The Whitney Visual Explorer

Artist Biennial

Louise Nevelson

1899–1988

104 works in the collection 34 exhibitions at the Whitney

Biography

One of the foremost American sculptors of the twentieth century, Louise Nevelson is renowned for her monochromatic assemblages of found or cast fragments, combined in dramatic abstract installations. Trained as an actress, modern dancer, singer, and painter, Nevelson (born in the former Russian Empire) studied with Hans Hofmann and assisted Diego Rivera on WPA murals in New York before taking up sculpture in the mid-1930s. When metal was less available during World War II Nevelson began working with wood, a material she associated with the lumber and building businesses of her father and grandfather. By the early 1950s she had incorporated etching, terra cotta, and stone work into her multifaceted practice, and by 1954 she produced her first series of black-painted landscape sculptures, a breakthrough that would give way to large-scale environments unified by a single color.

One of these, Dawn’s Wedding Feast, a sprawling installation of Nevelson’s first white sculptures, was created for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 exhibition Sixteen Americans. Composed of found wood—stacked boxes, antique chair legs, banister railings, finials, and other architectural fragments—the elements towered against a sixteen-foot-long wall, rose up from large plinths, or hung from the ceiling like totemic stalactites. It represented, in Nevelson’s words: “a white wedding cake. A wedding mirror. A pillow . . . a transition to a marriage with the world.” After the exhibition closed, the installation was disassembled and recycled into new compositions, a cathartic process Nevelson often employed. Although Dawn’s Wedding Chapel II was the result of such reconfiguring, it retains the geometric complexity, formal cohesiveness, and elaborate equilibrium of Nevelson’s original assemblage.

Works in the collection

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Exhibitions at the Whitney