Word: nevelson
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These interests soon drowned her marriage to Nevelson-a cultivated and decent man, but by her terms "not a poet." The birth of her son Myron in 1922 threw her into a severe depression: "I wasn't ready for motherhood; I didn't know how to live." Mother and father stayed together nine more years, finally separating...
...made her look at cubism, "the key to my stability ... Positive and negative. A block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure." On seeing her first cubist Picassos, Nevelson recalls, "I understood it at once. I felt related, as if I had done them. So was I going to leave that...
...bitterly anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, she says, wanted to marry her. ("Don't you know that fanatics, if they hate Jews, love to marry Jewish women?") It was from this trip that she came back fully determined to be a professional. Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League, joined the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera's army of assistants, took up modern dance and worked at her sculpture...
...terra cottas were heavily influenced by French Cubist Sculptor Henri Laurens, and their dominant rhythm was taken from Mayan art-a blockish, crankshaft-like sequence of shapes. They may have been stylistically uncertain, but they were powerful, and on seeing them, a leading New York dealer named Nierendorf gave Nevelson her first one-woman show, in 1941. She was past 40, an age when some artists start thinking not about their debuts but about their retrospectives...
...1940s this solid sculpture began to give way to assembled pieces looking like figures or standing totems. One influence on them that Nevelson likes to recall was the black iron stanchions of the Manhattan subway stations, "sculptures in themselves"; another was a carved African figure of a leopard she remembered from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris: "It was the first time I recognized the power of that animal, not as an animal, but the power of its forms." Nevelson was drawn to what was mythic and magical in sculpture just as a yearning...