Lunar Landscape

The plastic research of Louise Nevelson comes directly from that series of American sculptors who had worked in direct contact with the main figures of the New York School. One of the techniques most explored by them was that of assemblage, a Dada-Surrealist cultural legacy, exemplified in the exhibition The Art of Assemblage organised by William Seitz in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Assemblage was then very widely practised by young avant-garde artists, both for economic and for aesthetic reasons, linked to the possibility of direct contact with reality in a less aestheticised and more lived sense. It is not far-fetched to identify the display cases containing objects found by Joseph Cornell or Rauschenberg’s personal boxes as direct precedents for the sculptures of Nevelson (they were together, moreover, at the annual exhibition in the Whitney Museum in 1953), who combined Surrealist interest in the imaginary with a passion for ancient pre-Colombian civilisations. This interest was aroused by a trip to the Yucatan, where she discovered steles and totems in which various Mixtec codices and scenes of Mayan life were merged, and reinforced by her experience as an assistant to Diego Ribera. After her initial attempts in terracotta, during the 1950s Nevelson devoted herself almost exclusively to the use of wood, creating monumental sculptures assembled from boxes, which became increasingly large, structured into levels and always monochrome: initially in matt black, then in white and gold. The decision to immediately give a purely monochrome character to these works was aimed at reducing the differences between the various objects that compose them, emphasising the eminently sculptural nature of this research, in which all remaining pictorial characterisation is annihilated or reduced to its minimal terms.