Using Art Images and Ideas textbook Read pages

Using Art: Images and Ideas textbook. • • • Read pages 246 -7. Take notes as you read. Answer critical thinking question. Review artwork on page 39, and 122. Define the vocabulary words listed below. Elements: Shape (geometric), Form, Value and Texture. Principles: Formal balance (symmetry) Techniques: Subtractive sculpture (method). What would be Additive method? Relief. Sculpture Highlight

Louise Nevelson - Sky Cathedral, 1958. Aim: What impact did Nevelson’s use of “one color” have on her work? Do Now: Write your opinion in a sentence or two.

Nevelson was born Sept. 23, 1900 in Kiev, Ukraine. From the time three- year old Louise Berilawsky (Burr -lee-OW-skee) arrived in the US from Russia (1904), she felt out of place. Her family spoke little English, and there were few Jewish families in Rockland, Maine. Her father quickly established a successful lumber business; her mother was a fashionable woman and homemaker who dressed her children in beautiful clothes. But this set them apart from their classmates and furthered the discomfort Louise felt. Besides having few friends, Louise had difficulty with reading. Except for art and sports, she did not enjoy being in school. Piano and art lessons were continued at home and took the place of friends. From the time Louise was six, she built things from wood scraps she found in her father’s lumberyard.

In 1920, Louise married Charles Nevelson, whose family ran a shipping business. The couple moved to NYC. Nevelson studied voice, dramatics, and art. She studied at the Art Students League in New York City from 1928 to 1930. She felt that marriage interfered with her ambitions, and in 1931 she left her husband sent her son to live with her parents. That same year, Louise left for Europe to study with the German painter Hans Hofmann in Munich. Returning to New York, Louise had confidence in her work. In 1936, a gallery exhibited some of her wood sculptures. Her work focusing on simple, geometric, abstract shapes.

Her diverse works of the 1930 s and '40 s show influences ranging from the dynamic contortions of the futurist school to the cool, simplified forms of the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi's sculptures. Trips to Mexico and South America inspired a series of terra-cotta works. Constantin Brancusi (French, born in Romania, 1876– 1957) Bird in Space 1923/Marble

Nevelson’s Large scale wood sculptures began with her first smaller scale piece titled: Black Majesty (1955, Whitney Museum, New York City), a horizontal arrangement of geometrical wooden forms.

In the late '50 s Nevelson began producing her well-known "sculptural walls"--large freestanding arrangements of shallow vertical boxes filled with pieces of wood and miscellaneous objects such as driftwood, wheels, knobs, and chair slats.

Rain Garden II by Louise Nevelson
 31"x 47"X 4 -1/2" painted wood, 1977
Bette C. Graham Collection, Gihon Foundation, Santé Fe, New Mexico

• These works, with such evocative titles as Sky Cathedral (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) and Total Obscurity (1962, Pace Gallery, New York City), were usually painted a single color, notably black, but sometimes white or gold.

She later experimented with other materials, such as metal, Plexiglas, plastic, Lucite, and enamel. For New York City's Saint Peter's Lutheran Church Nevelson created the all-white Chapel of the Good Shepherd (1977 -78).