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Thursday October 11, 2007

‘Overdue’ retrospective of great Jewish American sculptor at de Young

by dan pine
staff writer

You might say that Louise Nevelson went into the family business.

Her grandfather was an Orthodox wood peddler in Ukraine; her father, a poor junkman who also specialized in selling scrap wood. Then, Nevelson became one of 20th century America’s most important sculptors. Her medium of choice: cast-off pieces of wood.

With her wild clothes, accessories and makeup, Nevelson was as flamboyant as a rock star, so much so that her persona –– as with, say, Salvador Dali –– sometimes overshadowed her art. Since her death in 1988, a renewed appreciation of her work has swept the art world, culminating in a three-month exhibition opening at the de Young Museum on Saturday, Oct. 27.

“The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” premiered last May at the Jewish Museum of New York. It brings together more than 70 works spanning the artist’s long career, and is the first large-scale Nevelson retrospective in two decades.

“She is overdue,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the curator of American art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “We need to look at the work again.”

Nevelson is known for her elaborate wood sculptures, often large-scale and painted in monochromatic black or white. At first glance, her work appears abstract, a wooden cousin to the muscular expressionism of contemporaries like Jackson Pollack or Willem de Kooning.

But Burgard begs to differ.

“If you look at the work, there are figurative elements,” he says, “free standing totemic elements. Once people realize this, they understand how to look at her work more metaphorically.”

Nevelson’s admirers have noted Jewish undercurrents in some of her work. In a few pieces –– such as those memorializing the Holocaust or in commissions done for synagogues –– that Jewish cast is overt. For the bulk of her output, the Jewish element is more suggestive, linked closely to her biography.

Born Leah Berliawsky in 1899, she spent the first six years of her life in Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement, one of 14 children growing up in an Orthodox home. Her father relocated to America, bringing the rest of the family over in 1905. They settled in Rockland, Maine, a small, largely Protestant town. There, Leah couldn’t help feeling like an outsider.

Eventually, in her art, she would take “objects the world had cast aside as having no value, transforming them and placing them in a new context of art,” says Burgard. “She found materials that best embodied her own experience as a castoff.”

Nevelson married young, had a son, but was unhappy with domestic life. She deserted her family to study in Europe (and lived with the guilt for the rest of her life). But she returned to America in the early 1940s with a new artistic vision. It would take many years before the rest of the art world caught up with her, but by the late 1950’s, at nearly age 60, she was the “it” girl.

For many devotees of American art, she still is.

“No one who ever looked at her work has mistaken it for anyone else’s,” says Burgard. “She insisted on the fulfillment of that inner vision.”

The new exhibition includes “Homage to 6,000,000” and the model for “The White Flame of the Six Million,” both painted wood pieces created to honor the Holocaust dead. The final version of the latter piece is actually the eastern wall of Temple Beth El in Great Neck, N.Y.

“When you look at this work, you notice the flame-like forms,” says Burgard. “Beautiful echoes of curvilinear forms, silhouettes you would associate with a flame. It also calls to mind the curves of the human body. It’s very subtle and beautiful.”

Nevelson, who created another Holocaust memorial piece for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, once said of Hitler’s war against the Jews, “The depth of what I feel must remain private.”

Otherwise, so much about her achievements is front and center in the public eye, and even more so with the de Young exhibition.

“Our perception of her is this indomitable force of nature,” says Burgard. “She’s gone but the work is here, and this [show] is a wonderful opportunity.”

The Jewish Museum of New York, with support from the Koret Foundation, the Helen Diller Family Foundation and the Francis Goldsmith Exhibition Fund, presents “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend,”

on display 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, Oct. 27 through Jan. 13 at the de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, S.F. Tickets: $6-$10. Information: www.deyoungmuseum.org.

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