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Louise Nevelson: Dawns and Dusks


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Louise Blouin Foundation W1

Excitement a long way from Kansas

Nevelson

Ben Lewis, Evening Standard 30 Apr 2009


Amid the monochrome sculptures of female American modernist sculptor Louise Nevelson, you may think for a moment you are Dorothy in the black-and-white opening scene of the Wizard of Oz, when the twister smashes the houses of Kansas into matchwood.

In Nevelson’s wall-reliefs and occasional sculptures, bits of wooden furniture — bedposts, skirting boards, chair-legs, banisters, doorknobs, carved decorative mouldings, those wavy bits of wood that your granny has around the top of her curtains — as well as rough wooden offcuts and the odd dustbin lid, are arranged in monumental Cubo-constructivist assemblages. They are often piled taller than human height and painted in a minimalist matt grey-black. The effect is tantalisingly ambiguous — exhilarating in its diagonals, yet ghostly and funereal in its palette.

Here, at long last, is a proper exhibition of an important artist worth putting in the stunning, high‑ceilinged palace — sorry, make that private art foundation — of philanthropist and magazine proprietor Louise Blouin. Her gallery is one of a number of build-your-own ICAs that London’s fractional billionaires have opened in the last two years (like David Roberts’s 111 Gallery, Alex Sainsbury’s Raven Row and Anita Zabludowicz’s 176).

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) belongs firmly to the postwar generation of American sculptors, whose reference point was Picasso, but she’s a bit too decorative and complicated to make it to the top of this league. She doesn’t really get as far away from her influences as one would like — some pieces look like three-dimensional versions of Juan Gris or Fernand Leger paintings and this exhibition is also not as comprehensive as it should be, with no works from the Fifties and few from the Sixties. But Nevelson’s work — at its best in works such as Cascade VIII, a grid-like arrangement of 20 or so shoe-sized boxes, each with their own dreamlike arrangements of door knobs, hooks and triangles of wood — has elegance and excitement.
Until 14 June. Information: 020 7985 9600; www.ltbfoundation.org.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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Thank you, Ben. I did go to her big show (at the Tate was it? anyway I'd liked her spider and I went) and I can see what you mean and may be guiding me to, which is your real function.
I'm only just a "Granny" and grandbaby is far to young to take (1 month old!) with me. But I find that as I am a well educated 65 who husband died just before Christmas, I am increasingly written off by the "popular" media. It is the job of journalists to inform and that is why I love the Evening Standard and the Times ( although feedback to Times on Line is now impossible!).
Case in point: I am expected to be "on the pull" (Suddenly I am a merry widow? Certainly not! I guess the independent woman is still a social anathama) but that's the times, which have suddenly become "interesting" again. I can only most deeply wish and hope that the cash to support the "arts" does not leave them and the tradition of the powers that happen to be spending our money on their interests is promptly executed. I do not want even its death throws. Kill it at once!

- Carlyle Braden, Croydon, UK, 04/05/2009 09:49
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