The Fight in Women Between Security & Adventure—Is There a Beautiful Solution? a consideration of the life and work of Louise Nevelson
The work of the 20th century sculptor Louise Nevelson, who lived from 1899 to 1988, shows in an exciting, new way, the drama about security and adventure in art. She once said, “I’ve always been a searcher.” “Almost everything I have done was to understand this universe, to see the world clearer.”
Aesthetic Realism sees the opposites of security and adventure in a whole new way, and studying it revolutionized my life and my work as an art teacher and sculptor. I learned, as every person can, that there are two ways of going after both—one that is honest, which art stands for, and the other false and hurtful because it arises from contempt.
In his lecture “Mind and Security” Eli Siegel explained:
“If the only way we can get our unity is to feel against what is not ourselves; and not want to be interested in it, then our security will be fake from the very beginning. If, however…there can be something which is unified and various, where people can be themselves and welcome the variety of reality, out of that comes security. The only way to be secure is to be all of yourself. The only way to be all of yourself is to see what exists, because all of yourself feeds on what exists.”
Louise Nevelson is most known for her large sculptural environments made of wood. In a talk my colleague Steve Weiner gave in the Terrain Gallery series “Art Answers the Questions of Your Life” he took up the work by Nevelson titled: Sky Cathedral-Moon Garden + One of 1957-60, one of many in her Sky Cathedral series, and showed how the artist saw meaning, mystery, and possibility in objects she found on New York City streets.
Nevelson, Louise, Sky Cathedral—Moon Garden + One, 1957-60, wood painted black, 109 x 130 x 19 inches, Milly and Arnold Glimcher, New York
Nevelson, said, Mr. Weiner stated: “takes the things people literally have to look down to see—objects on the street, on the ground and raises them up, frames and composes them, and makes us look up to them. “
In the book Dawns and Dusks: Conversations with Louise Nevelson, the artist tells the author Diana MacKown how she saw these objects having adventures all their own:
“Anywhere I found wood, I took it home and started working with it. It might be on the streets, it might be from furniture factories…. I don’t think you can touch a thing that cannot be rehabilitated into another life… What people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection. You’re taking a discarded, beat-up piece that was no use to anyone and you [put] it in a position where it goes to beautiful places… These pieces of old wood have a history and drama… Just think of certain backs of chairs… What it has gone through, the life it’s had!”
At the age of 33 when Louise Nevelson decided to work professionally as an artist, she was adventurous. “I’m going into areas I don’t know,” she said. “I might just fall right down… [but] I’d rather do it and see what it’s about. I don’t want the safe way. The safe way limits you.” On a trip to Europe in the 1930’s she was greatly affected by Cubism and it encouraged her to find the new sense of structure she was looking for in her work. “I began to understand the cube,” she said, “and it gave me the key to my stability.” After this she started to build constructions made of food crates she had found. The box, she said, “gave me a better sense of security” and it also freed her to be adventurous, “to try the unusual.”
Yet the same person who felt “Creation… is… always a surprise,” also said, “There are not many surprises in a life. The actual world is too much for me.” In a lecture, Eli Siegel explained:
“An artist has a fight between the artist in her and just the person. Art tries to honor reality. We, simply as selves, may want to honor only ourselves.”
She Had a Fight between Artist and Person
Born in Russia to Isaac and Minna Berliawsky, Louise was three years old when her father came to America, hoping soon to send for his wife and three children. His leaving, writes biographer Laurie Lisle in Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life, was traumatic for the young Louise who, she says, felt such a “violent sense of desertion” by her father and to some extent her mother, that Louise refused to speak for half a year. Lisle writes:
“Her mother feared that she had suddenly become deaf and dumb. This was the first of many periods of numbing depression and withdrawal that would afflict her throughout her life.” What made for this withdrawal? Was the young Louise going after the false security of shutting out the world?
When she was five, the family joined Isaac in America and settled in Rockland, Maine. In the book Breaking Traditions: The Story of Louise Nevelson, Natalie Bober describes how the young Louise “hid behind a proud bearing and retreated more and more into herself.” “I felt like an outsider,” Louise later said and defiantly added “I chose to be an outsider.” I believe she made a hurtful choice, as Mr. Siegel describes a person feeling, “If I can make myself asbestos and heavy gloves and a statue, then I’m going to be safe.”
But the young girl had something else working in her—a passion for art. She was interested in objects outside of her and wanted to give them form. She spent hours sketching the furniture in her family’s home and also visiting her father’s lumberyard. At age 9 she told the town librarian, “I’m going to be an artist. No, I want to be a sculptor.”
