In New York it is desirable to have some kind of relationship with your neighbor, but not too close. A few years ago there was some kind of gas leak in my building. When the brave Italian firefighters came to save the day—with pictures of saints in their oxygen tanks—they asked me if the couple across the hall was in the house or in their house up north. I said I didn’t know, so the firemen closed the door to make sure they couldn’t see. The next time the male part of the couple was in town he buttoned me up on the stairs to complain about the damage to his front door. This made me overfamiliarize myself. It wasn’t that I really knew this guy. I was just trying to save his life.
“Mrs. N’s Palace,” the new exhibition at the Center Pompidou-Metz, takes its name from the permanent installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), whose title refers to the nickname of Nevelson and her neighbors in the city. Nevelson was a pioneer of installation art and is best known for assembling debris that looks like monochrome artifacts from the future. You can imagine the stairwell conversations. Although the Met’s work does not appear in the Metz exhibition, the new exhibition borrows from other impressive collections for what is his first European impression of this scale, 50 years after he was last seen in France.
|
“MRS. N’S PALACE” |
Although associated with impersonal monoliths, Nevelson’s art begins with the body. He studied eurythmy for two decades and honored Martha Graham. This concern informs him Motion Picture-Still a series from around 1945, where a number of terracotta objects are tied to an object so they can spin around like a dancer. It may be here that he first became interested in the color black, because these were often painted in that color, which he called “the silhouette, the essence of the universe.” These works are nothing but a shifting shadow.
Among his dark pieces should be Respect to the Universe (1968), the show’s bass note. This wall piece is about nine meters wide, a grid of open boxes dense with turned wood, finials and offcuts. This abandoned carpenter from New York may have been burned in a very precise fire, because it is in a round and unchanging matte black. Nearby may be garbage. In the distance its penumbras turn to distorted stars, with a beautiful intensity that can be heard when discussing the Color Field painting by the likes of his friend Mark Rothko.
This exhibition recreates three of his historic locations, Garden Month + One (1958), his first white work Dawn’s Wedding Ceremony (1959), and his golden single, The Royal Tides (1961). From this last entry appears An American Tribute to the British People (1960-64), gilded wall on loan from Tate. There is a modest dimension to this work but it is of the Nevelson signature type. Its direct and symmetrical qualities make the spaces between the junk sound like column flares. Gold does not feel precious. Nevelson emphasized that color comes from the earth, and this sounds more like the sun than jewelry. The work shines and vibrates without insisting on it. I have no problem living with it, or indeed down the hall from it.
More show updates
