Arts and Letters

Louise Nevelson was born in Russia, near Kiev, as our century opened. Her family spoke Russian outside the house, Yiddish at home. They come to the New World in 1905, not through New York Harbor and Ellis Island, but by the back door, southward from Canada, till their money runs out, in Rockland, Maine. Louise is five years old. She, her brother, and two sisters enter the Rockland School. Their father struggles, prospers, builds wooden houses (like his daughter later?), acquires property. He believes in education.

Louise's teachers recognize, early, her drive toward art. She says of them, "As a child, everybody knew that I had these two things, pianissimo and fortissimo."

During World War I a ship-owning family in New York sends damaged ships to Maine for repair. The eldest of four brothers propositions the eighteen-year-old Louise and is rebuffed. But two years later he sends a brother (sixteen years younger) as a suitor, and a marriage is arranged. Louise accepts, on condition that she may attend Pratt Institute. The engagement lasts two years. Then she brings with her, to New York, a young talent, a drive, a sense of independence, and a clear, deliberate, slow, Down-East accent, and succinct, sometimes poetic, turn of phrase.

She finds various art teachers. She becomes a mother, later a grandmother, eventually a great-grandmother. As to talent, Louise believed she was born with it. She knew what she wanted, and she also had an instinct for early contact with gifted people. For example, she studied with the Baroness Rebay, pre-Guggenheim. In 1931 she went to Hans Hofmann's school in Munich, before he came to New York and Provincetown. In 1932 she assisted Diego Rivera on his frescoes in New York. She found George Grosz at the Art Students League. Crossing to Europe on the Liberté, she met Céline, who proposed to her. In 1941, she went up to the dealer Nierendorf, a refugee from Berlin who had recently installed himself in New York, and asked for a show. When he protested ignorance of her work, she took him to her studio and he opened her exhibition three weeks later.

Louise, like many sculptors, had started as a painter. She later declared, "Of course I have never left two dimensions." She had earlier said that two dimensions were better than three, because with two, one created an illusion. She remained, in a lifetime of sculpture, tied to relief. In her mature work, there was almost always the picture plane.

She enters a world of collage which is, by definition, two dimensional, and she populates it with a vast array of "objects trouvés," gathering into her studio on Tenth Street a hoard of what she called "old wood." "I wanted a medium that was immediate"—self-contradictory, but it makes sense. She explains: "The fact that it's wood means that it has another life." That life she enshrines.

Louise had a long, patient apprenticeship. From that first show, at Nierendorf, she sold nothing. It was wartime, life was hard. Her son Mike, now grown, had gone to sea in the Merchant Marine.

In the late forties Louise is still living in a cold-water flat. She applies for a Guggenheim Fellowship, is turned down, but meets Josephine Leighton, secretary to Henry Allen Moe. Something comes of this; every week Louise is invited to the Leighton apartment in the East Fifties to have a hot bath, to wash her hair, to have a good meal.

Welcome is slower in the rest of New York. Nierendorf shows Louise again in 1942, 1944, and 1946. But when the Whitney buys something from her, she is already fifty-six; fifty-seven by the time the Brooklyn Museum buys, and fifty-eight when, at last, the Modern Museum follows suit. Four years later, Dorothy Miller presents her at the Venice Biennale. In 1964 she is there again, with a small group of Americans. But it is not until 1967 that the Whitney exposes, in a full-fledged retrospective, the range of her dramatic and poetic talent: an unforgettable mise-en-scéne by Louise herself, under pale, haunting light. That was twenty years ago, and she was already sixty-seven.

Nevelson's slow emergence confirms again that, of all the arts, painting and sculpture have the latest harvest.

She once declared: "I think we create our lives." But she needed a lifetime to do it. Fortunately, she was to have two more active decades—not just of acceptance, but of stardom, professional and personal. She confirmed that she spoke, whether in two or three dimensions, with her own voice.

Commentators mention Schwitters; she must have known his work. Both she and he are children of Collage and Cubism. However, Louise remained untainted by Dada or references to headlines, typography, or verbal play. Her detritus is not from billboards, packaging, or the press, but from the wreckage of our slums. She reveals to us, with every selected piece of wood, every nail, every hammer stroke, who she is, what she has seen, and what it tells.

Some may regret that Nevelson discovered plexiglass, cor-ten steel, and Lippincott. After all, an artist is entitled to be known by her best work. Louise was clear, eloquent, sometimes peremptory, independent of fashion or ism; she "created the language in which she is understood," but without an etymology, without a trace of the copybook. She does not argue, she states. No polemic—she does not try to tell us what art is, or is not. With her sticks of wood and their memory, she is a maker, a poet.

There have been a few women in history, apart from crowned heads, who did not need women's lib or NOW; a list could include: Joan of Arc? Catherine of Siena? George Sand? Marie Curie? Edith Sitwell? Martha Graham?—for me, Eleanor Roosevelt. I would put Louise among them. She said once: "I feel that through Nature I'm totally female." Let it stand. She does not need help.