Transcript

“It’s not the medium that counts. It is what you see in it and what you do with it,” said Louise Nevelson. She was one of the most inventive sculptors working in the mid-20th century, and is hailed for her monochromatic, architectural wall sculptures, amassed from recycled objects and painted black, gold, or white.

Sky Cathedral's Presence I, made from 1959 to 1962, is one of her more monumental works. Let's take a look.

While at first you might see painted boxes stacked on top of each other, get up close and you’ll find much more.

On the right-hand side, we see bits of banisters framed in a box, or a circle that creates harmony against the broken planks of wood underneath it. You question whether you are looking at a fruit basket, a bedside table, or a filing cabinet that held important documents. By showing them as defunct, Nevelson gets you to think about the past lives of these objects, and beyond that, how they were made from wood that was once a tree. Nevelson’s Ukrainian Jewish family worked as woodcutters before emigrating to the US at the turn of the 20th century.

Now try standing back, and look around you. Perhaps there’s a monochromatic painting by Robert Motherwell, or another work of abstracted shapes. Suddenly, to me, these paintings appear different. By looking closely at Nevelson’s sculpture, she gets us to look beyond these abstracted marks and to the historical context in which they were made; the emotion that was bound up in them, and the empty void that artists of the post–World War II era had to fill — to comprehend a broken world that was in need of rebuilding.

Let’s think about the title: Sky Cathedral. When Nevelson was making this work, the city of New York was being built up around her with skyscrapers that soared upwards towards the clouds. This work gives the feeling of infinite building blocks, but the idea that it’s a cathedral also makes me think about what it could represent: respite and reprieve in a time of devastation and darkness.

By amassing her work from scraps found on the street, Nevelson shows us how we can physically reformulate detritus and turn it into something new. A reminder of the possibilities of making new dialogues, forming new communities, and finding beauty in something that has been thrown away.

Image: Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral's Presence I (detail), 1959–1962. Painted wood and found objects, 107 x 120 1/8 x 21 1/2 in. (271.8 x 305.1 x 54.6 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Foundation purchase, Phyllis C. Watts Fund for Major Accessions, 2017.50 ©️ Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York