Louise Nevelson

P. Schneider, Amityville, New York
Christie's, New York, November 14, 2001, Lot 177
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Louise Nevelson, arguably the most original American sculptor of the 20^th Century, male or female, was born Leah Berliawsky in a provincial Russian town near Kiev in 1899, and immigrated with her family to Rockland, Maine. It was not until she reached a mature age of 50 when she began to produce a radical and unorthodox body of work.  Nevelson began to compose environments from jettisoned pieces of wood, which she would saturate in a can or tub of thinned commercial black oil paint. However, whereas Ad Reinhardt arrived to the color by philosophical means, Nevelson arrived at the color due to the affected mystery and the democracy it endowed her constructions, as no black was ever exactly alike. There was a dichotomy between the universality of the color and the delineation of space and depth and the illusory effect it created. Further, the texture of the wood subtly alters the tonality, further directing light across the surface. When critiqued for the suggestive morbidity of black painted structures, Nevelson responded, “black creates harmony and doesn’t intrude on the emotions.” (“Weird Woodwork of Lunar World,” Life, March 24, 1958, p. 77) Art critic Dore Ashton further supported the sentiment, asserting that her black painted wood sculptures were “romantic, not elegiac.” The present work, Untitled, is a riveting example, a monochromatic, monolithic structure that fuses the organic and geometric, a formidable composition that questions the boundaries of painting and sculpture.