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LOUISE NEVELSON
(American, born Ukraine, 1899-1988)
Untitled
Polychrome wood and Plexiglas
15 3/8 x 19 5/8 x 4 7/8”
Bequest of George and Susan Proskauer 1992.17.72

Born Louise Berliawsky, the American sculptor Louise Nevelson grew up in Rockland, Maine, where her father operated a lumberyard; she is said to have first developed an appreciation for wood scraps there. She began her formal art studies in New York City in 1920, and over the next three decades she worked with the abstract painter Hans Hoffman in Munich and in New York, assisted Mexican artist Diego Rivera on murals, and studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter. By the 1950s, she was creating and exhibiting wood assemblages, and, in 1958, she exhibited what was to become her characteristic subject: a room-sized sculpture of stacked boxes filled with fragments of carved wood and found objects. In particular, she favored wooden architectural elements such as balusters, finials, and ornamental moldings. In her use of the “found object,” Nevelson was inspired by the legacy of the wood constructions of the Cubists and the Surrealists but adapted their ideas to construct her own universe. In this untitled work, and in her “walls”—engulfing environments made of stacked boxes—Nevelson gathered wood fragments into complex assemblages that suggest infinite space, distance, mystery, and shadow. She often used white, gold, and even polished metals and Plexiglas in her sculptures. Most often, however, Nevelson painted her work in a uniform coat of matte black, which she considered to be formal and aristocratic.