Louise Nevelson, Sculptor

This essay briefly analyses the multi-faceted life of the sculptor-artist Louise Nevelson, 1899-1988. A leader in a discipline dominated by men, Nevelson maintained a high, l
ife-long commitment to sculpture, and this essay will show how, during the period when old and famous her endurance and talent, when combined with fame, impacted on her cultural output. Then, for the first time her opportunities expanded to include commissions to create “public sculptures [which] translated her earlier private symbolism and narratives into a grand scale” (The Arts Story Foundation, 2016).

Louise Nevelson is recorded as a great modern sculptor (The Arts Story Foundation, 2016). Born Leah Berliawsky, Nevelson”s diverse and colourful life is “the quintessential American success story” (Lisle, 2001). In Russia her family was part of a rich, deep and strong culture and religion, yet, there it was “unlucky to be born a Jew” (Lisle, 2001).

In 1905 her Jewish-Russian parents and their children fled the Tsarist-Russian violence and hopelessness. Nevelson was about six years old. The strength and foresight of her parents, their urgent and dramatic journey, and subsequent cross-cultural migration, all worked to provide Louise with leadership qualities (Lisle, 2001).

Puccio, Mance & Murdock say: “successful leadership relies heavily on an individual’s ability to effectively respond to and proactively drive change – in short, to be creative” (9 December, 2010). Nevelson’s successsful career as creative artist began with her nine-year old’s instant response to learning of sculpture (Lisle, 2001).

Later in her life an art dealer, and close friend Arnold Glimcher described Nevelson’s “life itself is her greatest work of art” (cited by Lisle, 2001). Nevelson honoured her early decision to become a sculptor throughout her life, and this led, finally, to great success.
Cowan’s analysis of historic, economic factors confirms Nevelson’s elevated status and leadership (21 January, 2016).

Nevelson’s cultural output transcended male-domination in the field of sculpture. (Cowan, 21 January, 1996). In Cowan’s paper “Why women succeed and fail in the Arts” he acknowledges “women traditionally have faced lower returns to investing their energies into art” (21 January, 2016). He concentrates on four major “cultural economic” factors which may affect the cultural production of artists who are not men.

His specific factors are: genes, artistic parity, maternal instinct. The one wide, general factor is discrimination (21 January, 1996).In Nevelson’s case, as shown in her family’s decision and flight to safety and subsequent success in their new society, and hers in her chosen cultural field, genes appear to have superbly equipped her for greatness. Genes created her “smarter, more artistically gifted, more driven” (Cowan, 21 January, 2016).

Smarter to make vital life choices, as will be shown below. Cowan says Nevelson is shown as artistically gifted and an artist leader in “Linda Nochlin’s famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”… [and] major influence on the new generation of women struggling to redefine femininity in art” (21 January, 2016). Nevelson inherited strong, smart genes, used them well and worked them hard, and so attained parity with men in her chosen field of art.

Her art practice cost Nevelson an agonisng marriage break-up (Lisle, 2001). When her close-knit, well-loved family did not support her in her chosen discipline (Lisle, 2001), Nevelson departed overseas to further her studies. She left her husband, and their son with him. Nevelson retained her married name upon the divorce that soon followed, and Nevelson’s actions here subsume Cowan’s third cultural economic factor, the maternal instinct (21 January, 1996).

This is even though Alba (April 7, 2016) says a recent study by MacEacheron, (date?) proposes women take actions about which they are not fully conscious, and these actions sometimes do not appear logical to the observer, wherby “marital surname change serves as part of a general strategy… for [women to] maximise the[ir] offspring’s fitness”.

These points may be re-considered under Cowan’s (21 January,1996) single external factor where “potential artists look at the ease of obtaining training, the social responsibilities, their alternative occupations, and the market for their work” (21 January, 2016). Sculpting is complicated as suitable materials are bulky, and generally expensive to obtain. Beginning her practice Nevelson choose wood, a familiar medium in her father’s lumber yard, and her inherent drive and creativity again assisted her to decide upon, locate, “scavenge” and then find ways to use unwanted or discarded wood (MoMa, 2016). This she re-cycled into her ground-breaking and unique cultural output (Lisle, 2001).

