ON VIEW

One of America's greatest modern sculptors, Louise Nevelson is best known for her intricate assemblages in painted wood. Born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev, Russia, she immigrated with her family to Maine, where her father was a builder and manager of a lumber yard. After her marriage to shipping merchant Charles Nevelson in 1920, the artist moved to New York City and began to study both performing and visual arts. Setting out as a painter in the early 1930s, Nevelson soon switched to sculpture, creating Cubist-inspired figures in plaster and terra cotta. In 1941 she held her first solo exhibition at New York's Nierendorf Gallery.

Although Nevelson worked with pieces of found wood beginning in the early 1940s, she did not focus on wood as her primary medium until the following decade. In 1953 she made her first assemblages, a black-painted group of sculptures reminiscent of city skylines. These brought critical acclaim, and over the next few years, the artist's work was acquired by a number of major museums in New York. Included in the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1962, Nevelson reached the height of her career in the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1960s she created her first sculptures in Cor-ten steel, including a major commission for Princeton University in 1969. Several others followed, culminating in 1978 with seven steel works provided for Louise Nevelson Plaza in the Wall Street district of New York. Almost eighty years old at the time, Nevelson remained active well into her ninth decade. The artist died in New York in 1988.

The Currier's Dream Houses XXXIII is a fine example of Nevelson's wood sculpture. Consisting of found wooden objects arranged into two towerlike units and painted a uniform black, Dream Houses invokes familiar domestic forms yet is profoundly mysterious. Acting as windows, vertical gaps between the wooden elements open into dark interior spaces. These interiors appear inaccessible and unknowable at first, but a careful perusal reveals that each "dream house" possesses a hidden door, a barely discernible portal through which the persistent viewer may gain entry.

As its title suggests, Dream Houses reflects Nevelson's lasting fascination with fantasy and the world of the subconscious. Like a dream, the sculpture is at once familiar and difficult to decipher. Although it is made up of fragments drawn from the rational, waking world, these have been rearranged in ways that defy interpretation. The banisters and moldings adorning the exterior of Nevelson's houses do not function as they would in normal structures; here they appear as part of a new and alien grammar of ornament. Walls, windows, and doors define these houses, but their odd proportions transform them into improbable dwellings of dreamlike strangeness. Similarly, Nevelson's hidden entries into secret spaces serve as metaphors of the human subconscious and the possibility of "unlocking" it as a source of creativity. Painted entirely in black, the sculpture takes on added notions of darkness, night, dreaming, and introspection.

Nevelson's use of matte black paint is not only allusive but serves practical purposes as well. The light-absorbing properties of the paint minimize the disruptive play of shadow across the surface and serve to visually unite the disparate array of elements from which the sculpture is made. At the same time, the paint obscures the nature of Nevelson's materials, effectively recasting her found pieces of wood as exceptional and important forms.

Dream Houses XXXIII was purchased in 1973 by the Currier Museum of Art with the aid of a matching gift provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

VSD

REFERENCES

Arnold Glimcher. Louise Nevelson. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1976.

Louise Nevelson. Ex. cat. William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, ME, 1979.