and His Legacy, October 15–December 12. • Birmingham, The University of Alabama, Moody Art Gallery, Contemporary Work from The Pace Gallery. • Richard Marshall, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, commissions Robert Mapplethorpe to make portraits for the book titled 50 New York Artists, including ones of Willem de Kooning, Mark Di Suvero, Elizabeth Murray, Eric Fischl, Malcom Morley, Richard Serra, Louise Nevelson, Red Grooms, and Sandro Chia. • The United States imposes heavy economic sanctions on South Africa, in an attempt
1985 Nevelson donates twenty-five works to, among others, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Cooper Union, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum, and, in Europe, The Tate Gallery in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Total value of the donations is estimated at more than $5 million. Night Sail, 30 feet tall, 30 tons, is installed at the Crocker Center in Los Angeles; it is the first large outdoor piece on public view in Southern California. “I am a woman of great action, I don’t sit and dream. I’d rather move a mountain.”T57 She is presented with a National Medal of the Arts from President Reagan. The outdoor sculpture Night Wall I is erected in front of Langdell Hall and is donated to the University Art Museum of Harvard University. She receives an honorary degree from Harvard and an honorary degree from Brandeis University in Waltham.
1986 The indoor public sculpture environment Dawn’s Forest, 1985–1986, is installed at the Georgia Pacific Center in Atlanta. She receives the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Great Artist series award. The Pratt Institute in New York gives her an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts. “I have lived. I have been fulfilled. I recognized what I had, and I never sold it short. And I ain’t through yet!”T58 “It’s nice [being famous]. But it doesn’t overwhelm me . . . Does Beethoven care about these things? He’s dead anyway. This immortality is a joke. I don’t think about it. You know what I think of? When I am working, that’s living.”T59 “I am not that rich, because I have a lot of family around who I take care of. And I don’t even believe in leaving a lot of money because I see what it does to people.”T60 626. Untitled, 1985 Wood painted black, 115.6 x 43.2 cm
I somehow for myself feel independent of an audience and independent of human beings. I stand and feel independent. Because my life was a solo and I can’t thank too many people on earth.T171
627. Review in The New York Times, 1985
329 / 1985–1988
to force the South African government to abolish Apartheid. • The Iran-Contra affair breaks out. President Ronald Reagan accepts responsibility for having violated the embargo on weapons to Iran. 1987 • Connecticut, Fairfield County, Whitney Museum of American Art, Louise Nevelson: A Concentration of Works from the Permanent Collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, January 7–March 11. Travels to: Pennsylvania, Allentown, Muhlenberg College Center for the Arts, opens April 2. • Chicago, Richard Gray Gallery, Modern and Contemporary Masters, January 31–March 7. • Boston, Barbara Krakow Gallery, Louise Nevelson: Constructions, February 7–March 4.
• New York, February 22: Andy Warhol dies. • New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, American Mastery: Eight Artists in the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, June 8, 1987–May 21, 1988. • Washington, DC: the National Museum of Women in Arts opens its doors with the exhibition American Women Artists 1830–1930, curator Eleanor Tufts. • On June 26, at the end of the plenary session of the Central Committee of the CPSU, reformer Mikhail Gorbachev’s line of action prevails, paving the way for the Perestroika movement. • On October 19, the US stock market crashes and the market loses 22% of its value in a day.
• Amherst, University of Massachusetts, Herter Art Gallery, Contemporary American Collage: 1960–1986, November 9–December 11. Travels to: Ohio, Youngstown, Butler Institute of American Art, September 11–October 23, 1988; Missouri, Kansas City Art Institute, November 14–December 24, 1988. • New York, December 8: Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the first nuclear arms control treaty. 1988 • New York, January 6: the UN Security Council passes a resolution inviting Israel not to expel the leaders of the Palestinian revolt and to respect the norms of the Geneva Conventions on the rights of civilian populations in occupied territories. Israel rejects the resolution.
