Using Art: Images and Ideas textbook.
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Read pages 246-7. Take notes as you read.
Answer critical thinking question.
Review artwork on page 39, and 122.
Define the vocabulary words listed below.
Elements: Shape (geometric), Form, Value and Texture.
Principles: Formal balance (symmetry)
Techniques: Subtractive sculpture (method).
What would be Additive method? Relief.
Sculpture
Highlight
Louise Nevelson - Sky Cathedral, 1958.
Aim: What impact did Nevelson’s use of
“one color” have on her work?
Do Now: Write your opinion in a sentence or two.
Nevelson was born Sept. 23, 1900 in Kiev, Ukraine.
From the time three- year old Louise Berilawsky
(Burr-lee-OW-skee) arrived in the US from Russia
(1904), she felt out of place. Her family spoke little
English, and there were few Jewish families in
Rockland, Maine. Her father quickly established a
successful lumber business; her mother was a
fashionable woman and homemaker who dressed
her children in beautiful clothes. But this set them
apart from their classmates and furthered the
discomfort Louise felt. Besides having few friends,
Louise had difficulty with reading. Except for art and
sports, she did not enjoy being in school. Piano and
art lessons were continued at home and took the
place of friends. From the time Louise was six, she
built things from wood scraps she found in her
father’s lumberyard.
In 1920, Louise married Charles Nevelson, whose family ran a
shipping business. The couple moved to NYC. Nevelson
studied voice, dramatics, and art. She studied at the Art
Students League in New York City from 1928 to 1930. She felt
that marriage interfered with her ambitions, and in 1931 she
left her husband and sent her son to live with her parents.
That same year, Louise left for Europe to study with the
German painter Hans Hofmann in Munich. Returning to New
York, Louise had confidence in her work. In 1936, a gallery
exhibited some of her wood sculptures. Her work focusing on
simple, geometric, abstract shapes.
Her diverse works of the 1930s and '40s show influences
ranging from the dynamic contortions of the futurist
school to the cool, simplified forms of the Romanian artist
Constantin Brancusi's sculptures. Trips to Mexico and
South America inspired a series of terra-cotta works.
Constantin Brancusi
(French, born in Romania, 1876–1957)
Bird in Space
1923/Marble
Nevelson’s Large scale wood sculptures began with her first
smaller scale piece titled: Black Majesty
(1955, Whitney Museum, New York City), a horizontal
arrangement of geometrical wooden forms.
In the late '50s Nevelson began producing her
well-known "sculptural walls"--large freestanding
arrangements of shallow vertical boxes filled with
pieces of wood and miscellaneous objects such as
driftwood, wheels, knobs, and chair slats.
Rain Garden II by Louise Nevelson 31"x47"X4-1/2" painted wood,
1977 Bette C. Graham Collection, Gihon Foundation, Santé Fe, New
Mexico
• These works, with such evocative titles as Sky
Cathedral (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New
York City) and Total Obscurity (1962, Pace
Gallery, New York City), were usually painted a
single color, notably black, but sometimes
white or gold.
She later experimented with other materials, such as metal, Plexiglas,
plastic, Lucite, and enamel. For New York City's Saint Peter's Lutheran
Church Nevelson created the all-white Chapel of the Good Shepherd
(1977-78).