Louise Nevelson by Laurie Wilson

Author:Laurie Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

John Canaday was equally enthusiastic:

The Nevelson show at the Whitney proves … that she is truly the top figure in two sculptural revolutions of more recent date—the technical one by which sculpture is an assemblage of objects picked up just about anywhere, and the conceptual one of sculpture as an environment rather than as an object. If we have always known this, the Whitney show has afforded Mrs. Nevelson her first opportunity to install her environmental compositions in space of satisfactory dimensions.38

Charlotte Willard of the New York Post wrote: “Credited with being the originator of environmental sculpture, Nevelson has, in any event, done the most impressive and brilliant work in this movement…. Strangely silent, Nevelson’s work offers itself for contemplation and wins us not by an overwhelming presence but by the pervasive enchantment of its enveloping serenity.”39

Almost a decade after her first undeniably environmental exhibit, Moon Garden + One (1958), the artist was emphatically claiming the territory as the First Environmental Artist. The time lapse between the formal invention and the naming of it is similar to the one that occurred between the time (1957) Hilton Kramer noted how she used shadow as a formal device and her nominating herself as an Architect of Shadow (1964). First, she intuitively discovered (or created) a formal innovation, then she figured out—usually with the help of a critic or gallerist—how to put the innovation into words.

Not everyone was entranced by the retrospective. Reviewing the opening, the art critic Emily Genauer, who had written supportively about the artist for almost thirty years, declared herself to be fatigued by too much Nevelson: “Line up a whole museum floor of her pieces…. Fancy becomes formula; incantation becomes rhetoric…. It’s too little varied to reward overgenerous seeing.”40

Four days later, however, Genauer wrote a paean to the exhibit, entitled, “A Scavenger’s Black Magic.” The critic had obviously gone back for another look and emerged with a very different perspective:

It is nothing less than the creation of a special very private world of dream into which they may follow the artist and find revelations of timeless mysteries…. Her closely contained constructions vivify the space around them as an ancient god might, appearing on earth in impenetrable clouds…. Nevelson’s works wait for you to come to them. They wait with quiet and mysterious dignity. They enfold you in a new experience as completely as her boxes contain the enigmatic elements she has placed in them…. The living quality with which she has invested them grows ever larger, operating on a new level. This … is a magnification of image into an experience that the viewer not only perceives for the first time but in which he is also profoundly involved.41

At times, too much Nevelson was hard to take, even for a fan, and could seem repetitive. At other times it was a fabulous feast, as long as one took the time to carefully savor the individual dishes.

The flood of admiration Nevelson received as a result of the Whitney retrospective—as well

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