Space, Gender, Sculpture: Bourgeois, Nevelson, and the Changing Conditions of Sculpture in the 1950s

Speaks, Elyse

doi:10.1080/00497878.2011.609416

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…By putting the viewer's body into motion, Nevelson's reliefs charge the space around them, breaking down the conceptual barrier between the notionally independent, autonomous space of sculpture and the surrounding space of the viewer's body. 79 Nevelson would later intensify this breakdown by installing her sculptural reliefs along each wall of the room in which they were displayed, so that they would totally surround the viewer, anticipating later Minimalist and Postminimalist sculpture's concern with literal spatial relations. She fi rst developed this installational, "environmental" approach in her own home, with its almost completely encased walls, and which she kept quite dark.…”

Section: Total Totalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Black Wallpaper: Louise Nevelson’s Gothic Modernism

Siegel

2017

The Art Bulletin

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Nature is a Haunted House-but Art, a House that tries to be haunted .-Emily Dickinson, 1862 1 "Like a sorceress in her den, sculptor Louise Nevelson is peering out from an eerie world of her own making." Above these words, which open the artist's profi le in Life magazine (1958), we see Nevelson framed against a black sculptural assemblage ( Fig. 1 ). She wears a witch's hat. Overpowering lights bathe her in green, so that her skin, like that of the Wicked Witch of the West, appears emerald. She is small within the frame, overwhelmed by the sculptural walls that seem to envelop her, extending in all directions to the edges of the image. "Without resorting to eyes of newts or toes of frogs, she has conjured up a spectral sculptured landscape." 2 On the next page, Life identifi es that landscape as Nevelson's apartment, a six-fl oor brownstone on Th irtieth Street in Manhattan. Two more photographs follow the words, "Weird Woodwork continued" ( Fig. 2 ). Th e fi rst shows a bathtub fi lled with black, wooden sculptures, "which, for want of space, Miss Nevelson stores in an unused bathroom." More works litter the fl oor beside the tub, while a stack of black-stained two-by-fours rests close behind. In the second photograph, the artist ascends a set of stairs, her face obscured by shadow. "Reliefs on wall, made of pieces of plank nailed together, loom over the artist as she carries sculpture upstairs." 3 Th e caption's ominous wording is appropriate. Th ere is something threatening about these inanimate reliefs, as if they conspired to entrap her like those wooden walls from the opening portrait. Th is sense of threatening confi nement increases on the next page, with a photograph of black, sculptural grates blocking the window to the outside world. A hammer lies on the foreground table, as though left by some absent, hostile presence, some enemy who has locked the artist in this domestic prison, this "lunar world."Life presents Nevelson as a madwoman in her cloistered asylum, a lonely shut-in who is so disconnected from the world outside that she mistakes madness for genius, hallucinations for visions. Th is witch persona, however, was Nevelson's creation. She loudly proclaimed her isolation and eccentricity, described fi ts of depression and visions in the dark, "speaking to the wood and the wood speaking back." 4 Profi les such as Life 's thus conformed to Nevelson's adopted persona as a hoarder in the dark, a witch in her haunted house.Despite such self-perpetuated myths of isolation, Nevelson's home was a central node in the networks of postwar American modernism. 5 Beginning in 1953, she hosted the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors in her living room, its members including many major artists of the New York school. 6 Th at same year, she also began to open her home to artists and critics taking part in Will Barnet's Four O'Clock Forum, for panel discussions on topics like "Th e Future of Abstract Art" and "Criticism and the Search for Meaning in Art Today." 7 As the decade progressed, she welcomed n...

show abstract

Section: Total Totalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Black Wallpaper: Louise Nevelson’s Gothic Modernism

Siegel

2017

The Art Bulletin

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Space, Gender, Sculpture: Bourgeois, Nevelson, and the Changing Conditions of Sculpture in the 1950s

Cited by 1 publication

References 10 publications

The Black Wallpaper: Louise Nevelson’s Gothic Modernism

The Black Wallpaper: Louise Nevelson’s Gothic Modernism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About