Louise Nevelson

The artist Louise Nevelson said she didn’t believe in reincarnation, but late in life, when an interviewer asked her whom she would like to come back as, she answered without hesitation, herself.


Fame came to her belatedly. She was 60 when the 1959 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Sixteen Americans” enshrined her along with rising stars like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella (all younger than her by at least a quarter-century). Most women, as they age, cling tenaciously to a few well-honed looks. Nevelson made old age the stage for a fashion revolution. Gradually, her full-blown style emerged, an immense collage whose elements were subject to miraculous transformations — the head scarves and multiple pairs of false eyelashes, the ethnographic jewels and enormous furs, the couture garments layered under and over peasant clothing.

There’s the sculptor, at 81, smoking cigars with her dealer Arne Glimcher on the roof of her Spring Street home. She’s wearing a voluminous, ruffled and spangled robe made for her by the couturier Arnold Scaasi. She sports an Inca-style necklace; two enormous disks hang from her earlobes, and her entire ensemble is topped off with a jockey cap. (What is that rule of good taste? Before leaving the house, you remove one thing?)



In most photographs, it’s impossible to tell exactly what she’s wearing — the layering of glimmering bits of exotic fabrics and utilitarian garments, the unexpected juxtapositions, create a sense of utter uniqueness, an indefinable luxury. It’s a look that’s at once out of time and uncannily of this moment — furs over jeans, pants under dresses, riots of pattern and color. Nevelson “wanted to look dazzling at all times,” Scaasi remembers. “I’d show her a blue-and-silver brocade with big gold birds all over it,” the designer recalls, “and she’d say, ‘Oh, that’s perfect for Miss America’ — meaning herself. We’d make the suit, thinking it would be for evening, but then she’d be giving lectures in it at 10 a.m.” Glimcher told me recently that “she used to say, ‘I’m an atmospheric dresser,’ ” as if by piling on the clothes she could invent her own personal weather.

Nevelson paid a price for her stylishness — other artists mistook her for a bourgeois girl who was slumming, neglecting her almost preternatural energy for work in the years when she regularly woke before dawn to enter her studio, pausing only to dine on sardines and stale bread. In fact, her talent for self-dramatization seems both a reflection of the intensity of her drive and a cover for the deep vulnerability that went with it. Eventually her mature look (photographed by everyone from Cecil Beaton to Robert Mapplethorpe) became a public brand, as much as Warhol’s helmet of white hair and affectless demeanor. “She was a real innovator,” observes Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the guest curator of the Jewish Museum’s retrospective, “not just in creating her work but in her understanding of artistic celebrity.”

*excepts from ny times article by LESLIE CAMHI



The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend,” opening May 5 at New York’s Jewish Museum, showcases her monumental assemblages and pioneering, room-size environments made of found wooden objects, painted black, white or gold, and rendered infinitely mysterious.