Word: nevelson
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...Louise Nevelson still brings a sense of drama to her life-and work
...move into the next room, Moon Garden + One, is to see the full mastery of effect with which Nevelson could, and still can, transform a given space. These columns and stacks of boxes, with their carefully orchestrated suggestions of altarpiece, shrine, cave and iconostasis, suggest how far her desire for an environmental art has transcended decoration. The sculpture does not merely sit on the wall; it appropriates the whole surface, making the room itself an instrument of reverie. Spotlights play on the graphite-black surface of the sculptures, carving patch within darker patch of shadow until the inner forms...
...this could be melodramatic, without Nevelson's clear sense of formal diction. She knows exactly how far a space can be loaded with shapes before congestion takes over. And as a rule, her shapes are marvelously clear and decisive, a dream geometry of arcs, circles, balls and triangles, alternating with rougher and more battered fragments of wood. In this variety of texture and profile, which runs from Platonic solid to inchoate lump, her formal system seems to suggest the layers of definition from which memory itself is composed...
Part of the achievement of her work lies in the way in which she adapted the rationale of cubist composition to more mysterious ends. "Cubism gives you a block of space for light, a block of space for shadow," Nevelson has said. "Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube structure." transcends In and sum, the translates nature encompassing into ambition of Nevelson's work is to make a continuous surface so full, so engrossing and so minutely articulated with variety of detail that it can work as an abstract metaphor of nature itself...
This does not always come off. One detects (especially in parts of the gold-painted environment, The Royal Tides) a note of theatrical pomp, a weakness for the merely spectacular. But Nevelson's black rooms and her array of white sculpture entitled Dawn 's Wedding-the negative reversal of Moon Garden, every shape blanched and fully visible under the chalky candor of the white paint so that it seems ethereal and removed rather than dense and beckoning-afford an extremely satisfying sculptural experience. They are full of mystery, rigor and the calmly detailed expressive power that...