Pictures at an Exhibition

Titian, Supper at Emmaus, 1533-43

ART & ANTIQUES
March 2009

Pictures at an Exhibition
by James Panero

Behind the scenes at the MFA Boston's Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese

As the march 15 opening approaches for his exhibition “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the curator Frederick Ilchman moves from conservation to design to exhibition space with an amiable twitter. Dressed in a natty three-piece suit, he looks as if he just stepped off a vaporetto on the Grand Canal. He is a specialist in Tintoretto—he spent five years in Italy researching the expressionistic cinquecento painter—and seems to know every painting and every person in Venice.

Curators are a museum’s ghostwriters; they write in pictures and let the pictures speak for themselves. A name on a wall, an essay in a catalogue, a voice on an audio guide—the curator works behind the scenes, but the choices someone like Ilchman makes in the conception, selection and execution of a show will leave an indelible impression on the way we see the work and on the story we take away. At 41 years old, Ilchman is about to mount the most important exhibition of his career.

With only weeks to go, Ilchman keeps busy with all aspects of his show’s preparation. The catalogue is done and off at the printers, but some of the loan guarantees are yet to be finalized. The museum’s own paintings destined for the exhibition are still up in the conservation lab for cleaning. An extensive X-ray analysis, undertaken by the conservator Rhona MacBeth, is revealing new secrets of the creation of one unusual work. Back at the design department, a model of the exhibition hall—a sort of curatorial dollhouse—is being fitted with foam-board walls and postage-stamp-sized printouts of paintings. “For the last room, I’m thinking of the autumn of their years. Fall colors,” Ilchman says to designer Keith Crippen while sticking a miniature wall up with putty. “This one you showed me a moment ago is way too Martha’s Vineyard. It’s preppy cranberry.”

Ilchman is the Mrs. Russell W. Baker assistant curator of paintings at the museum. After Princeton he did graduate work in art history at Columbia University under the advisement of the Renaissance scholar David Rosand. A visit to Italy at the completion of his master’s degree convinced Ilchman to focus on Tintoretto, the rebel painter of the late Venetian Renaissance. Although he was a favorite of John Ruskin, the artist has lacked for good modern scholarship. “Tintoretto occupies a special place in my heart, and I appreciate the underdog,” he says.

Ilchman immersed himself in Venetian painting for his on-site dissertation research. He also became an important player in cultural politics by working for the philanthropic organization Save Venice, and these connections have now helped him secure the loans for his show and even underwrite, through a donation to Save Venice, the restoration of one of the works destined for display (A Deposition of Christ, from Venice’s Accademia).

Upon arriving in the museum world, Ilchman says he first contemplated mounting a monographic exhibition of his dissertation subject. Then a major 2007 show of Tintoretto at the Prado in Madrid, to which he contributed, mitigated the necessity of such a project. “Incredible attendance, 400,000 people,” Ilchman recalls. “Tintoretto is smiling and looking down at that.”

So he began thinking about new ways of approaching the Renaissance master. Out of this emerged the present show, which is destined to make headlines through a comparative examination of the three-way rivalry between a grand Venetian patriarch (Titian) and his heirs at once repudiating (Tintoretto) and respectful (Veronese). “To understand Tintoretto you have to spend a lot of time considering Titian and Veronese,” Ilchman explains. “While there are other artists in Venice, these were the rivals. Here’s the important thing to remember: Titian was born 30 years before Tintoretto and 40 years before Veronese. These painters’ careers then overlapped for nearly four decades.” (Titian lived more than 90 years.)

“Instead of the usual effort to locate art within a political or social context,” says Rosand of the upcoming exhibition, “the Boston project makes the studio itself the context, that is, the art of painting is the subject of the exhibition. And this very focus—on the aesthetic and technical—testifies to the imagination of its curator. Frederick Ilchman envisioned an exhibition that would focus on the art, its materials and techniques, and by bringing these three painters together he is in effect reconstructing the artistic context of 16th-century Venice, its world of artistic competition.”

