Louise Nevelson

(American, 1899-1988)

Night Sentinel Panel
1973

Footnotes

Provenance
Pace Gallery, New York (no. 4634)
Makler Gallery, Philadelphia, (no. 7453)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1975


Louise Nevelson's exquisite Night Sentinel Panel presents a compelling insight into the artist's unrivalled arrangements of wooden landscapes, in this case challenging the topos of the chair as an artistic symbol.

The influence of Duchamp's Ready-Mades can be keenly felt in the artist's reappropriation of scrap materials though in this instance it is far more personal, the leitmotif of wood in her work evoking her father's lumber yard where she grew up as a girl in Maine. Her innovative technique of recycling wreckage and reassembling it in intense monochromatic composition bring the Ready-Mades back within the embrace of a more classical artistic tradition.

The various connotations of the chair immediately resonate with the viewer, positioning this work within an art-historical context that is laden with meaning through the representation of countless artists. Depicting seated rulers of worldly and clerical empires, the chair as throne has been the cardinal point for portrayals of powerful authorities, from Egyptian pharaohs to medieval emperors and Renaissance royalty up until Modernity and the new order after the Industrial Revolution. As a framework for individuals at the pinnacle of their potency, the iconographic importance of the seated figure lends great majesty to this composition.

Vincent van Gogh's famous chair marks a pioneering twist in that regard. He shows a humble and empty straw, ladder-back chair, the human absence is overtaken by hints of presence left behind by the pipe and handkerchief – allowing the viewer to read this marriage of warm ochre and cooler blue brushstrokes as a self-portrait of the artist. Dating from the same year, Paul Gauguin's Armchair in much darker tones of reds and greens displays a pensive gesture and equally welcomes symbolic interpretation. Both of these iconic representations pave the way for the most prominent representations of the chair in the Twenty First Century including Andy Warhol's Electric Chair or Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs.

Developing the concept heralded by the first Ready-Mades, Louise Nevelson's Night Sentinel Panel is a tribute to the very idea of the objet-trouvé. Her assemblage guides the viewer through this particular scenery formed by blackened spheres, divided into spare components that may be united to form an identifiable object. This dissolution of single parts challenges the very essence of our comprehension of objects as they are and our abilities to philosophically contemplate the world as an abstract ideal. By recreating a new order, Louise Nevelson conveys a perception of the liminality between spaces, of shadows and movement. Far from being static, her solid compositions create architectural realities that encompass a metaphysical order all of their own. By submerging the entire composition in a matt layer of black paint each element is rendered equal, the inherent significance of each individual component laid bare. The atmospheric environment created by Louise Nevelson's use of black is a masterly example of its chromatic universality, which represents in her eyes the "total colour" containing all colours. This all-unifying choice of tonality can be read as an erasing gesture towards the past, but also captures the affirmative essence of eternal space.

The consistent use of wood may be seen as radical departure from the traditional materials of sculpture appropriated by her male contemporaries. Wood does not signify the weight of Richard Serra's large-scale installations or the solidity of Isamu Noguchi's marble works but rather hints at an organic nature filled with possibility; solid yet malleable. Nevelson however expanded the range material she used in her sculptural works towards industrial products in the mid 1970s, exploring the array of possibilities opened by working with Cor-ten steel, aluminium and Plexiglas which enabled her to fabricate larger-scale installations and execute a variety of public commissions.

Recognized as one of the most important American female artists, the complexity of her monochromatic work eludes categorisation as Assemblage Art, Minimalism or Abstract Expressionism, and is rather considered to be an integral part of and the main link between these movements and had an instant impact. As such as early as the 1950s the artist's work featured in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMa in New York. Acquisitions by major institutions, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Tate Modern, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, have followed, as well as many collections in Japan including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Shinagawa. In 1962 Louise Nevelson represented America at the Venice Biennale and received her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967.