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Nevelson is past 80, without seeming so. One of the results of having a public mask is that its wearer seems to age more slowly, and no persona in the field of American culture is more instantly recognizable than hers. The armature of bone is a little more visible through the gaunt face when the makeup is off; the immense clumps of false eyelashes, glued double or treble to her lids, seem rather darker against the skin; the expression is slightly more imperious. Otherwise there is little apparent change.
In looks, Nevelson's style may be described as collage driven relentlesrelentlessly to excess, a cross between Catherine the Great and a bag lady: pailady: paisley scarves, blue work shirt, full-length chinchilla, OrientaOriental brocade, embroidered waistband, flounces, a rattling boar-tusk necklace and a black riding cap. (When Nevelson was picked as one of the twelve Best-Dressed Women by Publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1977, few of her acquaintances were surprised: there was, as one friend remarked, nowhere else to put her and no known way to ignore her.) "Personally, I'm dramatic, it seems," she told an interviewer a few years ago. "I have a feeling maybe my appearance is deceptive. Because if you're going to put on a show like I do, they don't know beneath that façade there's something else."
What lies beneath the façade is a self-constructed woman, one of the four or five most distinguished living sculptors. By right, the grande dame of American art is Georgia O'Keeffe, 13 years Nevelson's senior; but O'Keeffe is reported to be almost blind and unable to paint any longer. Not so Nevelson, who sails into her ninth decade with undiminished vigor. The year 1980 brought her a load of work, commissions and exhibitions heavy enough to floor an artist half her age. It was her big year. In its wake, some 20 of her giant steel sculptures—scaled up from Nevelson's maquettes by the Lippincott works in North Haven, Conn., a foundry the size of a shipyard—are under construction for various corporate and civic bodies. She held a show of her wood constructions and collages at Wildenstein last spring, and throughout the summer a selection of her major "environmental" sculptures from the '50s and '60s—arrays and assemblies of separate pieces, meant to confront the viewer with whole surrounding families of shape and texture—went on view at the Whitney Museum in New York. This year, according to her dealer, Nevelson is "resting." Rest, in terms of a career like hers, is an extremely relative term.