Louise Nevelson
Flower Queen
1953-55
Etching
Plate: 20 in. x 15 1/2 in.
Sheet: 30 in. x 22 in.
Gift of Steven Sheinhouse / Frances Glasser
American artist Louise Nevelson (1899 -1988) has been acclaimed as one of the leading artists of the twentieth century. 1 She created sculptures that fused the historic Avant-Garde movements of Cubism, Dada and Surrealism with influences from Native American and Pre-Columbian art. 2 Her compositions were largely “based on the idea of assemblage and the overlapping perspectives of geometric shapes and is[are] characterized by the use of wood and bits of furniture salvaged from the streets of New York.”3
Nevelson was originally from the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). She emigrated with her family to the United States in the early twentieth century. At the early stages of her career, she studied at the Arts Students League of New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller and Kimon Nicolaides from 1929 to 1930. Then she studied with Hans Hofmann in 1931. A decade later in 1941, Nevelson had her own solo-exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York.4 Her works were so inspiring that she was selected to be a producer of American artworks and teacher at the Educational Alliance School of Art on behalf of the Federal Art Project for the Works Progress Administration.5
During the course of her life, Nevelson traveled extensively. She visited Europe, Mexico, South America. In part because of her travels she was shown in European, as well as American, exhibitions. Throughout her career, Nevelson participated in forty exhibitions, thirty-six of which exhibitions were solo shows. Currently, her most prestigious works are held within the prominent American collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art. Her artwork is also showcased within national institutions like the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Gallery in Washington, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Although more generally known for her sculptural works, she created prints throughout her career. In 1947, she began etching when she studied with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, New York.6 Nevelson’s prints are important for understanding her creative process because for her “print technique has always served as an artistic imperative.”7 Her prints allowed her to discover a “perceptual truth, an ingredient of seeing that has inherent structural and expressive flexibility, and hence a potential for infinite meaningful variation.”8 It was her personal way of developing the formal qualities that form a new manner of seeing.
The etching and aquatint, Flower Queen is from Nevelson’s first collective body of prints, made during the years 1953 to 1955. When studying this print, one can tell it took considerable time to create based on the overall composition, tonal effect and contrast, and extensive articulation of line. The work is reflective of Nevelson’s consideration towards sculptural forms in a two-dimensional format and experimentation with imagery. This period of works is characterized by her extreme contrasting application of tonalities with linear linkages and accents. Flower Queen is reflective of Nevelson’s experimentation with mass and form, as well as process. Instead of focusing on the figure and rendering it in a naturalistic fashion, she focused on the space and mass of the body and face. She also paid close attention to linear qualities, “spatial ambiguities of the etched surface, the interplay of close values expressed in relative depth of etch and heaviness of inking, and treatment of the plate surface in terms of contrasting” values.9
1. "Biography," Louise Nevelson Foundation, last modified 2010, http://www.louisenevelsonfoundation.org/biography.php. ↩
2. Bruno Cora, ed., Louise Nevelson (Milano, Italy: Skira Editore S.p.A., 2013), 3. ↩
3. Cora, Louise Nevelson, 3. ↩
4. "Biography," Louise Nevelson Foundation. ↩
5. Robin Clark, "Louise Nevelson," Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/nevelson-louise. ↩
6. "Biography," Louise Nevelson Foundation. ↩
7. Gene Baro, Nevelson the Prints (New York: Pace Editions, 1974), 1. ↩
8. Ibid, 4-5. ↩
9. Ibid, 4-5. ↩
-Amanda Page