Introduction

Kim Conaty: Welcome to this exhibition of works by Louise Nevelson. I’m Kim Conaty, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. 

Nevelson lived and worked in Manhattan from the 1920s to the 1980s. She worked in many mediums, but became best known for sculpture. Assembling materials that she found on the street, she took inspiration from the city around her. In a 1972 interview with her art dealer, Arne Glimcher, she described returning home from a trip abroad. 

Louise Nevelson: I returned to America and New York and I'd go into the subways. The columns in the subways are black iron. And for me, personally, they certainly had as much meaning, and in form as well as many of the things that are in museums. I didn't make that distinction, for me. And they still have that power and they still are grand and glorious. 

Kim Conaty: Nevelson channeled that power through abstraction. She masked the identity of her materials, including milk crates and table legs, by painting them a single hue—often black.  

Louise Nevelson: I don't want color to help me. And I think that is the key to my life. That has been the key. Why I chose the hard way I don't know. 

Kim Conaty: Despite their monochrome surfaces, Nevelson’s sculptures contain a wide variety of forms, textures, and objects. The works on view here reward close looking, offering endless details for visitors to discover.