Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension

A New Yorker for most of her life, Louise Nevelson created dramatic and monumental sculptures often made from found objects and discarded pieces of wood gathered from city streets. Like the artist herself, Nevelson’s work seems to possess the irresistible energy of the city, at once taciturn yet teeming with life.

In 1957, Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) installed one of her first “Sky Cathedral” sculptures in the lobby of her brother’s hotel, the historic Thorndike Hotel in Rockland, Maine. It hung there for ten years until it was acquired by the pioneering collectors of American sculpture Jean and Howard Lipman. The Lipmans displayed the massive wooden assemblage of black painted boxes in Howard Lipman’s Manhattan business office. Sky Cathedral (1957) became a central piece in the family’s collection when in the 1970s they moved to Arizona and built a new house to accommodate its monumental scale. Their son Peter, along with his wife, Beverly, generously donated the sculpture to the San Jose Museum of Art in 2010.

Louise Nevelson: The Fourth Dimension brings this important work in SJMA’s permanent collection together with personal objects and ephemera from the Peter and Beverly Lipman Collection. Notes from the artist, rare books, and a single black box sculpture made for Jean and Howard Lipman reveal the intimate relationship between the artist and the collectors. The exhibition considers the influence of Sky Cathedral on works Nevelson made in the following decades, including lesser-known wall reliefs and a collage recently acquired by SJMA and on view for the first time.

One of the earliest wall-box sculptures in Nevelson’s highly esteemed series, Sky Cathedral marks a pivotal moment in her career when she began working with architectural space—mounting sculptures to walls and ceilings to create what she termed “worldscapes.” Sky Cathedral embodies Nevelson’s enigmatic and capricious understanding of a fourth dimension. A student of metaphysics, she believed that the spiritual quality of her wall arrangements brings “the fourth dimension or elsewhere, into the here and now of the third dimension,” suggesting a spatial continuum between the viewer, the object, and the universe. Relying not only on the physicality of her objects, the self-described “architect of shadow” used light and shadow as substance, lending additional illusionary depth to her three-dimensional walls of sculpture. Using a monochromatic palette, Nevelson created the sense of incomprehensible dimensionality—like that of a black hole—imbuing her work with an aura of mystery.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

 Whether or not you go,  The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend  focuses on all phases of the artist’s remarkable ascent to the top of the art world, from her groundbreaking works of the 1940s to complex pieces completed in the late 1980s. The most extensive study of Nevelson to be published in over 20 years, this beautifully illustrated book also demonstrates how Nevelson’s flamboyant style and carefully cultivated persona enhanced her reputation as an artist of the first rank. Louise Nevelson (1900–1988) was a towering figure in postwar American art, exerting great influence with her monumental installations, innovative sculptures made of found objects, and celebrated public artworks.

Essays by distinguished scholars examine a wide variety of important issues and themes throughout Nevelson’s career, including the role of monochromatic color in her painted wooden sculpture; the art-historical context of her work; her acclaimed large-scale commissioned artworks, which established her as a central figure in the public art revival of the late 1960s; and her “self-fashioning” as a celebrated artist, particularly her origins as a Ukrainian-born Jewish immigrant to the United States. An illustrated chronology and exhibition history accompany the text.

Select The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend to learn more or to order this book.