Ilchman’s focused survey will be his first exhibition as lead curator at the MFA, which he joined in 2001. The museum has pulled out all the stops for him, setting aside its Gund Gallery in the I.M. Pei-designed Linde Family Wing, sending paintings from its permanent collection abroad in order to secure important loans back home, even promoting the exhibition with a press lunch at Mario Batali’s Del Posto in New York.

The show is set to display many of the finest works by these artists ever to travel to the United States. In the fall it will go up at the Louvre, which signed on as an exhibition partner in 2007—quite late by museum standards—after being impressed by Ilchman’s initial plans for the Boston show. “My colleague George Shackelford, the head of the department, went to Paris with the binder to borrow two great Titians—The Supper at Emmaus and the Madonna and Child. They asked if we were looking for a partner,” Ilchman explains of the serendipitous collaboration.

A snowstorm is bearing down on Boston and about to knock out part of a day from the show’s tight advance schedule. Ilchman has spent the morning in the recording studio working on the audio guide. Settling into a corner booth in the museum’s Bravo restaurant, steps away from the future location of his show (where a blockbuster exhibition of Assyrian treasures from the British Museum is installed), the curator places a well-worn three-ring binder on the table and, with a close eye on his watch, begins flipping through the pages.

“This binder is the physical manifestation of the evolving exhibition in my head,” he explains. “I’ve been carrying this binder around for four years. It’s been on 20 airplane flights. The process of a show’s refinement is extremely complex. It’s easy to assume the curator tries to get the best things, and puts up what’s best, but there has to be a coherence to the show.”

The binder is made up of plastic sleeves, each containing a printout of a painting destined for the exhibition walls and the direct comparisons he hopes to make: in portraiture, ecclesiastical painting and even in three nudes regarding themselves in the mirror (Titian’s Venus With a Mirror, circa 1555; Tintoretto’s Susannah and the Elders, circa 1555–56; and Veronese’s Venus With a Mirror, circa mid-1580s). This is Ilchman’s hand, his deck of cards reshuffled and restacked. What was once 100 paintings has been whittled down to 56. In the front pocket are loose images—the paintings that didn’t make the cut.

“A lot of the work in the exhibition is about shuffling these cards,” says Ilchman. “Every painting in the exhibition has to justify its presence. The crate that a painting travels in costs a lot to make, and there is limited real estate on the walls. You can’t be sentimental because you like something. Then there’s negotiating, refining the checklist, getting the best things to make your point. A huge amount of time is spent writing the request letters. I have to make it clear that the painting we’re looking to borrow is the missing piece. And,” Ilchman continues, speaking of the intricacies of museum politics and the labor in securing loans, “you do favors for each other. In Italy I put on one of my best suits, speak Italian and take this binder and explain why this painting is essential for the show.”

The introductory painting in the exhibition is a Bellini and Workshop, Virgin and Child With Saints, one of two paintings in the show not by the three rivals. “This is the kind of painting that Titian could have painted and would have learned in Bellini’s workshop,” says Ilchman. “It’s from the Met. It’s been off view since 1974. The whole doesn’t come together very well. The saints look like they were Photoshopped in.” Ilchman explains his decision to edit down his initial plans for a longer introductory section. “A colleague warned me you are going to spend all your time borrowing one Giorgione,” he says of the great early Renaissance Venetian painter, “when you could borrow three Veroneses. And where Giorgione was a huge influence on Titian, it’s not the case for Tintoretto and Veronese. The thing is to keep the focus.”

Turning to Titian’s Supper at Emmaus, Ilchman compares Titian’s version of the subject (from the Louvre, dated 1533–34) with a 1542 version by Tintoretto from Budapest and one mid-1570s Veronese from Rotterdam. “Tintoretto’s energy is spinning out of control. Compare this to Veronese’s close focus. And for the Veronese we’re helping the museum in Rotterdam. We’re helping them restore this painting in time for the exhibition by splitting the cost of the treatment three ways.”

