In New York, it is desirable to have some kind of relationship with your neighbor, but not one that is too close. A few years ago, there was some kind of gas leak in my building. When burly Italian firefighters showed up to save the day — with images of saints plastered on their oxygen tanks — they asked me if the couple across the hall were at the apartment or at their home upstate. I said I didn’t know, so the firefighters opened the door to make sure they weren’t. The next time the male half of the couple was in town, he beat me up in the stairwell to complain about the damage to his door jamb. This struck me as all too familiar. It wasn’t like I really knew the guy. I was just trying to save his life.
“Mrs. N’s Palace,” a new show at the Center Pompidou in Metz, takes its name from a permanent installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art designed 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 is best known for his collages of debris that look like monochrome artifacts from the future. You can imagine staircase conversations. While the Met’s works do not appear in the Metz gallery, the new exhibition borrows from other impressive collections in what is its first European retrospective of this size, 50 years after its last show in France.
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“Mrs. Palace Inn“ |
Although she became associated with inhuman monoliths, Nevelson’s artistic impulses began with the body. She studied movement art for two decades and revered Martha Graham. These fears inform her Moving, static, moving form A series from around 1945, in which a small group of clay elements are suspended on a rod so they can twirl like a dancer. This was probably where she first became interested in black, because she was often painted in this color, what she called “the silhouette, the essence of the universe.” These works are only changeable shadows.
Among her blackest pieces it has to be Greetings to the universe (1968), a bass tone for the show. This wall piece is approximately nine meters wide and is a grid of open boxes filled with turned wood, finished decorations and carvings. This neglected New York joinery may have been burned in a very careful fire, as it falls under the control of a unique and consistent matte black finish. Up close it might be trash. In the distance, the penumbras turn into upside-down stars, with a good tension felt in conversation with the Color Field painting of people like her friend Mark Rothko.
The exhibition recreates three of her iconic environments, Moon Garden + One (1958), her first white work Dawn wedding (1959), and it has the only gold, Royal Tide (1961). From this latest installation comes An American greeting to the British people (1960-1964), gilded wall on loan from Tate. There is a refined grandeur to this work but it is from Nevelson’s signature collection. Its vertical and symmetrical qualities make the gaps between the litter look like pillar torches. As for gold, it does not seem precious. Nevelson insisted that the color came from the earth, and this color seemed to have more in common with the sun than with jewelry. The work glows and vibrates without insisting on its own. I wouldn’t mind living with him, or actually down the hall from him.
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