Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson – Difficult childhood as a Jew, immigrant, and outsider

Louise Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky on 23 September 1899 in Perejaslaw, the Ukrainian city which was once part of the Russian Empire. The youngest daughter in an orthodox Jewish house, the family emigrated to the USA in 1905. Her father had already established a new existence in Rockland in the state of Maine in 1902 and worked as a logger – a factor which later had an impact on his daughter’s artistic work where wood played an important role as a material. Yiddish was the primary spoken language in the family home and so Louise Nevelson had to learn English in school. At the age of nine, she was deeply impressed by a plaster bust of the French heroine Joan of Arc and subsequently developed a strong interest in art, which, however, found little support in her environment and so eventually chose to escape her petty bourgeois hometown for New York where she graduated from high school in 1918. 

Unhappy marriage and definitive turn to art

Louise Nevelson worked as a stenographer in a law firm where she met the well-to-do Charles Nevelson, whom she married in 1920. Even the birth of their son Myron, however, could not prevent the marriage from failing due to the partners’ different ideas: Louise Nevelson wanted to work as an artist, whilst Charles expected her to be an attentive and representative wife. The couple divorced and Louise kept her husband’s name, but renounced all financial support- Instead, she turned to art, studying under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides at the Art Students League. During her studies, Louise Nevelson discovered the art of Marcel Duchamp, which would have an influence on her later work. She gathered further valuable impressions on a trip to Europe where she was struck by the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brâncuși as well as the exhibits of African art in Paris’ museums, studied with Hans Hofmann in Munich, and discovered Cubism.

Breakthrough to internationally celebrated artist

Louise Nevelson supported Diego Rivera with the production of his large-format mural Portrait of America in 1932 but felt herself increasingly drawn to sculpture. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1941 in the Karl Nierendorf Gallery in New York, and in 1943 Nevelson joined artists such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Meret Oppenheim as one of 31 participants in the famous Exhibition by 31 Women held by Peggy Guggenheim in her gallery, Art of This Century. Ceramics formed a focal point of Nevelson’s work in the 1940s, and in 1958, she attracted international attention with her large-format work Moon Garden Plus. In the 1960s, Louise Nevelson took part in the Venice Biennale, and twice in the Documenta in Kassel. During her lifetime she received a special and rare honour: a plaza in downtown New York was dedicated to her in name. 

Louise Nevelson died on 17 April 1988 in New York. Her niece is the painter Neith Nevelson.