The show also includes a strange nativity scene that belongs to the MFA, a painting consisting of five different canvases stitched together and executed by what appears to be an equal number of different hands. Amid the crudely worked over imagery, three exquisitely painted figures stand out. They seem to have been painted by Tintoretto himself. “We did a battery of scientific tests, and we found a painting underneath it,” Ilchman says. A 72-negative X-ray analysis, which picks up the lead content in white underpainting, revealed hidden angels and the feet of Christon the cross. Upon seeing the X-rays, one of Ilchman’s colleagues made a startling realization: sections two and four—those most likely by Tintoretto himself—were once joined together. Ilchman now speculates that in an act of Renaissance recycling, common in the workshops of Venice, an original, vertical crucifixion by Tintoretto, set among the angels in a cloud, was taken apart and transformed (not too convincingly) into a nativity scene.

Behind all of Ilchman’s decision-making for Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese is the one technical fact that defines the Venetian Renaissance and makes such an exhibition as this a possibility outside of Italy. It is the development of oil on canvas. “You can never do a Michelangelo show,” the curator says. “His best work is fresco painting and monumental sculpture. There have been impressive shows of Renaissance Florence, but many of those artists are truly best defined by works that are not moveable. But you can approximate Venetian artists like Tintoretto accurately because you can move many of his key canvases.”

The consistent combination of oil with canvas was new in the early 15th century, Ilchman explains. Up until then, prestige paintings were made on wooden panel or as frescoes. The humid and saline climate of Venice finally encouraged artists and patrons to adopt a technique that up to that point had been used for banners and other forms of low art. In 1474 the Venetian government decreed that the redecoration of the main room of the Palazzo Ducale would be done on canvas. If Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese had been painting two centuries before, much of their work would have most likely been Venetian fresco, and given the climate, little of it would remain today.

But the development of oil on canvas did not just lead to work with a longer shelf life. It also encouraged the building up of textured surface. Paintings defined by layered coloring and expressionistic brushwork eventually became the hallmarks of Venetian art and defined it against the sharp contours and refined draftsmanship of Florence.

Finally, oil on canvas led to transportability and the birth of the secondary painting market. Titian became the first nonresident court artist by shipping work to two successive Spanish monarchs, Charles V and his son Philip II, largely without leaving home. It also created an art world of celebrity painters that we would have little trouble recognizing today. The artistic ego, the concept of the artist as something greater than an artisan for hire, took root in Venice, and it was nurtured in the competition of three great artists.

“In many of its aspects,” Ilchman writes in the exhibition catalogue, “our modern concept of painting, and the artistic self-determination it assumes, owes much to the rivalry between Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Cinquecento Venice.” It might also be said that the modern museum, with its library of moveable art, owes much to the developments these artists made half a millennium ago. It’s a story tailor-made for a museum exhibition, worth telling by the curator who can bring the paintings together to tell it.

Outside the frame

 The Death of James Lee Byars, 1982/1994, by James Lee Byars

HUMANITIES MAGAZINE
March/April 2009

"Outside the Frame"
by James Panero

How Asia changed the course of American Art

On July 8, 1853, four black warships under a cloud of smoke entered the waters around Edo, now known as Tokyo, the center of power in feudal Japan. The American commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore for the Imperial Emperor. Under the policy of sakoku, or “closed country,” in effect since 1639, the ports of Japan had been forbidden to foreign transit but for a Dutch harbor in Nagasaki. Fillmore's long and even chatty letter, brimming with American optimism ("Great and Good Friend!" it announced to the Emperor), sought to overturn this policy and forever alter the United States' relations with the East.

“Friendship, commerce, a supply of coal, and provisions and protection for our shipwrecked people” were Fillmore's requests. His hope was to ensure the safe passage of the American whaling fleet, then fishing off the Japanese coast, and for American vessels en route to China.

Yet it wasn’t the persuasiveness of Fillmore’s letter so much as the intelligence of the American commander and armaments and technology of Perry’s gunboats, consisting of two steam frigates and two sloops, that guaranteed an audience with the Tokugawa Shogunate and Japan’s acquiescence less then a year later. With the signing of the Convention of Kanagawa, Japan was open.