MoMa (2016) says Nevelson was a member of the Abstract Expressionist group. Her success appears to be “part of historic dominance breaking down, over time and over genres” (Cowan, 21 January, 2016). America, in particular, in that era relaxed many social conventions. Crouch describes this Modern Movement period, when Pevsner presented his important 1936 concept of “a strange contradictory set of ideas about the universal and the individual… in which powerful individuals create a rational universal style” (1999). Nevelson’s family’s trans-culture move to America made it possible for her to easily learn about these ideas, and to decide to sculpt (Lisle, 2001).

In her teens Nevelson briefly considered another career. Instead, her early decision to marry, and subsequent move to New York, with its extraordinary array of quality artistic support systems of all types gave her access to top-level training and superb channels to market her art (The Arts Story Foundation, 2016). Marriage is thus another decision which appears based upon her cultural output, as, whether conscious or unconscious, that decision located Nevelson in the city where she gained status as wife-socialite and provided her greatest chance of success as sculptor (Lisle, 2001).

Once in New York and thereafter over long periods Nevelson built up her political position with diverse artistic collaborations, exhibits with other important emerging artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenburg (Scott, 9 May, 2007), their families and in a strong artist-womens’ group. She made sincere life-long friends with a huge number of important galleries and dealers, strengthened control of her ouvre with important teachers and trained in other fine arts, and dance, music, voice. Nevelson wore clothes designed and made for her by Canadian designer Arnold Scaasi, another close friend (Jacobs, 4 August, 2015), and was regularly photographed (Lisle, 2001)

Nevelson, credited as “integral to the renaissance of American sculpture” (Lisle, 2001), rose to the challenge at about 68 years when apparently all “factors contingent on human belief or conduct” were satisfied (Cowan, 21 January, 2016):

in 1967, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted
her first museum retrospective and exhibited over 100
of her works spanning her entire oeuvre. Two years later,
already in her 70s, she received her first commission for
a monumental outdoor sculpture from Princeton University,
which she fulfilled in 1971 (Lisle, 2001).
Nevelson had achieved her objective for her “private symbolism and narratives” (The Arts Story Foundation, 2016) – from the family’s early journey at an early age of life, throughout her unusual life, all her innovative, creative, cultural output led to this point.

Throughout her life, Louise Nevelson made internal cultural economic, and other important external decisions. These decisions aided her to develop and manage her life and her cultural output and she became a leader as a sculptor. To keep her internal childhood commitment Nevelson studied, travelled, experimented, made a new type of art and developed her enormous political base into an ever-evolving base comprised of: close friends, fraternities, joined-ventures with individuals and collaborative artist groups. Nevelson worked with these and developed her circle of knowledge via her strongest key friendships and work relationships with famous art teachers, art dealers, and galleries. She nurtured her artistic talent with other fine arts including voice, music and dance and key overseas studies. Her superb and yet light management skills ensured the manuscript of her biography was finished and she signed off the final document completely, bringing the work into actuality. Louise Nevelson is an important lesson for all aspirants to greatness.

Reference:

Cowan, (21 January, 1996). Why women succeed and fail in the arts.
Journal of Cultural Economics, 00: 1-21, 1996.

Crouch, C. (199). Modernism in art, design & architecture. London, UK: Palgrave.

Jacobs, A. (4 August, 2015).
Arnold Scaasi dies at 85: Dressed stars and socialites, his ‘Scaasi girls’. The New York Times, New York edition. from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/fashion/arnold-scaasi-a-designer-who-dressed- generations-of-scaasi-girls-dies-at-85.html?_r=0

MacEacheron, M. (15 March, 2016). North American Women’s Marital Surname Change:
Practices, law, and patrilineal descent reckoning. Evolutionary Psychological Science. DOI http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-016-0045-9
from: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-016-0045-9

Lisle, L. (1990). Louise Nevelson: A passionate life. Lincoln, NE, USA:
Author’s Guild backinprint.com Edition.

MoMa. (2016). website.Louise Nevelson.
from: http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/4278?locale=it

Puccio, G. J., Mance, M., and Murdock, M. C. (Dec 9, 2010).
Creative Leadership: Skills that drive change. Thousand Oaks, California, USA: SAGE Publications.

Scott, A. K. (May, 2007). A Life Made Out of Wood, Metal and Determination.
New York Times.
from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/arts/design/09neve.html?_r=0

The Arts Story Foundation. (2016).website. Louise Nevelson.
from: (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-nevelson-louise.htm)