Louise Nevelson became renowned during the Abstract Expressionist period for constructing crated assemblages full of wooden items grouped together into monochromatically painted cubic structures. Her aim to reinvigorate found objects with a spiritual life was informed by feminist ideals and Nevelson's strong persona, which inspired multitudinous female artists associated with the women's movement. Influenced by Duchamp's found object sculptures, Nevelson sought to build abstract wooden environments, painted gold, black, or white, that obscured original content to historicize debris with a second, more mysterious narrative life. The narratives in her artwork originated from her personal migration history as a Jewish woman who relocated to America, and from her active life in New York's artistic community.

• Nevelson's art career spanned over sixty years, and is marked by periods of abstract sculpture-making focused on precariously balanced geometric forms. For decades, Nevelson built wooden structures, but in the 1970s, she began experimenting with plexiglass, aluminum, enamel, steel, and bronze.
• Louise Nevelson may be most remembered as an artist whose brilliant ability to endow abstract sculpture with personal narrative led to a deep influence on artists who struggled with expressing themselves in a formalist artistic vein.
• Dialogues in the feminist art movement were greatly expanded thanks to Nevelson's sculptures, which complicated gender stereotypes. They were large-scale, bold, and edgy which were traits affiliated with masculinity at the time. They also expressed, however, the artist's deepest emotions about her life as a woman.

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At age six, in 1905, Nevelson immigrated with her father to Rockland, Maine from Ukraine. Born Leah Berliawsky, her family was forced to relocate due to cultural strain between the Jewish community and Tsarist Russians. Nevelson claimed to have known from the beginning that she would be an artist, and at age nine was called to sculpt by a statue of Joan of Arc at the Rockland Public Library. In 1920, soon after she married Charles Nevelson, the couple moved to New York, where Louise sought to hone her artistic career.

Louise Nevelson left both her husband and her son, Mike, behind for travel to Munich to study Cubism under Hans Hofmann. Her decision to focus on her career instead of just solely on mothering formed her sculptural installations such as Dawn's Wedding Feast. In 1932, when Hans Hofmann decided to come to America, Nevelson followed his lead in becoming a student at the Art Students League, an art school where Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist artists studied. Here, she studied painting, modern dance, and sculpture, and built constructions based on portrait and lighter subject matter relative to her future work. It was also during this time that she met Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and assisted the legendary muralist for a period. Nevelson also hosted community meetings, which she called Four O'Clock Forums. These forums became the meeting grounds for Abstract Expressionist artists, and fostered a sense of camaraderie among her peers.

In the 1940s, when the artist began making sculpture made from cast-off scrap wood, Nevelson's favored material was a radical departure from male artistic endeavors, like Isamu Noguchi's and Alexander Calder's, who were welding metal. Dynamism of form, derived from her studies of Cubism, became Nevelson's trademark as she crafted surreal, totemic monuments that served loosely as maps to the artist's mind. While making a reputation for her sculptural bravado, Nevelson also cultivated her extravagant personal style, which included long dresses and false eyelashes, to dovetail with her desire to express emotion through art. Following World War II, Nevelson, like other Abstract Expressionist artists, made work that illustrated how freedom of expression was a political act.

To further define her artwork as uniquely female, Louise Nevelson not only adopted wood as her signature material, but also avoided using typical carpentry to manufacture her pieces. Her process became purely additive, wherein she stacked and balanced objects before nailing together and painting them, as opposed to carved. In this, her artwork has a full-bodied, positive feeling that is trademark Nevelson. To further this concept, Nevelson purposefully selected objects that had an initially intimate scale that became grander viewed holistically, combined into environments. Subject matter in her work during her long career ranged from her personal feelings about uprooted childhood, culture, and war, to nature's divinity. In the 1950s, the artist mentioned her admiration for the power and scale of the pyramids, and her work in ensuing decades clearly reflected this need for communion with nature on a religious level.

Nevelson's work was a fundamental building block in the history of feminist art, for its challenge to stereotypically "male" sculptural forms. In Linda Nochlin's famous essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," Nevelson was listed as a major influence on a new generation of females struggling to redefine femininity in art. Beyond this, Nevelson's sculpture can also be considered a predecessor to installation art due to the way she designed pieces in her exhibitions to function, not only as discrete objects, but as parts of a whole. Furthermore, Nevelson has extended the Duchampian conversation in found object sculpture and the readymade, which continues to contemporary practice today.
Below are Louise Nevelson's major influences, and the people and ideas that she influenced in turn.


"Now that's true, I have called my shots on Earth. I have had a blueprint on my life and that's why I am positive about it. Now you can see that I'm a bit shy and I can get hurt by dropping a handkerchief - I can croak or something - but where my creation is, I am totally one piece."