Word: nevelson
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...Nevelson's account of her childhood and youth has the deliberate quality of fiction, simplified and pruned of inconvenient facts. She presents herself as an infant prodigy, continuously inspired, the servant of her gifts, every part of whose life, even loneliness, was an act of choice. She says she knew at five that she was going to be an artist, and by seven that her art would be sculpture. Art did give Nevelson a sense of security and a vocation. "From the first day in school to the day I graduated," she says, "everyone gave...
...electric glare, each jar filled with a different sort of colored candy-toffees, bull's-eyes, peppermints, fruit gums. "It looked like heaven," she recalls. "It was very magical." There is an obvious and durable link between that epiphany in the candy store and the regulating image of Nevelson's mature work: the serried boxes, each holding its array of repeated forms, offered for inspection in a shallow space...
...Berliawskys were one of 30 Jewish families in a provincial town whose anti-Semitism stung in a thousand ways. Nevelson remembers her father taking to his bed for weeks at a time when things got too much for him. Her mother was "misplaced in every conceivable way"-intelligent, pretty, neurasthenic, miserable in her marriage but devoted to her offspring. By the prevailing standards of Maine she had a ripe sense of style; she rouged her cheeks and dressed as though she were in New York City, thus laying the foundation of her daughter's passion for maquillage as armor...
...married a young cargo-ship owner named Charles Nevelson, who took her to live in New York. The city was the stronger marriage. "New York is a city of collage," Nevelson would pronounce 50 years later, at the dedication ceremony of one of her outdoor sculptures in lower Manhattan, "a collage with kinds of religions, and the whole thing is magnificent ... There's no place like...
Here, at last, the big world started to act on the intense, self-dramatizing neophyte from Maine. "I've always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself," Nevelson recalls. "I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself-if someone went six, I'd go twelve, you know? I had to move, not to get frustrated; and I was frustrated enough. In 1920 I went into everything you could imagine-Bahai, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, vegetarianism ... well, that didn't last long. I have to eat meat." She studied art, acting...