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Artist: Louise Nevelson
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  • About
  • Items (178)
  • Auctions (112)

Louise Nevelson
1899–1988

One of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century, Louise Nevelson created intuitive, lyrical, and dense assemblages from salvaged wood, persisting in building a world of her own vision for more than sixty years.

Upcoming Lots Louise Nevelson

138 Louise Nevelson

Kneeling Horse

estimate: $10,000–15,000

starting bid: $6,000

Post War & Contemporary Art, 21 May 2025

The greatest thing we have is the awareness of the mind. There we can build mansions. There we have all the things that are not given to us on earth.

Louise Nevelson

Six Things to Know About Louise Nevelson

Nevelson claims that she decided to be a sculptor at the age of nine after seeing a white plaster statue of the Joan of Arc outside the public library in Rockland, Maine, where she grew up.

In the mid-1930s, Nevelson briefly worked as an assistant for Diego Rivera while he was creating his murals at the New Workers School in New York.

Nevelson first came to using scrap wood as a medium during World War II, when metal and other materials were scarce, saying: "There was sculpture in every piece of wood I saw."

Louise Nevelson, Sky Series D, Result: $40,000

She considered New York City, where she lived for over sixty years, "one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century," and once called the city "her mirror."

Nevelson was nicknamed the “Queen of Spring Street”, after the five-story home and studio space she kept in the then-not-so-posh SoHo neighborhood on Spring Street. The building was formerly a sanitarium.

Upon his first visit to New York, Jean Dubuffet, seeing a Nevelson installation, said: “This is enough, this is all of America, I don't need to see any more.”

The nature of creation is that you have to go inside and dig out. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it’s a painful, difficult search within.

Louise Nevelson

Auction Results Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson

untitled

estimate: $300,000–500,000

result: $266,500

Louise Nevelson

Mirror-Shadow V

estimate: $300,000–500,000

result: $226,800

Louise Nevelson

Moon Zag XI

estimate: $80,000–120,000

result: $131,000

Louise Nevelson

Atmosphere and Environment II

estimate: $15,000–20,000

result: $69,300

Louise Nevelson 1899–1988

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Louise Nevelson is best known for her large-scale, monochromatic, painted wood assemblages. She was a harbinger of feminist and installation art that rose to prominence in America in the mid-twentieth century. Her sculptures reflect her interior life, women’s roles in society, the urban landscape, personal symbolism and spirituality. Nevelson was also well-known for her cultivated style and no-nonsense personality, both of which helped sustain her tenacious confidence over the course of five decades, as the art world came around to celebrating her work and its impact.

Louise Nevelson was born Leah Berliawsky in 1899 in a part of Ukraine that is now Russia. In 1905 her family immigrated to Rockland, Maine to escape the persecution the Jewish community suffered under Tsarist Russia. Nevelson had artistic aspirations from an early age and in 1920, after marrying the son of a wealthy businessman, she and her husband moved to New York City. She gave birth to a son in 1922 and began taking classes at the Arts Students League in 1928. Finding it difficult to balance her family and her ambitions, she and her husband divorced in 1931 and she traveled to Munich to study under Hans Hofmann. The following year, Hofmann immigrated to America and Nevelson followed suit, returning to New York. She once again studied at the Art Students League, working under George Grosz and Chaim Gross and also worked for the Works Progress Administration, where she encountered many of the era’s soon-to-be-famous artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Nevelson’s work began attracting attention in the early 1940s, though financial success belied her early efforts. Being a woman, along with creating large, ambitious works made from refuse wood, contributed to the lack of initial fanfare around her work. In the 1950s she began being showing at respected galleries in New York, including Martha Jackson Gallery and Pace Gallery (who still represents her work today) and her work was critically favored, but not fully embraced or understood by the art market. In 1959, Nevelson’s Dawn’s Wedding Feast was shown in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition of avant-garde contemporary art, 16 Americans. Also included in that show were works by Jasper Johns , Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Nevelson was working within a similar mode as many of the era’s abstract expressionist painters—creating work out of an inner, emotional, self-guided searching, rather than from any obvious relation with culture or nature. Her assemblages, though made out of salvaged, mismatched wood, are unified and elegant in their depth and interior rationality. Dense and lyrical, these works speak to celestial bodies, personal myth-making, and psychological landscapes.

The Whitney Museum of American Art held Nevelson’s first retrospective in 1967 and in the 1970s, when Nevelson was in her seventies, she began receiving commissions for large, outdoor sculptures, which inspired her to work with new materials such as steel. Nevelson died in 1988 in New York, leaving behind a legacy of sustained creative persistence and vision that influenced scores of young artists that came after her.

[Her life] is such an intricate pattern of fantasy synthesised with reality that separation of myth and fact is nearly impossible...Nevelson's life itself is her greatest work of art.

Arnold Glimcher, art dealer and friend

Additional Resources

Louise Nevelson Foundation
Louise Nevelson interview, 1977
"Keeping House with Louise Nevelson," Oxford Art Journal, 2017
Louise Nevelson papers at Smithsonian Archives of American Art
Louise Nevelson studio tour

Humans really are heir to every possibility within themselves, and it is only up to us to admit it and accept it. You see, you can buy the whole world and you are empty, but when you create the whole world, you are full.

Louise Nevelson

To learn more about a work by Louise Nevelson in your collection, contact our specialists.

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