Perry’s voyage, however, had a reciprocal effect. With the opening of Japan, the East began to exert its own cultural influence on the United States. For those who merely expected a one-way spread of the Christian gospel and Western culture to “heathen” lands, the result was unexpected. Nevertheless, as Perry approached Edo harbor, one might say a Japanese black fleet of its own, outfitted with Eastern philosophy and Oriental ornament, made its slow way to the cultural shores of the United States. The period of Asia’s colonization of American imagination was about to begin.

The influence of Eastern thinking over American artistic culture is now the subject of a sprawling 250-work exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989.” The show sets out to survey the East’s cultural reflections in American art in the same dreamy manner that American artists often appropriated Eastern themes. A meditative peel of bells, courtesy of the artist Ann Hamilton, circles Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling rotunda and sets the tone for an exhibition that seeks to be both didactic and contemplative, Western and Eastern. The exhibition rises and falls on the same themes as the work it contains. The show “does not illustrate its textual sources; it embodies them,” announce the curators.

“Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am.” Rene Descartes summarized a strain of Western classical thought when he wrote this maxim in 1644. His declaration of self-consciousness borrowed from Aristotle and the Nicomachean Ethics: “Whenever we think, we are conscious that we think, and to be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious that we exist.” For the arts of the West, this philosophy of self-awareness established formal boundaries between the artist or observer or conscious subject and the passive window-like art object.

Traditionally, the Western artist imposed an extension of the rational world on a painting through the illusion of perspective. The artist’s studied draftsmanship used the West’s particular knowledge of representational technique to translate the visual world to the picture plane, all the while concentrating almost exclusively on the positive space within the boundaries of the frame.

But what about the space outside the frame--not just the physical space, but the spiritual and relational space between art and artist and viewer? In the past hundred and fifty years, the philosophies of the East have exerted their strongest influence over this negative, numinous region. Meanwhile, the artists of the West have observed, imagined, and even made up what the East has to say about this liminal area, filling in with their own dreams, spirituality, meditations, and politics. Influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Asian art and performance, Western artists “deliberately abstained from European empiricism and utilitarianism and looked toward Asia to forge an independent artistic identity that would define the modern age--and the modern mind--in a new transcendentalist understanding of existence and consciousness,” writes Alexandra Munroe, the curator of the Guggenheim show.

Dream House (1962--present) by La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela and The Death of James Lee Byars (1982/94) by James Lee Byars, two of the most memorable works at the Guggenheim, both use Western means to affect this Eastern sensibility. Dream House came about in the early 1960s when Young combined his interest in North Indian classical raga music with Zazeela’s studies in light art. Both became followers of a North Indian vocalist named Pandit Pran Nath and lived with him as disciples in a traditional gurukula manner. The result of their work at the Guggenheim is a carpeted meditative room (no shoes allowed) off the side of the main gallery, filled with colored light and deceptive shadows and sounds that pulsate in deep, repetitive electronic tones. Young and Zazeela’s art cannot be isolated as single elements to be observed—a beam of light, strips of paper, a movement of music--but instead concerns itself with enlivening the spectator through acute sensory stimulation.

The Death of James Lee Byars operates through similar means. From 1958 to 1968, Byars lived in Kyoto, where he taught English to Buddhist monks and studied Noh theater, “a highly abstract spectacle whose dramas explore the intersection between the human and supernatural worlds,” writes Monroe. Through this Japanese influence Byars developed a metaphoric performance practice that carried meaning over to form. The Death of James Lee Byars, now on display in the first large gallery room of the Guggenheim, is composed of a monumental hollowed-out cube covered in glittering gold leaf. In the center is a platform on which the artist once performed as the dead figure of himself. Today, small shimmering crystals rest on the slab in his place. The work of art here is less concerned with sculpture in itself than in the resplendent gold void contained within it, a special space of its own that evokes the spirit of the artist.

