On Exhibit

Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk

by Suzette McAvoy, Guest Curator

When I was growing up in Rockland from grammar school to high school, there was no museum. One of the great joys of my life is that we have a first-rate one now—a beautiful building that encloses creative works that can stand with the great ones. That is something I had not expected in my wildest dreams to find in a town in Maine—that jewel that shines.

~ Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) wrote these words following an exhibition of her work at the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1985. In the four years preceding the show, Nevelson donated eighty-seven pieces of art to the institution, including fifty-six of her own works. Her brother, Nathan Berliawsky, and sister, Anita Berliawsky Weinstein, also gave significant gifts, making the Farnsworth’s Nevelson collection the second largest holding of the artist’s work after the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City.

The exhibition Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk, newly installed in the Nevelson-Berliawsky Gallery on the museum’s sixth floor, traces the artist’s formative years to her emergence as a sculptor of international renown. It is perhaps fitting that the Farnsworth’s holdings are especially strong in her early works, as it was in Rockland that she spent her formative years and discovered her love of art.

Born Leah Berliawsky in the autumn of 1899 in Tsarist Russia, near Kyiv in what is now Ukraine, Nevelson immigrated to Maine with her family in 1905 to escape the persecution of Jews under the Imperial regime. At an early age, she received recognition from her schoolteachers as “the artist.” She later said, “From the

first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me 100 plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place you get 100 plus.”

In 1920, Louise married Charles Nevelson, a shipping company executive from New York City who had business interests in Rockland. Her move to New York following their marriage was instrumental to her growth as an artist. She called it “a city of collage…the whole thing is magnificent… There’s no place like it.” Upon her arrival, she began vigorously pursuing her interest in the arts, studying painting, acting, dance, and voice. After her son Mike, born in 1922, had reached school age, she enrolled full-time in the Art Students League, resolving to pursue a career in art.

At the League, Nevelson studied painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller, a well-known and respected artist. He taught the fundamentals of oil painting while encouraging his students to find their own artistic voice. Female Nude (c. 1929), an example of Nevelson’s student work, shows a classically posed model with a cluster of easels in the background. Although she soon rejected Miller’s traditional style, she embraced his example of art as a way of life.

Her drawing instructor at the League was Kimon Nicolaides, author of the book, The Natural Way to Draw. Nicolaides emphasized gesture or “scribble” drawing, where “you feel the movement of the whole.” Nevelson excelled at the spontaneity and speed of this drawing style and used it throughout her career. Of note in the early drawing, Four Figures (c. 1930) is the stack of three heads to the left of the central figure, a reference to the totem form of ancient Mayan, African, and Northwest Coast cultures. The totem form would become an important compositional device in her later sculptures.

In September 1931, Nevelson traveled to Munich, Germany, to study with the influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann, who she believed was “the only person who could explain and teach Cubism, Picasso, and Matisse.” When she arrived in Germany, Hitler was gaining increasing power, and she found Hofmann distracted by finalizing his plans for emigration to America. Although she studied with him briefly, she credits Hofmann with introducing her to the “push and pull” of negative and positive spaces. This concept was of critical importance to the development of her mature work.

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) Woman with a Red Scarf (Self-Portrait), c. 1947 Oil on board, 47 3/4 x 23 3/8 inches Bequest of Nathan Berliawsky, 1980.35.24 © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

After a year of traveling in Europe, visiting museums in Rome, Pisa, Florence, and Paris, she returned to New York in the fall of 1932 and re-enrolled in classes at the Art Students League. Now separated from her husband, she moved to an apartment at 1237 York Avenue, where York Avenue, New York City (1933), was painted. One of her only two known cityscapes, the painting is in the Cubist style, with the three-dimensional forms of the buildings interpreted as flat shapes conforming to the two-dimensional picture plane.

