Louise Nevelson: Sculpture
But a very different Nevelson emerges at Richard Gray Gallery, which has long represented her (she died in 1988). Presenting her sculpture as she preferred to display it, surrounded by darkness and lit with dim bluish spots simulating moonlight, reveals how inappropriate the bright, clinical lighting of museums is to her work. Of the 22 late sculptures at Gray, 2 are painted white and 5 include found objects left in their natural state, but 15 are completely black, and these play off each other in the dim, moody twilight, filling the space with their presence while seeming to lose their physicality: Nevelson’s painted black surfaces vibrate between materiality and invisibility. The solidity of chair legs and dowels, plumbing fixtures and slabs of wood, is accentuated by the black paint, which also threatens to dematerialize them as they merge with the shadows they themselves create. Even when the light shines off them, creating a hint of white on black, one is torn between reading this luminosity as metallic hardness and seeing it dissolve into pure light.
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Nevelson well understood the potential of black. She told interviewer Diana MacKown, who published their conversations in the 1976 book Dawns + Dusks, that “black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all…. There is no color that will give you the feeling of totality. Of peace. Of greatness. Of quietness. Of excitement. I have seen things that were transformed.” She insisted that her sculpture not be reduced to its materials: “The work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the color. I don’t use color, form, wood as such. It adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea.”
Though the scope of Nevelson’s interests and ambitions was wide, one key to her work can be found in its simultaneous proud self-declaration and mysterious self-denial. Her black paint and dark light make the sculptures a mix of shadows and solid forms removed from sculpture’s long tradition of works that announce themselves first of all as objects. Similarly, she produced both large, imposing installations and very small pieces. One untitled box (number 18 on the checklist) is only about a foot long. Small, enigmatic wood fragments on its cover mirror an equally enigmatic arrangement inside of little wedges and small curved pieces and what seems to be part of a pipe bearing the number “907.” Just as her arrangements emphasize the abstract forms of found objects, effacing their original functions while preserving them as records of human activity, so her black paint and dark light remove this piece from the world of streets and alleys where she scavenged its parts. In the tradition of high modernism, it becomes an autonomous object, its own reason for being–a mirror for the consciousness of the artist, or viewer. As Nevelson told MacKown, “All materials are accumulations of thought.”