The earliest American interest in Eastern expression emerged in New England, where the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read Hindu texts in the 1840s. Here Eastern art connoisseurship arose out of the China trade, and a community of Asian scholars developed around Harvard University. The most influential of these was Ernest Fenollosa, who became the curator of Japanese art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1890 and wrote the canonical two-volume Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912).

The transcultural assimilation of Asian thought in Western art and culture was never merely an American phenomenon, however, and it did not begin with Commodore Perry. In 1827, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel linked Arthur Schopenhauer’s “cult of nothingness” to the Buddhist nirvana. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in what was known as japonisme, the French Impressionists took up the formal qualities of Japanese wood-block prints, called ukiyo-e. The flattening of the picture plane, which became a central feature of modernism, owes much of its development to the styles found in this Japanese art.

Fenollosa directly influenced at least two important artists, Arthur Wesley Dow of Massachusetts and John La Farge of New York, who had both studied painting in Paris and taken an early interest in French japonisme. Dow worked with Fenollosa at the Museum of Fine Arts and published Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected from a New System of Art Education (1899) based on his interest in Japanese prints, which emphasized the rhythmic spacing of forms. Both artists traveled to Japan, and La Farge, through his wife, had a familial connection to Commodore Perry. His close-cropped images of flowers, in their high horizon lines and color choices, resemble Edo-period paintings. After traveling with Henry Adams through Japan, La Farge helped design a memorial, now in Rock Creek Cemetary in Washington, DC, for Adams’s wife with the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the architect Stanford White. This important work, which evokes both Symbolist iconography and Eastern quietude, “is likely the most public artwork of the nineteenth century to refer in such significant ways to Eastern sources,” writes Monroe. There is a cast of it in the Guggenheim show.

It is appropriate that the Guggenheim Museum, with its renowned collection of abstract paintings by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, should be the institution to hold this survey. Beyond a mere formal influence on the look and style of modern art, the East had its most profound effect on the philosophies of art, no more so than in the early development of abstract painting, which arrived in America in a roundabout way from Asia by way of European intermediaries (who themselves drew on the publications of New York-based spiritualist circles).

Kandinsky’s debt to Theosophy has been a long-standing source of embarrassment for those who prefer to see only a positivist, materialist origin to abstract art, often examined only through the lens of French modernism. The occultist practice of Theosophy, founded by Madame Blavatsky in New York in 1875 and continued by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, borrowed extensively from Eastern religious practices, in particular Hindu and Buddhist teachings and cosmograms used as visual tools for achieving greater consciousness. Besant and Leadbeater’s book Thought-Forms, which promised a “glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes” through the synesthetic mixing of the senses, visualized a Gounod chorus, for example, as an “oblate spheroid” of colors rising “six hundred feet” in the air. Kandinsky’s own book On the Spiritual in Art borrowed extensively from Thought-Forms, as did his formal experiments in paint.

Kandinsky’s abstract “compositions” did not set out to represent an external reality so much as “to effect a spiritual awakening in the viewer’s consciousness,” write Kathleen Pyne and D. Scott Atkinson in the Guggenheim catalog. “Kandinsky drew from Theosophy to develop his revolutionary claim that abstract art (the formless form) had the greatest potential for expressing cosmic laws,” adds Monroe. “The notion of art as a mystical inner construction charged with the power to transform the viewer’s state of mind had a profound impact on American vanguard artists, on whom Kandinsky’s debt to Asian logic for his theories of abstraction was not lost.”

The first generation of American artists to arrive at abstraction came through Kandinsky’s indirect Eastern influences. Marsden Hartley met Kandinsky in Berlin in 1913. Alfred Stieglitz, the center of New York’s early avant-garde, ran excerpts of Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art in Camera Work that same year. Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Synchronists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright reflected Kandinsky’s interest in synesthesia, an artistic belief, related to Richard Wagner’s “total work of art,” that the senses could be brought into harmony, with colors that can be heard and music that can be seen. These artists also absorbed Fenollosa’s books and Hindu and Buddhist texts (Hartley’s Musical Theme [Oriental Symphony] is a synthesis of all these influences). “The example of Kandinsky highlights the hybrid context of the introduction and reception of the East in American modern art,” writes Monroe.

