Word: nevelson
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...Nevelson did not want to make her totems from steel-"it was too mechanical for me"-and so she resorted to wood, the stuff of her childhood in Maine. She began collecting stray bits and pieces from the street, from junkyards, from antique shops: scroll-sawed offcuts, bits of molding, battered planks and ribs of crates, balusters, toilet seats, sheets of split veneer, gun-stocks, dowels, finials, anything that seemed to have some character. The amassing of these things was an act of love and salvage. "I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection...
...Nevelson was not, of course, the first artist to do this: her forerunner in the art of reclamation was German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who made thousands of collages from street refuse. When the sculptor Jean Arp saw Nevelson's great black environment Sky Cathedral in 1958, he wrote her a poem hailing her as Schwitters' spiritual granddaughter, but the fact seems to be that Nevelson had seen nothing by Schwitters...
...Nevelson's attempt at a fusion of painting and sculpture ended by confusing her reputation during the 1960s. The art Establishment was dominated by a formalist view that took it as gospel that art should be "self-defining"-so that painting must eliminate every attribute not unique to painting, and sculpture likewise to sculpture. To this Establishment Nevelson seemed impure to the point of sloppiness and her love of metaphor and allusion quite improper. Nor did it help that she was a woman. Thus, in one of the most celebrated curatorial blunders in recent memory, she was left...
Such snubs are long past; for ten years Nevelson has been almost monotonously anointed with praise, and her extreme popularity among collectors has introduced other problems. A fine line exists between fecundity and overproduction, and one may suspect that Nevelson's very success has edged her across it, demanding-in contrast with her actual masterpieces like Mrs. N's Palace-a steady output of second-line goods to keep the market happy. It is hardly imaginable that, 20 years from now, anyone except dealers will be taking Nevelson's abundant prints and recent multiples very seriously...
...only area in which this presents a real problem is in her larger sculpture. Despite her virtuosity, Nevelson has not made a good crossing from private to public space, although she is besieged by commissions. In fact, there is hardly one major 20th century artist-not even Alexander Calder or Henry Moore- whose essential oeuvre includes much public, commissioned sculpture. On the public scale, the suppleness of intuition tends to stiffen and is replaced more often than not by a mild form of self-parody. The old cliché was the bronze general on horseback, humiliated by birds...