Word: nevelson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prolific is nothing-it fails to distinguish an artist from a grunion-but Nevelson's abundant output has also been, until quite recently, strictly edited, so that it bears an imposing sense of consistency and energy. There are 80-year-old artists who are content to repeat their own formal inventions as clichés. Most, though not all, of Nevelson's work is free from that tendency. If she is not one of the great formal innovators of modern sculpture-and her contribution to its syntax cannot fairly be compared with Picasso's, Tatlin...
...past 25 years Nevelson may fairly be said to have reinvented environmental art for herself. In the 1920s and '30s many artists worked on room-size environments in which painting and sculpture were melded on an architectural scale. But nobody had given this juncture between the categories of art the intense poetic charge that Nevelson brought to it. This became triumphantly clear in the large sculptures she started producing in the late '50s, the environmental walls. Essentially they consist of irregular stacks of shallow boxes, filled with forms in relief and painted black. They have an extraordinarily dignified...
...miniature stage, containing strange images like a diorama of another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct...
...same time, the flatness of the walls and screens-the boxes were shallow, and Nevelson rarely tried to make sculpture-in-the-round-gave them a great depth of pictorial suggestion. One seemed to be looking not at an explicit sculptural fact but at a dark reef of nuances: form laid beside and over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show...
...sense could Nevelson be called an intellectual artist. To talk to her for a while is to enter a blurred framework in which precise dates, influences, exact encounters and the normal to-and-fro of an artist's life are blended into a sometimes irritating sense of self-engendered myth. Nevelson is, in fact, the Martha Graham of sculpture, and both her work and her incessant recasting of her life have the same eventual purpose: the exorcism of solitude by fiction...