• Louise Nevelson, Rain Forest Night Presence Column, 1967

    Louise Nevelson

    Rain Forest Night Presence Column, 1967
    Black painted wood with formica base
    49 x 8 x 8" in (52.25 x 8 x 8" in including the base)
    Enquire
  • Louise Nevelson’s approach to sculpture was, in her words, an “alchemical” one. In a lifetime that spanned the 20th century, the artist worked against the backdrop of profound social and cultural change. She lived through both World Wars, witnessed the rise of modernism and watched skyscrapers transform the New York City skyline. In the 1940s, with the world and her son at war, Nevelson began to collect wooden fragments from the streets of New York, intuitively arranging and compartmentalizing the found objects into large-scale assemblages. Her decision in the following decade to paint the works all in one colour led to the monumental monochromatic sculptures that have made her an icon of American art.
     
    Nevelson’s work is both highly distinctive and difficult to categorize. The artist is considered a pioneer of installation art, but her work has also been discussed in relation to Cubism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, and feminism. Working freely between painting, sculpture, and architecture, the artist continually resisted labels. She made wooden constructions while her contemporaries welded metal and worked at a scale associated with male artists at the time. According to her granddaughter, Maria Nevelson, “She was creating her own reality.”
     
    This is as true of Nevelson’s practice as it is of the artist’s self-fashioned persona. Born in 1899 in what is now Kyiv, Ukraine, Louise Nevelson, née Berliawsky, transformed herself from the young immigrant who felt out of place in Rockland, Maine, to a leading sculptor of the 20th century, recognized for both her artistic achievements and her sartorial sense (the furs, the elaborate jewelry, the mink lashes…).
     
    It’s easy to wonder if an element of autobiography can be found in the repurposed wood of her sculptures. Nevelson’s father worked in the lumber trade and the artist had a sense of both the family “woods” in Ukraine and the forests in Maine. But Nevelson insisted against a reading of her work based solely on its material properties. “It’s not the medium that counts,” she explained, “It’s what you see in it and what you do with it.” Nevelson took ordinary objects and used them to create sculptures that transcend the quotidian origins of their materials.
     
    The alchemy of her work lies in this transformation of disparate objects into new forms that when painted black (white or gold in the case of her later works) take on a greater sense of presence.
  • Beneath an even layer of matte black paint, Rain Forest Night Presence Column is a modular assemblage of wooden fragments resting atop a Formica base in columnar form. Nevelson’s columns extend her signature practice of transforming found pieces of wood into monochromatic sculptures. Over the course of her career she produced both freestanding and hanging columns, sometimes incorporating them into her larger “environments.”
     
    Nevelson’s first columns followed two trips to the Yucatan Peninsula. The artist had developed an interest in Pre-Columbian art through museum collections in Paris and New York and while apprenticing with Diego Rivera in 1933. In the early 1950s while visiting the Quirigua ruins in Guatemala, Nevelson saw Mayan stelae. These limestone monuments rose from the grounds of the archaeological site — monochromatic columns of light and shadow.
     
    In place of low relief carvings that record historical events, Nevelson’s columns bear imprints of the forces at play in the streets where her materials were found. Areas of texture, small holes and other distinctive markings appear throughout the sculptures, subtle traces of the objects’ histories. From a distance these details are absorbed into the black paint. Nevelson’s columns appear as unified vertical structures, their emerging and receding forms casting shadows that move with the changing light.
     
    In its final form, each column lends itself to multiple interpretations. Sometimes referred to as “totems,” Nevelson’s columns might evoke the monumental carvings known to parts of Africa, Central America, and the Northwest Coast. The vertical wooden constructions might be thought of in relation to trees, natural resources, and the forests that house them. They might also recall the imposing buildings in the city that Nevelson described as “a great big sculpture.” “The columns in the subway,” she explained, “had as much meaning as many of the things that are in museums.” Writing for the Brooklyn Rail, curator and art historian Jillian Russo saw in a selection of columns exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “the vertical lines of the facades of the meatpacking warehouses across the street.”
     
    Rain Forest Night Presence Column is ultimately an abstract sculpture. But it also reflects Nevelson’s search for the underlying essence of her many influences—the sense of presence embodied in the ruins of ancient civilizations, the mysterious shadows of dense forest environments, and the towering skyscrapers in the dynamic cityscape around her.

  • Essay by Avneet Dhaliwal, MA