Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face by Julia Bryan-Wilson. Yale University Press, 352 pp., $60.
The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury by Shirley Reece-Hughes. Yale University Press, 208 pp., $50.
Louise Nevelson called New York City her mirror. She trawled the streets of Manhattan for good bits of refuse, mostly wood, and dragged them back to her apartment, cleaned them in the bathtub, and fused them together, niches that she filled with microworlds composed of reclaimed elements like chair backs, shoehorns, fruit crates, and cornices. Nevelson preferred monochromatic schemes: Most of her sculptures were painted oil black, which she called the most aristocratic of the colors. She was obsessed with theaters and palaces. The art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson describes Nevelson as outside of time: She smoked cigarillos, referred to marriage as her greatest mistake, and eschewed the heteronormative standard of living in the midcentury United States. She preferred to live downtown with the bohemians, in what she called her “palace,” an apartment in Chelsea and, later, another apartment further downtown.
Born in what is now Ukraine to a Jewish family who immigrated to Maine
in 1905, Nevelson is best known for those monochromatic, wall-sized sculptures and for her eccentric self-presentation that first baffled critics and later inspired countless artists, students, and queer aficionados. They regard her as a queen whose queendom was her studio because, fittingly, evoking “royalty” for Nevelson was a matter of atmosphere, a feeling she could build herself. Her ramshackle apartment in Lower Manhattan (she moved to New York after marrying in 1920) and the worlds she built inside it became the crucibles in which her identity—both public and private—were formed. Her father worked as a woodcutter and ran a junkyard for a living; her mother wore the heavy black eye makeup that Nevelson later adopted as her own signature look. Nevelson’s work and life alike have captivated audiences with their sheer enormity, intricacy, and resistance to categorization. Recently, they have both been the subject of critical reappraisal.
A 2023 retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, titled The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury, surveys Nevelson’s artistic efforts starting in the early 1930s, when she studied dance and movement with Martha Graham, and ending in the 1960s, when she became known for her presence in a very young and masculine art world. That anomalous presence, as well as her persona as an eccentric crone of Lower Manhattan, made both her and her work deeply misunderstood by the critics of her time. The retrospective and its accompanying catalog by Shirley Reece-Hughes, with contributions from Julia Bryan-Wilson, Mary Coffey, Jane Dini, Marin R Sullivan, Karli Wurzelbacher, Tara Donovan, Elizabeth Finch, Ellen Graff, Maria Nevelson, and Jean Shin, approach Nevelson’s work through an exploration of her formal choices and artistic maneuvers—from her early influences in dance, to the way she switched from a subtractive style to an additive one, to the way she fixed her position in the male-dominated canon.
Bryan-Wilson, for her part, takes a more idiosyncratic approach to Nevelson’s oeuvre. Using feminist critic Sarah Ahmed’s definition of queer—to disturb the order of things—as a guide, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture (2023) assesses the artist’s work thematically rather than chronologically. The monograph is split into four thin volumes, each organized by a gesture that Nevelson makes throughout her career and life: “Drag,” “Color,” “Join,” and “Face.” The format attempts to queer the traditional monograph and the art-historical canon without foisting the burden of history or “women’s art” onto Nevelson’s shoulders.
Detractors used her outfits, thick eyeliner, the fact that she was a woman over the age of twenty-five, to deride her, but Nevelson took advantage of that flattening of substance and image. For her, imitation was an affirmation that her style was worth repeating.
These two disparate approaches—the retrospective that divides an artist’s career into sequential periods and the treatment of that same career as an amorphous thing, rife with circuitous references, rather than a linear progression—are befitting of Nevelson. It’s important to view her and her work in relationship to history, taking particular note of the way that white male critics of her era failed to understand her power and style, as well as to understand the timeless totality of her life and art.
On this last point: Nevelson was one of the first American artists to refer to her work as an “environment” in a decade, the 1970s, when the meaning of the word was being considered anew. Her wall-size sculptures, which could be thought of as a façade without a building, displayed her fascination with the way interior household objects contain histories and summon memories; her world filled exhibition rooms with an energy critics of the moment found difficult to describe. Still, Nevelson encountered fellow travelers during her time. Bryan-Wilson makes a keen comparison between Nevelson’s work and that of Noah Purifoy, the Black American artist on the West Coast known for his massive sculpture garden made from ostensible junk and for work that addresses or re-creates historic moments in Black American history like the Watts Riots. In Purifoy and Nevelson’s work, fragmentation of architecture and history becomes a type of diary; found scraps and daily details are recomposed into fresh forms that never resolve into a whole. They used the discarded to create a unique vernacular within an art world that fetishized the new. These recombinations suggest surprising relations, or what Bryan-Wilson calls “queer kinships,” between the two artists. “Nevelson’s assemblage visualizes an affective mode of relating,” writes Bryan-Wilson, “… of joining together, coexisting—across difference.”
While Bryan-Wilson insists that the material choices Nevelson made in these assemblages said as much about her as her personal life and self-presentation, the fact remains that the faces and bodies of women artists often get collapsed with their art. Detractors used her outfits, thick eyeliner, the fact that she was a woman over the age of twenty-five, to deride her, but Nevelson took advantage of that flattening of substance and image. For her, imitation was an affirmation that her style was worth repeating. There are plenty of such homages: Vaginal Davis’s “Make-Up Portraits,” created for her exhibition, Vaginal Davis and Louise Nevelson, Chimera (2017), in which Davis is photoshopped into a photograph of Nevelson, wearing the exact same headscarf and pinafore smock, as if the two were deep in emphatic conversation; Mary Beth Edelson’s series of altered photographs, O’Kevelson (1973), in which the artist transforms herself into Georgia O’Keeffe and Nevelson; and Alice Cahn’s homage, in which she sent Nevelson a photograph of herself, dressed up as the artist, standing in front of sculptures she’d made to
emulate Nevelson’s for a 1980 gallery show.
According to Bryan-Wilson, tributes like these “indicate how Nevelson’s style (both artistic and personal) inspired women to imagine themselves as unconventional makers, artists, and thinkers, and how they dressed up in Nevelson drag as a method of empowerment.” Her work thus “served as a springboard for a wide swath of responses that were often far more sensitive to her artistic procedures than was the contemporaneous criticism by so-called professionals.”
Perhaps it’s because Bryan-Wilson imagines herself as both a fan and art historian that she was able to produce a volume that reflects Nevelson’s own spirit of artistic generosity. The book effectively queers the art canon—it shakes it open. Nevelson’s influence is present in its approach—one of open-minded wonder, a reconsideration of of her work unencumbered by myopic prejudices. Accidentally, I read the four volumes out of order. On a trip, I realized that before leaving I had thrown the first and last in my bag. It didn’t matter; Nevelson’s ideas, as well as Bryan-Wilson’s, were there, alive, ready to be collected and yet again recombined.