Night and Silence, Who Is There?

By ROBERT HUGHES

Nevelson 's palace goes on show in Manhattan

The dandy of American art is a woman, Louise Nevelson. Nobody is more recognizable: the fine, blade-nosed Aztec face with its monstrous false eyelashes, like clumps of mink, is as manifestly the property of an artist as Picasso's monkey mask. The sight of Nevelson under full sail--mole-colored hunting cap, peasant flounces, Chinese brocade and wolfskin, bronze pendants clanking, boar's teeth rattling--is one of the few spectacles of complete self-possession in American life; the 19th century poet who walked his live lobster on a ribbon outside the Ritz could not have looked more remarkable.

The traditional problem of dandyism is that it usually leaves so little room for work: it is the work. Not with Nevelson. She will be 78 next year, and there is no more prolific or respected sculptor in America. Her boxes and walls, filled with accumulated wooden fragments painted a uniform black, white or gold, are among the fixtures of the modern imagination. But at an age when many artists are content to repeat the cliches they invented, Nevelson keeps on extending herself. The proof of this--if it were needed--is the centerpiece of her current show at Manhattan's Pace Gallery, Mrs. N's Palace.

This walkin, environmental sculpture took 13 years to complete. It is the most ambitious of all her wooden constructions. The title suggests a brief bow in the direction of another, and earlier, image of night and silence: Giacometti's The Palace at 4 a.m., 1932-33, one of the canonical sculptures of surrealism. But Giacometti's palace was the size of a doll's house. Nevelson's work--almost 12 ft. high, 20 ft. wide, and 15 ft. deep--is actually domestic (if not palatial) in size, a place one can move into. It is both sculpture and shelter, a continuous surface painted black--Nevelson's peculiar black, said to be ordinary house paint straight from the can, but with a dull lunar sheen to it, like graphite or caviar.

Embedded in this color is a profusion of shapes: balls and balusters, cubes, boxes, spikes, seamed and weathered palings, fragments of ogee and cavetto molding, the fossils of the Age of Wood. By now, Nevelson is a scavenger on a nearly industrial scale, given to buying up whole demolition contracts to secure material. It is possible that some of the wood sold by her father, an emigre from Kiev who started a lumberyard in Rockland, Me., in 1905, has found its way back as table legs or broken newel posts into Nevelson's sculpture.

There is no apparent limit to the richness of her patterning. The objects are disciplined by a vertical-horizontal grid, or held like parts of a collage in shallow framing boxes; those formal devices, along with the shapes themselves (the jig-sawed edge of a plank recalling the side of a Braque guitar) allude to cubism. But Nevelson's work, although grounded in a cubist syntax, has very different aims. It is addressed, above all, to mystery. Unified by the black paint, the thousands of objects that make up Mrs. N's Palace shed their identity. They do not become sinister --this is no mere haunted house--but they do become less knowable, withdrawn from recognition within the austere space of Nevelson's fiction.

When you step inside the "house," some parts of it are invisible: darkness laid into darkness. As the eyes adjust, so the forms gradually appear, and this gradual unfolding of complexity is very moving: one is a long way from the direct, all-at-once confrontation of most American sculpture. There is no way of seeing Mrs. N's Palace as a whole. It dis closes itself in time, and each passage of shapes is apt to erase and replace one's memory of its predecessor. In short, it aspires -- to employ that gnomic phrase of Walter Pater's -- toward the condition of music, the serial art par excellence.

Twentieth century art has been rich in didactic rooms, in which an artist set forth to construct an exemplary environment: Lissitzky's Proun Room, Van Doesburg's project for a university hall, Schwitters' Merzbau, Kandinsky's music room, and so on. Nevelson's palace is of their company. Yet its motives are not didactic; they are closer to folk art, to the "ideal palace" made from junk by the French postman Cheval from 1879 to 1912, or the Watts Towers built by Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements of Nevelson's poetic but wholly sculptural sensibility, and this time they have produced a masterpiece.

-- Robert Hughes

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