All That Glitters

The old three-story house stands on the corner of Spring and Mott streets in Manhattan's fading Little Italy. Inside, the furnishings are spare--some benches and tables, a cupboard. But if the house lacks furniture, it does have marvels of decor. There is a room lined with towering cases of gilded bric-a-brac. In another room, shallow honeycombs of orange-crate cabinetry are filled with carefully posed objects--chair legs, a broken wheel, a bowling pin. parts of a table pedestal, a banister, some toilet seats--all gleaming goldly. The owner of this hammer-and-nails Fort Knox is Scavenger-Sculptress Louise Nevelson, 61.

Nevelson sculptures (they might more accurately be called assemblages) are displayed in museums all over the world, fetch from $500 (for a small box of surprises) to $25,000 for a whole flabbergasting wall. This week Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery acquired Nevelson's Royal Game from Manhattan's Martha Jackson Gallery. Price for the 5-ft. by 4-ft. work, which is the gift of Museum President Seymour H. Knox: $6,000. Last month Nevelson won the $3,000 grand prize in the first Sculpture International of the Torcuato Di Telia Institute's Center of Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, where she exhibited five pieces. In June, she was one of four artists chosen to represent the U.S. at the 31st Biennale in Venice. Louise Nevelson's three rooms of "wall furniture"--one in gold, one in white, and one in the traditional Nevelson black--were the first things to greet visitors at the U.S. pavilion, and one of the few real sensations of the entire Biennale.

Pizzeria Studio. Nevelson "walls"' might go nicely in certain modern commercial structures, but so far she has refused requests to do office-building lobbies. "Someone once told me, 'Think how many people would see your work in an office building: 100,000 a day.' And I said, look, dear, I am not interested, because those 100,000 people are blind."

But she is pondering a commission to embellish a wall for the New York State Theater, to be built at Lincoln Center:

"There people will look."

Louise Nevelson is an imposing, muscular woman with eyes like augers. Besides the three rooms of golden debris in her house, she maintains two more studios near by--one in a former pizzeria, where she does her "dirty work, my black things," and one a few doors away for her white work. Her material is wood, shaped for utilitarian purposes--and salvaged by her from dumps and antique shops, or donated by friendly driftwood gatherers. For tools she uses an electric band saw, files, and a hammer.

Sculptress Nevelson made her first real splash four years ago with sinister black-massed woodworks, given such titles as Moon Dial and Cathedral in the Sky. She denies that she is presently in a gold period, although most of her work, after being lacquered with several coats to seal the wood, is lavishly spray-bombed with a metallic product called Spray-O-Namel.

A World Embalmed. Praising her earlier work, French Painter-Sculptor Jean Arp said: "The monster bibelots of Louise Nevelson walk in an immense universe dimmed by the night of twilight." And not all critics approve of her switch from mystical blackness. One, panning the gold, wrote: "Curiously, the sense of a world embalmed appears to be furthered by her current use of gold paint." But criticism bothers her not a whittle. She is at the height of her fame, sales of her work last year amounted to about $80,000, and in the fall she will change galleries to become the first woman and the first U.S. sculptor to be handled by Manhattan's choosy Sidney Janis. For Louise Nevelson: the future looks golden.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.