Perhaps, having had a lumber merchant and woodcutter, and later owner of a junkyard, as a father, it is no surprise that Louise Nevelson turned to discarded fragments of wood as the source material for her sculptures. Alongside her brother, both new immigrants from Russia now living in New York having escaped the destruction of the war, she would scavenge the streets looking for offcuts to place in similarly abandoned crates. The results, painted typically in matt black, and re-configured into assemblages, became increasingly large in size, first wall-scale and finally monumental.
Born at the very end of the 19th century, it was not until she was in her fifties that she gained any critical attention, though then, finally, came some degree of financial security. The Whitney Museum of American…