Art: Tsarina of Total Immersion

A show of Louise Nevelson "environments" in Manhattan

Louise Nevelson, the doyenne of American sculpture, is 80 this year. Over the past four decades—she did not have her first exhibition until 1941—the work of this Russian-born artist, an immigrant from Kiev, has become one of the indispensable points of reference in American art as a whole. Her walls of wooden boxes, painted black, white or gold and containing arrays of scraps and found objects, occupy a unique mid-point between the grids of cubism and the dream landscapes of surrealism, displaying a tough analytical sense...