Louise Nevelson 1970 (1971)

Every work of art evokes a principle of form. Every expression of the artistic imagination follows the dictates of a fantasy. It is in the synthesis of form and fantasy that the truly original work of art achieves its identity. It is in the creative unforeseen collision of a structure and the imaginative energy that animates it that a work of art takes hold of our sensibilities and transforms them. [Music] [Music] Hey. [Music] [Music] [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] interview. Louise Nevelson, Scene 17. Sound one, take one. Well, uh I don't think that I analyzed it quite like that. I was feeling my way and my feeling must have been almost parallel to the way I wanted things. Now I never wanted to make anything but I wanted to really give form to my life. And the things that that are here are the mirrors of the form that I wanted. So, uh I never thought of it in terms of black or white or this or that. But as my form became closer to the way I was thinking, I gave myself titles like that. I'm a a architect of shadow. And that went on for some years. And then I uh sort of identified very closely with reflection and then I realized and I gave myself a title that I was an architect of light. In 1905 at the age of five, Louise Bellioski was brought by her immigrant parents from Kiev, Russia to the seaside town of Rockland, Maine. There she attended the local public schools. Her interests were divided between the performing and visual arts. In 1920, she married Charles Nebson and went to live in New York. Her son Mike was born in 1922. In these years she studied painting and voice. She enrolled at the art students league studying with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimman Nicolades. Shortly after in 1931 she went to Europe studying for a time with Hans Hoffman in Munich. She worked as an extra in movies in Berlin and Munich. In 1932 back in New York she worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on New York mural projects. began exhibiting in the 30s. Her first one-man show took place in 1941. In 1950, influenced by Diego Rivera, she first travels to Mexico. >> The first things that I had seen first in Mexico City and then I went to Yucatan and I realized that I was in the presence of great creative work. for example, they had such order and such grandeur and such power. And it always struck me so funny that when you would hear that they would say primitive art, they were so ahead of anything that I've ever seen plus the pyramids. I I will stack Mexico and its high development to anything on earth. Now that's where I was moved and that may have fired my own uh awareness. The grandeur of Mexican art with its monumental ambition and its tremendous vitality had a decisive effect. Yet the fantasy generated by this experience had first to work its way through the traditional forms in which the artist had been trained. in paintings, in drawings, in graphic art, in the traditional forms of sculpture in the round. Nevelson worked her way through the accepted and established means, developing all the while a deeper and deeper affinity for cubism, which would eventually provide the means of accommodating the fantasy at the heart of her work. It would be cubism that would put her art in touch with the majesty of the primitive she had first glimpsed in the pre-Colombian monuments of Mexico. When you think that we humans have the awareness and the facility that if we raise our eyes up to the sky, say a half an inch, we're in infinite space and the power of the eye is unbelievable. We don't think of it. We take so much for granted and humans are always complaining about the shortcoming of humans. But nevertheless, uh we can't deny that the other side of the coin is majesty at its greatest. >> The first constructions were assembled on a flat pedestal-like base or tabletop. Were these images of landscape or still life, nature or pure abstraction? Forms were rounded or jagged, the spaces crowded or sparse, always painted a uniform matte black, graphic presences of great but mystifying power. One day there were a few other things preceding it but one day I saw a box in the street and this box must have been 7 ft long about 6 in or so in depth and in width and I thought this the proportions and the form in every way was almost a work of art in itself. So I took it into my studio and I began working in it and found forms to you know fit into it and I realized I had something >> accident improvisation the unexpected. The discovery of form abetting its creator. Yet the discovery of the box for Nevelson became the realization of a new variation on the cubist motif. The Helter Skelter variety of found objects, found wood, fantasy rampant, was transformed into a rigorous design of enclosures and structures, finally into walls, expanding these enclosures and structures into an architectural scale. Well, when I first encountered uh cubism, I thought I had found the very last thing that was necessary to reveal life to me. Now, I think my work is closer to cubism than to any other way of thinking. And that's why I thought that Picasso had had influence on every thinking being. >> Historically, this is sculpture that derives from the cubist collage with its technique of joinery. Sculpture no longer carved or modeled, but sculpture constructed as a house or a fence or a box is constructed. built by joining masses and enclosing space, embellishing it, exalting and redefining it, bending it to the artist's will and fantasy. In Neblesson's case, a fantasy of shadows and darkness. >> And