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Student Union Collection |
Louise
Nevelson
Russian / American, 1899-1988
Night
Zag III, 1971
painted wood
34 ½” x 42 ½” x 4”
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Called the “most celebrated female sculptor
in the history of modernisn,” though she worked in obscurity
for years, Louise Nevelson has called herself the “Architect
of Shadows.” Looking at Night Zag III, which is typical
of her art, one can see what she meant.
Nevelson’s signature work was the wall sculpture, a large
assemblage of stacked boxes filled with fragments of carved wood
and found objects like finials and spindles, usually painted
flat black to give it a mysterious and shadowy appearance. Her
sculptures, organized with small spaces of varying depths to
create a shattered Cubist picture plane, resemble paintings in
their frontality. The Wake Forest piece uses the same themes
as her larger works, cubist frame and found objects, but on a
more intimate scale.
Nevelson lived a colorful life.
Born in the Ukraine, she was reared in Rockland, Maine where
her father operated a lumberyard.
In 1920 she moved to New York where she took up acting, dancing,
piano, singing, and painting along with sculpture. She worked
with Ben Shahn as an assistant on Diego Rivera’s murals
in New York, and studied with German abstract artist Hans Hoffman,
who introduced her to Cubism and collage.
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