Louise Nevelson

I only know this – that you can't give advice to an artist. (Louise Nevelson)

Louise Nevelson became renowned during the Abstract Expressionist period for constructing crated assemblages full of wooden items grouped together into monochromatically painted cubic structures. Her aim to reinvigorate found objects with a spiritual life was informed by feminist ideals and Nevelson's strong persona, which inspired multitudinous female artists associated with the women's movement. Influenced by Duchamp's found object sculptures, Nevelson sought to build abstract wooden environments, painted gold, black, or white, that obscured original content to historicize debris with a second, more mysterious narrative life. The narratives in her artwork originated from her personal migration history as a Jewish woman who relocated to America, and from her active life in New York's artistic community.






Key Ideas / Information

Nevelson's art career spanned over sixty years, and is marked by periods of abstract sculpture-making focused on precariously balanced geometric forms. For decades, Nevelson built wooden structures, but in the 1970s, she began experimenting with plexiglass, aluminum, enamel, steel, and bronze.

Louise Nevelson may be most remembered as an artist whose brilliant ability to endow abstract sculpture with personal narrative led to a deep influence on artists who struggled with expressing themselves in a formalist artistic vein.

Dialogues in the feminist art movement were greatly expanded thanks to Nevelson's sculptures, which complicated gender stereotypes. They were large-scale, bold, and edgy which were traits affiliated with masculinity at the time. They also expressed, however, the artist's deepest emotions about her life as a woman.

This was taken from: www.theartstory.org