the same thing happened with black. At that given time years ago, people thought that if you were an artist that you had to make things and you had to make things according to the rules and regulations. And people said, "Why artists? Why do you use only black? You know, if you used a touch of white or with it or a touch of vermilion with it." And I then in there said, well, I didn't want to make anything because these are images that seem uh to identify with some inner being as if I'm related to them, knew them all my life. So I wasn't making anything. And at that time, I became more and more secret within myself. And I could not conceive of doing work in the round. It became too public. And for years I did it and I even conceived of more boxes within boxes and black velvet. [Music] I somehow had an idea of we'll say when I did Don's wedding feast uh that I wanted light. I had been in the other quite some time and it was not too difficult. But I I will say that the forms did take a more festive u feeling. >> The festive feeling of Dawn's wedding feast is to be found in its overall architecture, in a design that is elaborate and robust. But it is there too, in the romance of the shadowy details, in the complicated images encased and improvised from discarded wood, in the intricate construction transformed into a fantasy of light. It's like a sunny day. The light of the sun turned to gold reflected in a structure of repetitions and accumulations. Are these weward circles and ellipses images of the sun or pure geometry? A collage of memories and associations or the elements of a pure design. The principle of structure here is a dialectical principle. The rigor of a strict box-like form repeated again and again, becoming the container of baroque accumulations of found images, of found circles, found columns, found arcs. The rediscovered fragments of other worlds. Each of these crowded spaces is a unique, intricate, almost pictorial experience. A little wild at times, a little humorous, none ever quite repeated, but each echoing the others. A bizarre architecture disclosing a wilderness of the imagination. [Music] Neblesson had achieved her most personal individual statement by breaking with the traditions of sculpture. the traditions of carving, modeling, and casting by turning to construction, working direct without the reliance on foundry or any process but her own unmistakable visions on her materials. The materials themselves were no longer sovereign. Like Picasso before her, casting her constructions in bronze, she found, perhaps despite herself, that she had embraced, unknowing, something of the tradition she had turned her back on. And the ancient method of casting so alien to her original vision became only another magnificent realization of it. [Music] In the past, Nevelson gathered her wood in the street, so to speak. Now she consciously planned every element in the design, cutting each form to fill and articulate a specific space. Now every detail of the structure had to be invented. Now the variations and repetitions traced a narrower course with smaller, subtler differences, every element in stricter control. There came a moment when for Nevelson, as for many artists before her, the will to form took precedence over every other consideration, the dictates of geometry became more and more absolute. Well, you see, when I got to plexiglass, number one, you see no matter. There is matter, but you see no matter. So it is a direct uh right move after the others you see because it's total reflection actually. But the thing that is to me a miracle is that when plexiglass is used and called what it is that's something it's a matter now when the concerns like say Dupont and PE big concerns like that they have spent millions and millions of dollars and they've had the greatest minds in chemistry and science to give us this material. Well, in my experience and awareness that doesn't exist because it's remarkable that they have done it, but that I can take it and use it for what it is. And for me, of course, it's just light. [Music] The ideal of a transparent structure in which space, mass, and light are identical and indistinguishable has haunted constructivist sculpture from its beginnings. And no sculptor has brought this ideal to a more transcendent realization than Louise Nevelson. In these plexiglass structures, everything is open, visible, and luminous. Planes dissolve into mass and mass into light. In these new crystal palaces, the sculptor makes of her art a triumph of light. But I think I'm getting closer and closer to in the plexiglass actually. I mean that material to me identifies with what every known philosophical book that we have on every philos take the orientals India or the Hindus or the Japanese or the testaments they have always clairvoyance transparency and this is the closest we can get. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] On a rainy Tuesday morning, January 26, 1971, one of the major works Louise Nevelson completed in 1970 was installed on the plaza of the serum building on Park Avenue in New York called Atmosphere and Environment. 12. This open form sculpture is composed of separate units of quart steel which had to be assembled on the site under the artist's supervision. It was to be on public exhibition for 6 weeks as part of the city of New York's sculpture and environment program. [Applause] The work is designed in the artist's most stringent style using a repatory of geometrical forms to orchestrate its composition of shadows and light. 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