One might think that the calligraphic brushstroke of the second generation of American abstract painters, the Abstract Expressionists, was equally Asian influenced, but these artists were on the whole less accommodating to Eastern roots. The critic Clement Greenberg insisted that Franz Kline, one of the more obvious candidates, has no more “than a cursory interest in Oriental art.” Robert Motherwell claimed he wanted “no fake Oriental work for me.” As occult practices became too closely associated with the rise of fascism and Nazism during the war (and Japan itself was, of course, an Axis power), across the board, abstract painting in the second half of the twentieth century sought to dry out and desacralize much of the mysticism that went into abstraction's origins.

American poetry took its own cue from Eastern sources from an early date, most importantly in Ezra Pound’s 1915 publication of Cathay, containing translations of Fenollosa’s notes on Chinese classical poetry. After the Second World War, the Beat writers took up the mantle of Eastern aesthetics, although often more philosophically than through actual textual interaction. The title of the show, “The Third Mind,” refers to a cut-up work by Beat writers William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin that combines text and images in random collage.

Interestingly, in 1958, Alan Watts, the preeminent American advocate of Zen, distanced himself from his artistic cult followers, including the Beats. He accused them of using Zen to rationalize “sheer caprice in art, literature, and life [to] revolt against culture and social convention.” He went on: “Today there are Western artists avowedly using Zen to justify the indiscriminate framing of simply anything—blank canvases, totally silent music, torn-up bits of paper dropped on a board and stuck where they fall, or dense masses of mangled wire.”

The composer John Cage, whose 1952 composition “4’33” ” consists of three movements in which no notes are played, came in for his own criticism from Watts. Cage became famous for translating Eastern philosophy into twentieth-century Western music in what the Guggenheim calls “Cage Zen,” although Cage’s affinities for indeterminancy are closer to I Ching, a book of divination that is one of the five classics of Confucianism, than to Buddhist Zen. “What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen,” responded Cage, whose approach to the East, as with the Beats, was predominantly philosophical. Nevertheless, even as his Eastern influences were not always directly drawn out, Cage found a way to articulate the Eastern importance of negative space better than anyone: “Formerly, silence was the time lapse between sounds, useful towards a variety of ends. . . . Where none of these or other goals is present, silence becomes something else—not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds.”

Despite often dubious misappropriations of Eastern philosophy, and maybe even because of them, Western artists were drawn to produce some of the most important work of the modern period. “Misreadings, misunderstandings, denials, and imaginary projections emerge as important iterations of this individual, transcultural process,” admits Munroe. They also left plenty of second-rate examples, where the lessons of Eastern space failed to translate into the frame of Western art. For from the dreams of astral consciousness, this is what Western artists must make and what Western museums must display: works in frames. The work that endures in “The Third Mind” respects its Western demands. The art that fails holds out for a vision where none appears. In either case, the effect can be enlightening, in both an Eastern and Western way.

Gallery chronicle (March 2009)

Louise Nevelson, Untitled (1968)
Photo by: Bill Jacobson / Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

THE NEW CRITERION
March 2009

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” at Pace Wildenstein, New York, February 13–March 14, 2009.

The sculptor Louise Nevelson was the idol of art’s own silent screen, the creator of evocative, cinematic work who also lived like the sirens of early film. An excellent selection of nearly twenty of her large wall sculptures from the 1950s through the 1980s is now on view at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea.[1]

Nevelson used the syntax of Constructivism to plumb the depths of Romanticism and Symbolism. Hilton Kramer rightly praised her work as a “realm of enchantment.” Now Pace further reminds us how Nevelson refined allusion and mystery to make her own powerful contributions to twentieth-century modernism.

