Word: nevelson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nevelson 's palace goes on show in Manhattan...
...dandy of American art is a woman, Louise Nevelson. Nobody is more recognizable: the fine, blade-nosed Aztec face with its monstrous false eyelashes, like clumps of mink, is as manifestly the property of an artist as Picasso's monkey mask. The sight of Nevelson under full sail-mole-colored hunting cap, peasant flounces, Chinese brocade and wolfskin, bronze pendants clanking, boar's teeth rattling-is one of the few spectacles of complete self-possession in American life; the 19th century poet who walked his live lobster on a ribbon outside the Ritz could not have looked more...
...traditional problem of dandyism is that it usually leaves so little room for work: it is the work. Not with Nevelson. She will be 78 next year, and there is no more prolific or respected sculptor in America. Her boxes and walls, filled with accumulated wooden fragments painted a uniform black, white or gold, are among the fixtures of the modern imagination. But at an age when many artists are content to repeat the clichés they invented, Nevelson keeps on extending herself. The proof of this-if it were needed-is the centerpiece of her current show...
...title suggests a brief bow in the direction of another, and earlier, image of night and silence: Giacometti's The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932-33, one of the canonical sculptures of surrealism. But Giacometti's palace was the size of a doll's house. Nevelson's work-almost 12 ft. high, 20 ft. wide, and 15 ft. deep-is actually domestic (if not palatial) in size, a place one can move into. It is both sculpture and shelter, a continuous surface painted black-Nevelson's peculiar black, said to be ordinary house paint straight...
Embedded in this color is a profusion of shapes: balls and balusters, cubes, boxes, spikes, seamed and weathered palings, fragments of ogee and cavetto molding, the fossils of the Age of Wood. By now, Nevelson is a scavenger on a nearly industrial scale, given to buying up whole demolition contracts to secure material. It is possible that some of the wood sold by her father, an emigre from Kiev who started a lumberyard in Rockland, Me., in 1905, has found its way back as table legs or broken newel posts into Nevelson's sculpture...