• Florida, Palm Beach, Hokin Gallery, Louise Nevelson, February 1–20. • Belfast, March 16: three bombs are launched against the crowd of Catholics attending the funerals of three suspected IRA members. Three people die. • March 25: the Chinese Parliament, following a proposal made by Deng Xiaoping, passes a series of reforms. It recognizes private business, authorizes land transactions, and promotes the country’s social and political democratization. • Venice, 58. Venice Biennale, June 26–September 25: the work Night Gesture I, 1976–1986, as planned before her death, is installed in the Giardini.
648. Pamphlet for Homage to Louise Nevelson, A Selection of Sculpture and Collages, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1986
645. Installation view of Mirror-Shadows at The Pace Gallery, New York, 1986
330 / 1985–1988
1987 “If they blow [the world] up, that’s not my business. My business is to work. I could have stopped after WWII, but I thought, How would I live? I had to express the creative energy. Because I was getting sick and things. If you don’t express what you have to, you get sick.”T61 “When people say that I’m a strong woman, it offends me no end. Because I don’t want to be a strong woman. All I want is to reveal what I understand about the world to myself. And that is my whole search. I want it to be revealed to me. For that I work; for that I will work more.”T62 She is diagnosed with lung cancer. 1988 Nevelson dies on April 17.
647. Catalogue cover for Louise Nevelson, Sculptures et Reliefs, La Galerie Alice Pauli, Lausanne, 1986
658. Catalogue cover for Louise Nevelson, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987
My total conscious search in life has been for a new seeing, a new image, a new insight. This search not only includes the object but the inbetween place. The Dawns and the Dusks. The objective world, the heavenly spheres, the place below the land and sea.T108
725. Untitled, 1986 Metal, paper, and wood on board, 112 x 81.5 x 16.5 cm
331 / 1985–1988
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When I pick up a piece to put in a piece, it’s living and waiting for that piece. You don’t just break a thing and put it in. That becomes self-conscious, and that has no life. That’s why I pick up old wood that had a life, the cars have gone over and the nails have been crushed. You have to cut it sometimes, you might even break it sometimes, but it has to be done a certain way, not broken unconsciously.T160
625F. Untitled, 1985 Welded Cor-Ten steel painted black, 853.5 x 853.5 x 274.3 cm
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To me, actually, some of the poorest and cheapest woods are really the most exciting—the Japanese boxes and crates have the most texture, and they have knots in them. It doesn’t matter. During the war there was a shortage of materials, and I decided that creativity was the important thing and I would see things that I could use, everywhere. I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind. I had always, way back years ago, felt that . . . In my environment as a child I was very aware of relationships. The injustice of relationships. And I suppose I transferred that awareness to material, what we call “inanimate.” I began to see things, almost anything along the street, as art. I don’t think you can touch a thing that cannot be rehabilitated into another life. And once I gave the whole world life in that sense, I could use anything.T159
625D. Mirror-Shadow V, 1985 Wood painted black, 262.9 x 317.5 x 66 cm
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40393. Untitled, 1985 Paint, vinyl, and wood on board, 129.5 x 203.8 x 19 cm
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28951. Untitled, circa 1985 Wood, paint on board, 149.9 x 152.7 x 48.3 cm
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18349a. Night Gesture I, 1976–1986 Welded Cor-Ten steel painted black, 51.8 x 57.2 x 29 cm 18350. Untitled, 1976–1986 Welded Cor-Ten steel painted black, 68.6 x 68.6 x 27.4 cm
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19143. Mirror-Shadow XXXXIII, 1987 Wood painted black, 142.2 x 236.2 x 40.6 cm Following page 668. Night Gesture I, 1976–1986 Welded Cor-Ten steel, 518 x 570.9 x 289.2 cm Installation at the 58. Venice Biennale, 1988
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In the end, when you get older, your life is your life and you are alone with it. You are alone with it, and I don’t think that the outside world is needed. It doesn’t have much influence on me as an artist, or on us as individuals because one cannot be divorced from the other. It is the total life. Mine is a total life.T63
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