In New York it is desirable to have some kind of relationship with your neighbor, but not too close a relationship. A few years ago there was some sort of gas leak in my building. When the burly Italian firefighters showed up to save the day—with pictures of saints clinging to their oxygen tanks—they asked me if the couple across the hall was in the apartment or their house upstate. I said I didn’t know, so the firemen opened the door to make sure they weren’t. The next time the male half of the couple was in town, he buttonholed me on the stairs to complain about the damage to the door plug. This seemed all too familiar to me. It wasn’t like I really knew the guy. I was just trying to save his life.
“Lady N’s Palace,” a new show at the Center Pompidou-Metz, takes its name from a permanent installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), whose title refers to Nevelson’s nickname with her neighbors in the city. Nevelson was a pioneer of installation art and best known for collections of trash that look like monochrome objects from the future. You can imagine the stairwell conversations. While the Met work does not appear in the Metz exhibition, the new show borrows from other impressive collections for what is its first European retrospective of this scale, 50 years after it was last shown in France.
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“Ms. N’S PALACE“ |
Although she became associated with inhuman monoliths, Nevelson’s artistic impulses began with the body. She studied eurythmy for two decades and honored Martha Graham. These concerns inform him Moving-static-moving figure series from around 1945, in which a small stack of terracotta elements are attached to a rod so that they can be spun like a dancer. It may be here that she first became interested in the color black, because they were often painted in that color, which she called “the silhouette, the core of the universe.” These works are nothing but shifting shadows.
Among its darkest parts must be Homage to the Universe (1968), a bass score for the play. This part of the wall is nearly nine meters wide, a network of open boxes filled with turned wood, skirting and cuttings. This discarded New York carpentry may have been burned in a very precise fire because it is topped with a distinctive and durable matte black. Up close it could be garbage. Far away her penumbras turn into inverted stars, with a good tension felt in conversation with the Color Field painting by people like her friend Mark Rothko.
The exhibition recreates three of its historical settings, Garden of the Moon + One (1958), her first white work Dawn wedding party (1959) and her only gold, Royal Tides (1961). From this last installation comes An American tribute to the British people (1960-64), a gilded wall on loan from the Tate. There is a grandeur of manner in this work, but it is of the Nevelson type. Its vertical and symmetrical qualities make the gaps between the debris feel like the flares of a column. As for gold, it doesn’t feel precious. Nevelson insisted that the color came from the earth, and it seems to have more in common with the sun than with jewelry. The work shines and vibrates without insisting on itself. I wouldn’t mind living with her, or actually down the hall from her.
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