Online Art Gallery

Night Wave: Moon, 1984
Louise Nevelson, (1900-1986, American)
Black painted wood construction (12' x 35' x 20")

Gift of Mrs. George W. Norton

Louise Nevelson relied on a grid or pillar format for almost all of her sculptures, but she always undermined the sense of ordered rationality which a geometrical, architectural vocabulary implies. Her mysterious cabinets of discarded carpentry suggest a shadowy magic, a muffled sinister romanticism.

The profusion of imponderable trophies that makes up her wall-sized environments was assembled in a purely intuitive linkage. Different levels of clarity, density and blankness, like different levels of depth within the sculptures, provide the visual equivalent of poetic rhythm and metaphor.

The color black, which Nevelson called "the essence of the universe," unifies the scrap components of her art. Mayan and Aztec hieroglyphs and architecture were particular influences on Nevelson's art, and like her contemporaries, the American abstract expressionist painters, Nevelson used repetition to suggest obsessional imagery welling up from the subconscious. But ultimately the air of secrecy, the peculiar majesty and dream-like, mythic character of her art are strictly her own invention.