She was born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia in 1899, the daughter of Jewish parents. At four she moved to the United States and grew up in Rockland, Maine. Her father worked in the timber business; her mother dressed like a Park Avenue grande dame; Louise, meanwhile, developed a persona best suited for her sense of artistic destiny. “I’ve always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself,” she said. “I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself.” Her grandiose pronouncements went hand-in-hand with her particular artistic achievement.

“I knew I was a creative person from the first minute I opened my eyes,” she claimed. “I knew it, and they treated me like an artist all of my early life. And I knew I was coming to New York when I was a baby.” She maintained the aura of a successful artist even before she was one. In her life and demeanor she rejected down-and-out bohemianism in favor of celluloid glamor. In 1920 she came to New York and married a shipping magnate named Charles Nevelson. “My husband’s family was terribly refined,” she complained. “Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven.” She had a son two years later. In 1931 she divorced, refusing to accept the complications of marriage. “I learned that marriage wasn’t the romance that I sought but a partnership, and I didn’t need a partner.” For many years she managed to live well, but also as an art world outsider. Over time she filled her palazzo-like homes with her large sculptures—first at a Murray Hill townhouse in Manhattan, and later spread through multiple buildings on Spring Street in Soho. She even discarded her home furnishings and other distractions to focus on making art.

She spent a quarter-century in the artistic wilderness. In the early 1930s, she went off to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann. She worked as an extra in films in Berlin and Vienna. She then became an assistant to Diego Rivera, whose sense of scale and technique of storytelling through sequential frames would make a lasting impression on her art. She also developed a lifelong fascination with modern dance and drew from Martha Graham a sensibility for movement: “Dance made me realize that air is a solid through which I pass, not a void in which I exist.”

Nevelson did not emerge onto the public stage until 1958, when the Museum of Modern Art acquired and exhibited Sky Cathedral, a wall-sized object of open wooden boxes containing recovered bits of architectural molding, dowels, and spindles, all painted a uniform black. Sky Cathedral, constructed on a system of box frames she had developed a year before, brought Abstract Expressionist scale and Cubist space into sculptural high relief. It also represented but a fraction of the work lining the walls of her home. Nevelson always exhibited the confidence of someone who was expecting the artistic spotlight. She was fifty-nine years old when it started shining on her.

It wasn’t long before Nevelson became a public eminence in the mode of Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. She wore gypsy bandanas and jockey helmets, sporting inch-long eyelashes and a riot of Incan and Persian jewelry. “I am what you call an atmospheric dresser. When I meet someone, I want people to enjoy something, not just an old hag,” she said. She smoked cigars. She appeared on magazine covers wrapped in furs. She rolled off one-liners and maintained the absolute position of her own artistic greatness. “In Maine, and at the Art Students League in New York, and then in Munich with Hofmann, they all give me 100 plus,” she said, often referring to herself as the builder of an artistic empire. “I am not very modest,” she admitted. She remained prolific up to her death in 1988. In the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after Alexander Calder’s death in 1976, she began receiving numerous commissions for public sculpture.

Most of us, regrettably, now first encounter Nevelson’s work through this public art. She was never at her best sculpting monumental stand-alone objects, nor does her work show well outdoors. “The very basis of Nevelson’s environments is enveloping rather than object-delineated,” wrote Arnold Glimcher. Gather her wooden sculptures in the right room, however, and the experience is altogether different. For the exhibition, Pace Wildenstein smartly displays some of Nevelson’s sculptures on blackened walls. Upon entering the show, I felt like the writer Joe Gillis when he meets Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. “You used to be in pictures. You used to be big,” says Gillis. “I am big,” replies Desmond. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Nevelson’s own larger-than-life persona would be of little interest were it not so tied to her sculptural practice. Her theatricality helps define her use of form. Hilton Kramer, in his introduction to a 1983 Nevelson catalogue, recalls a studio visit he made to her Murray Hill townhouse in the 1950s: “the most extraordinary of all my encounters with artists and works of art.”

Here one entered a world of shadows, and it required a certain adjustment in one’s vision simply to see even a part of what there was to see… . It was also, as one came afterward to realize, intensely theatrical. Emerging from that house on this first occasion, I felt very much as I had felt as a child emerging from a Saturday-afternoon movie. The feeling of shock and surprise upon discovering that the daylight world was still there, going about its business in the usual way, was similarly acute.

