Mirror-Shadow VIII
Louise Nevelson
(American, 1899–1988)
1985
Medium/TechniqueWood, black paint.
Dimensions289.6 x 266.7 x 99.1 cm (114 x 105 x 39 in.)
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds donated by Charlotte and Irving Rabb, Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum Lee, Robert L. Beal, Enid L. Beal and Bruce A. Beal Acquisition Fund, and the Sophie M. Friedman Fund
Accession number1997.97
On View
Not on viewClassificationsSculpture
Collections
Complicated and yet stark, precarious but somehow balanced—Nevelson’s works, like those of the Cubist painters who inspired her, push recognizable forms toward abstraction. She collected scrap wood, pieces of furniture, even wheels and then stacked, assembled, and bolted them into carefully framed compositions. Often, she painted them entirely in black. Unlike other artists in this room, Nevelson reduced her palette to add content. For Nevelson, black had a mystical sense of wholeness: it “is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.”
A leading innovator in twentieth-century American sculpture, Nevelson began making the powerful wooden constructions for which she is best known when she was in her fifties. These sculptures are typically made of stacked boxes filled with fragments of carved wood and such found objects as furniture pieces and bits of architectural ornament that she arranged into complex assemblages. She then painted these elements one color—usually black—to unify them and obscure their original identity. In this piece, an open, lattice-like support allows both for a dramatic play of shadow and for the wall behind to interact with the relief’s black surfaces. Large rectangular areas are punctuated by four wooden rings, the largest of which veers precipitously forward.
Provenance1997, sold by PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York, to the MFA.Copyright© 2011 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