That same year, Nevelson began studying with the emerging sculptor Chaim Gross, who, along with artists William Zorach and Robert Laurent, was championing a return to direct carving in wood and stone. While she later recounted that she knew from an early age, “I want to be a sculptor; I don’t want color to help me,” she continued to practice both painting and sculpture until the early 1950s. “Making the transition to sculpture wasn’t difficult at all,” she said. “I don’t see much difference between one medium or another.” The wood relief Female Figure (c. 1936) is a rare example of her efforts at direct carving.

Many of her early sculptures are semi-abstract animals and figures in terra cotta, plaster, or “tattistone,” an aggregate of marble dust, color, stone chips, and hardening agents, named for the sculptor Alexander Tatti, whom she studied with at a WPA-sponsored workshop. Bronze Bird (1952) is one of her few pieces from this period to be cast in bronze. It is the first work by Nevelson to enter the Farnsworth’s collection, a gift from the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in 1955.

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) Female Nude, c. 1929 Oil on canvas, 30 x 22 ½ inches Gift of Louise Nevelson, 1981.2.1

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) Woman, Child, and Cats, 1946 Oil on canvas, 33 5/8 x 39 3/8 inches Gift of Nathan Berliawsky, 1977.36 © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Dawn Column I, 1959, Wood and found objects painted white, 92 3/8 x 13 ½ x 13 ½ inches Museum purchase, 1979.81 © 2022 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Her paintings are primarily fi gurative; many are heavily textured with thick layers of paint applied with a palette knife. One of the most sculptural is Figure in Blue Shirt (1952), in which the painted topknot of hair projects nearly an inch from the surface of the canvas. In this work and the painting, Woman, Child, and Cats (1946), the background of stacked rectangles foreshadows her later wooden wall constructions.

One of her most striking self-portraits is Woman in a Red Scarf (c. 1947), in which she depicts herself encircled by a red line that binds her hands, an anguished stance for an artist. Th is emotional portrayal may relate to her dealer and close friend Karl Nierendorf’s sudden death in October 1947. Nierendorf was among the fi rst to show her work, and his death threw her into a period of despair. Th e cast stone sculpture, Figure of a Woman (c. 1947) is similar in composition to the painting, with the torso represented as an inverted triangle and opposing diagonals emphasizing the tilt of the head.

In the spring of 1950 and winter of 1951, Nevelson realized a long-held dream of visiting the Mayan ruins in Mexico and Guatemala. She stated, “Th is was a world of forms that at once I felt I could identify with…a world of geometry and magic.” Upon her return, she created a series of twenty-seven etchings, including Ancient One, Sunken Cathedral, and Ancient Splendor (1952–54), inspired by the ancient ruins. A selection of these prints and new black wood sculptures were included in her 1955 exhibition, Ancient Games, Ancient Places, at Grand Central Moderns Gallery in New York—the fi rst of several career-defi ning shows. Her following three shows at Grand Central Moderns marked progress toward her mature style, culminating with Moon Garden + One in 1958. For this show, Nevelson created a totally black environment that included her fi rst wall construction, Sky Cathedral (Collection of the Museum of Modern Art), a monumental piece composed of nearly sixty stacked boxes. Art critic Hilton Kramer praised the show, describing her works as “appalling and marvelous, utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the limits of sculpture...yet profoundly exhilarating in the way they open an entire realm of possibility.”

Th e critical success of Moon Garden + One confi rmed Nevelson’s stature as an artist of national importance. Th e following year, she was invited to participate in Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. For this, her fi rst major museum exhibition, she created Dawn’s Wedding Feast, an all-white environment suggesting a nuptial ceremony. Th e slender, vertical assemblage Dawn Column I (1959) was one of ten “witnesses” that stood on a narrow platform fl anking the altar. After years of using only black, Nevelson’s use of virginal white stunned her audience. Th e show represented a new beginning for her, “a kind of wish fulfi llment, a transition to marriage with the world.” After nearly thirty years of struggle, Louise Nevelson had become the “grande dame of contemporary sculpture.”

Suzette McAvoy is an independent curator, arts writer, and museum consultant with more than thirty-fi ve years’ experience in the fi eld of fi ne art and museums. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and previously served as Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum. She has curated more than sixty exhibitions on the art and artists of Maine.