Nevelson arrived at a sculptural form that conveyed the darkness of the movie house by way of Richard Wagner’s “total work of art.” “Theater, dance, music, films—the whole world of theatricality had long been one of Nevelson’s passionate interests,” Kramer remarked. Nevelson never drew formal boundaries between the arts. Everything became absorbed into her sense of overall creativity. Like the movies, which are a vulgar descendant of Wagnerian opera, Nevelson’s dark, musical work has more in common with advanced nineteenth-century art than the distilled classicism of twentieth-century high modernism.

Nevelson’s lush persona seemed far removed from the existential angst of the Abstract Expressionists at mid-century and the chilly serialism of the Minimalists a decade and a half later, even as her career took her through both worlds. In assembling her sculpture from wooden cast-offs, Nevelson became a spiritual actor. Her creative process had as much to do with nineteenth-century occult practices as twentieth-century formal concerns: “I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection. When you do things this way, you’re really bringing them to life. You know that you nursed them and you enhance them, you tap them and you hammer them, and you know you have given them an ultimate life, a spiritual life that surpasses the life they were created for.”

At Pace, the division of staked crates that make up Untitled (1964), turned open on their side, forms the frames of a larger moving image. Taken alone, each box displays an inanimate still life: table legs, pieces of shoes, all perfectly blackened and plunged in a bath of darkness. When read sequentially, though, the box frames become animated. The objects and the black spaces between them start to dance, one box to the next.

Nevelson refined this animating practice in her work in the 1970s, when she ceased relying on found-object crates and began contracting out for more uniform boxes. The result was an orderly constructivist grid, one that reflected the art world’s new measure of Minimalism but without a loss of animated action. For End of Day Nightscape (1973), the best work in the show, Nevelson further divided her grids into smaller and smaller units to arrive at a result so overwhelming it seems to become that total work of art, no longer the product of a single artist. The sculpture can be read differently at multiple distances. From up close it looks like the topography of a city; from farther away, one hears the tones of a contrapuntal fantasia. “The eye is fed such a rich diet that it can never quite take everything in at once,” Kramer remarked in a review of Nevelson’s work in 1976. The divisions have to be “read as a series of sequences, and as we give ourselves over to it, we are enclosed in its magic spell.”

Cascade VII (1979) zooms in on the action, with multiple lines of hinged box doors that open and close as you read down. Cascade VIII (1979) is a perfect open grid of six-by-five boxes where sticks of wood further divide the space and reflect frame to frame. The “Mirror-Shadow” series from the mid-1980s explodes the grid, using it now as open armatures for free-floating objects in suspended space. Here one sees the box-like forms of earlier work mixed in with the allusive stand-alone elements of carved bed frames and musical instruments.

Nevelson’s handful of unpainted assemblages of mixed media from the 1980s at Pace, academic exercises in synthetic Cubist collage, come off as interesting counter-examples to her painted work but in the end fail as experiments in colorization. A few stand-alone sculptures from the same period, which resemble oversized golf bags containing loose strips of wood, also convey little of the evocative authority of her black wall sculptures. Nevelson is best in black and white with wall screens that are halfway between picture windows and stand-alone sculptures. Like much of her outdoor sculpture, the failed works at Pace risked variations that became too object-specific.

Louise Nevelson should be remembered for her artistic tenacity in lean times as well as her prolific output in flush. She understood the world in cinematic form, one that spoke in the silent stop-action of a flickering screen. “I feel in love with black; it contained all color,” Nevelson remarked in her best Norma Desmond imitation. “It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Black is the most aristocratic color of all, the only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing.” Fortunately for us, late in life, Nevelson was able to see herself become the star of her own spectacular in black and white.

Notes
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1. “Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks” opened at Pace Wildenstein, New York, on February 13 and remains on view through March 14, 2009. Go back to the text.