At 80, Louise Nevelson still brings a sense of drama to her life—and work
The house is an emblem of the life and the work. It sprawls on Spring Street in lower Manhattan, several blocks east of SoHo's boutiqueland and just above the bustle of Chinatown. Outside, the 19th century red brick structure is at once dignified and haphazard looking. Inside, it becomes a succession of caves: several buildings joined together (one of them a former abortion clinic or else a private lunatic asylum—the stories never tally), with the dividing walls knocked out, so that one goes up and down a series of levels. The floors are black and polished; the rooms are lined with matte black sculptures, whose cellular structures, like nocturnal honeycombs or trued-up ants' nests, intensify the labyrinthine feel of the house. Because most of the shutters are closed, the light inside is dim, and even those objects that are not black seem to be. The place is a continuous collage, from the ground floor workrooms—a former garage filled with stacks of the owner's working material: wood slats, newel posts, balls, balusters, a hive of infinitely replicated fragments awaiting wholeness—to the severe bedroom, with its pressed-metal industrial closets and barracks-like austerity. The collage extends into the cupboards, which, when opened, reveal a hoard of oddments and chotchkes: vanity sets, inlaid boxes, tarnished trays, ugly Edwardian candlesticks with silver frills, like the stock of a dotty junkshop owner who cannot tear to part with anything. Mere presence in the cave signifies "treasure."
The house belongs, of course, to the sculptor Louise Nevelson. She has lived in it for close on 30 years, acquiring more rooms, filling them up. By now it is the hive of the queen bee, where Nevelson presides over a small force of workers: carpentry and joinery assistants who help with the sculpture, and her archivist, friend, photographer and general factotum Diana MacKown. Nevelson still leaves it often enough to be a near legendary sight in Manhattan's galleries and shops, and an enduring staple in the pages of Women's Wear Daily. She likes to swathe herself in costume and go to parties; she dislikes cooking for herself and frequents small local restaurants in Little Italy and SoHo, where she is treated with the deference one would associate with Hizzoner the Mayor (which, in a cultural sense, she almost is).
Nevelson's disciplined work habits remain exactly the same as they have been for the past 40 years. Quick to correct those who call her a night owl, she describes herself as a "dawn person"; she likes to rise at 4:30 a.m. and start work, sometimes on the big constructions she is best known for, sometimes on the multitude of studies—a mere fragment of wood glued to a dark mounting sheet—that she produces in lieu of drawings and that form teetering stacks in the upstairs studios.