When Louise was 17, she met Charles Nevelson, from a wealthy Russian shipping family who lived in New York City. He offered her, writes Natalie Bober, “protection, comfort, security. They were married on June 12, 1920.
She was now free to pursue the adventure of her life—her care for art and began to study painting and drawing. It seems she and her husband argued a good deal, often about money and sex. And when Louise became pregnant and gave birth to a son, she went into a deep depression. About this time, she said ,“I had no freedom.” She came to feel her security as a woman lay in being separate from her husband, and after eleven years, she left him. As she put it: “I needed to claim my total life. That means my total time for myself. I had to have totality. This is my life and I don’t permit people to intrude.”
This was utterly against what she went after as a sculptor—the desire to get to unity, security through variety, through welcoming the manyness of reality through ordinary, often discarded objects in which she saw wonder and excitement.
Nevelson, Louise: Dawn’s Wedding Chapel IV, wood painted white, 1959-1960, 109 x 87 x 13.5 inches, Philippe Braunschweig, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Royal Tide, Dawn, 1960-1964, wood painted gold, 231.1 x 160 x 27 cm, Museu Coleção Berardo, Portugal. Sky Cathedral—Moon Garden Wall, 1956-60, wood painted black, 85 ⅝ x 75 ¼ x 12 ½ inches, The Cleveland Museum of Art, USA.
Security and Adventure in My Life
The way I found security in arranging clothes in order of color or alphabetizing my record collection, seemed miles apart from how I felt driving my 1967 Mustang down the highway singing as loud as I could “Born to Be Wild.” Like many women, I associated security with being at home and adventure with going out, doing exciting things. But these were in such a fight in me that when I was “out” I felt I had to get home, then getting bored, I felt I had to break out. Increasingly what I saw as adventure was being unrestrained—with men, driving fast, drinking, taking drugs, which left me disgusted, unsure of myself, and resolved that the less I had to do with other people, the safer and more secure I would be.
Growing up in Springfield, Missouri I went back and forth between “welcoming the variety of reality” and not being interested in things. My father Don Ellison raced thoroughbred horses, which my mother Beverly Burk helped train. We would drive cross country in a truck, with camper and trailer. Seeing the land change from place to place was an adventure—how it got flat in Kansas, how the earth was red in Oklahoma, how the early morning fog hung over the mountains in northern Arkansas, and how the air in Kentucky was sweet with the fragrance of wild honeysuckle.
Meanwhile, I had another drive—to be unbothered and separate. I gave my parents the message that I was miserable and often sat in the camper alone playing solitaire. Years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation I began to understand what was driving me when I was asked:
“How much do you want not to have your solitude interrupted? Would you say that is a large thing in your life—how to find time for just you? Do you think that there's an insistence on being intact?”
There was! And I learned that this false way I went after security affected how I saw everything, including love! I began to see that I was more myself—not less—the more I was affected by the meaning other things and people, including a man.
The Beautiful Solution
Eli Siegel is the critic who explained that “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” And about Louise Nevelson he said that her sculpture “continues the everlasting presence of passion and materialistic proportion or control.” The opposites of control and passion are related to security and adventure and these opposites are wonderfully together in her “Sky Cathedral” of 1958. It is a beautiful oneness of freedom and order.
Its overall structure is created from stacks of rectangular boxes that are a variety of narrow, short, tall, wide, and square. Yet placed securely within these boxes are intricate arrangements of a multitude of wooden shapes and forms, having tremendous variety. They are thin and thick; straight-edged and curved; textured and smooth; some recessed into the depths of the box, others coming forward; crowded together and spaced apart, abstract shapes and recognizable objects—all contained within those individual boxes that are stacked high and wide. And the multitude of the whole structure is unified with black paint.
Our eye goes on an excursion as shapes reveal themselves within the shadows and we begin to see objects we know—carved stair railings, banisters, chair legs, wooden spools, a bowling pin. All these shapes and objects are not secure through isolation or free through exclusion. No! Each individual shape and form is both more free and more secure through its relation to other shapes and forms. Look at how the bowling pin, a little above center, with its proud uprightness and graceful shape seems to insist on its relation to the tall cylinder to its right. It is secure in its place and free. This is how we want to be! In his essay “Art Is Free and Orderly” Mr. Siegel explains: “We want the world to be utterly orderly and utterly free at once. Art satisfies our own largest desire.”
Nevelson, Louise, Sky Cathedral, 1958 painted wood, 135 ½ x 102 ¼ x 18 inches, Museum of Modern Art, New York
—For Further Reading—
More about Louise Nevelson LouiseNevelsonFoundation.org