The Brooklyn Rail

In Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture, the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson recounts how Nevelson’s sculpture was criticized by Clement Greenberg and his acolytes as too much of a bad thing: repetitive, large-scale sculpture made from “low” materials, created by a woman with an outsize persona. Bryan-Wilson embraces Nevelson’s unconventional, expansive approach to the creative process, engaging in her own “feminist queering of the monograph form” by dispensing with a strict allegiance to chronology and hierarchy. Instead of adhering to a timeline—the organizing yet constraining scaffold of most full-career studies of a single artist—the publication’s thematic, fragmented format allows for connections to branch outwards and through Nevelson’s art. Four slender, novella-size volumes, titled Drag, Color, Join, and Face, are contained within a single slipcover, their covers a bold black. Though the numbering of figures from one part to the next points to a suggested sequence, each volume stands coherently alone and gains additional resonance through its relation to the others. The four volumes are dense with insight, especially in Bryan-Wilson’s attentiveness to the sexist, classist codes inherent in Nevelson’s past reception and her incorporation of contemporary studies of race and language.

Drag considers the recuperative aspects of Nevelson’s assemblages and Bryan-Wilson’s own project, analyzing how Nevelson’s work and self-fashioning were seen as “a drag”: she was appraised by contemporaneous critics as “a woman who simultaneously took up too much space but made minor work.” Bryan-Wilson explores the titular term’s different meanings, examining the artist’s process of hauling wooden materials off the street, her sculptures’ out-of-time use of old furniture styles and their resistance to modernist doctrine, and Nevelson’s campy self-presentation as unconventional acts of agency.

Another of the artist’s signature choices, the use of black paint, is the subject of Color. Citing Adrienne Edwards, Fred Moten, Huey Copeland, and other interlocutors who have investigated the racialized dimensions of the color black in art, Bryan-Wilson writes, “When Nevelson heralded the ‘greatness’ of the color black, she articulated a pointed rejoinder to those who see it as degenerate, inferior, or lesser.” The volume also investigates Nevelson’s rejection of the white cube in her use of blue lighting, the criticism of her white and gold works as decorative or gaudy, and the accumulation of dust on the surfaces of her sculptures over time, markers of human interaction that puncture the concept of an ideal, autonomous monochrome surface.

The rough, evident connections between the components of Nevelson’s sculptures are the launching point for Join, which also ties the artist to a constellation of other artists, including Saloua Raouda Choucair, Doris Salcedo, Sandra Orgel Crooker, and Noah Purifoy, and considers Nevelson’s co-habitation with her assistant Diana MacKown. Though Bryan-Wilson scrutinizes how this living arrangement was interpreted and mobilized by art historians and members of the gay community, Nevelson’s sexual orientation is less interesting to her than the artist’s “queer” rejection of the nuclear family in favor of chosen bonds. In the final portion of the volume, Bryan-Wilson examines the joining of artworks to names, admitting that she finds Nevelson’s vague titles “a bit frustrating,” with their repetitive nature leading to dismissive or overwrought interpretations by previous art historians. She wrestles with her own interpretation of this subject in a transparent fashion, surveying the complex discourse around naming and ultimately arguing for Nevelson’s titles as sources of feeling, rather than definitive meaning.

Face begins with a reflection on the overwhelming circulation of Nevelson’s visage, which Bryan-Wilson regards with ambivalence as a tired, gendered conflation of the artist’s appearance and her work. However, the concept of frontality—both in Nevelson’s recognizable garb and the façade-like appearances of her sculptures—proves to be more fertile territory for analysis. Bryan-Wilson writes convincingly of possible sources for Nevelson’s visual vocabulary, including the architecture of her native Ukraine and Jewish aniconic traditions. In a section that incorporates her own subjectivity with particular sharpness, Bryan-Wilson recounts a research trip she took to Nevelson’s hometown of Pereyaslav, describing how seeing the layered wooden design of the town proved to be a “revelation” in terms of understanding the artist’s work. Another aspect of Bryan-Wilson’s project is taking “‘low’ circulations seriously,” she writes, and her tender analysis of children’s classroom art projects and fan art based on Nevelson’s work are among the highlights of this volume. Her conclusion chillingly brings the project into the present, relaying how encounters with Nevelson’s mammoth wooden constructions have ignited her own fears of climate destruction: “They [Nevelson’s sculptures] feel like an artifact from a distant moment in which an artist could more innocently, or naively, incorporate massive amounts of wood without triggering associations of acute environmental loss.”

Throughout the volumes, Bryan-Wilson’s tone is academic but also highly readable, citing critical theory and popular press coverage of the artist with equal aplomb, and she keeps her subjectivity at the forefront through discussions of her research process, travels, and encounters with the works. The unique strength of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture comes from its purposely irregular, magnanimous approach to the monograph, a choice imbued with its own creative politics. The ingenious modular structure mirrors Nevelson’s work visually and conceptually, allowing meaning to accrete through a non-hierarchical relationship of parts.