Martin Friedman

Louise Nevelson

"This book surveys the stylistic evolution of Louise Nevelson's wood sculpture over three decades, focusing on the primal themes so identified with her art - 'table landscapes,' columns, boxes, reliefs and walls. More than sixty works are illustrated, ranging from small-scale containers (the 'Cryptics') to a sequence of monumental black walls that she has continued to produce since the mid-1950s. In addition, a number of recent photographs of Nevelson in her studio are included. Wood is indisputably Nevelson's medium and the exhibition documents her remarkable use of this material. Although she has recently made small, precise plexiglass cube constructions and overseen the translation of several of her earlier wood pieces into large coro-ten steel sculptures, the genesis and essence of her art is in her special use of wood, with which she creates seemingly weightless shapes whose iconography relates them to the past as well as to the present. She is an accumulator, a compulsive forager of abandoned and discarded fragments - chair backs, architectural scrollwork, brush handles, weathered planking, and sweepings of chips and slivers from the carpenter's floor. These become the ingredients of her spectral, architectural compositions which, painted a uniform color - black, white or, on rare occasions, gold - allude to a mysterious reality." -- Notes inside cover.

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