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To be prolific is nothing—it fails to distinguish an artist from a grunion—but Nevelson's abundant output has also been, until quite recently, strictly edited, so that it bears an imposing sense of consistency and energy. There are 80-year-old artists who are content to repeat their own formal inventions as clichés. Most, though not all, of Nevelson's work is free from that tendency. If she is not one of the great formal innovators of modern sculpture—and her contribution to its syntax cannot fairly be compared with Picasso's, Tatlin's, Brancusi's or even David Smith's—she has a very deep reservoir of feeling that has infused her art and saves it from looking arid or repetitious. As a sculptor of feeling, her only peer among living American artists is Isamu Noguchi. In a time of short careers and small careerists, in a commercialized art world strewn with cultural ghosts and aesthetic trivia, her obsessed, delicate and nocturnal imagination remains unusual, a legacy from the romantic belief in the healing and transforming powers of art, which is vanishing from our culture.
In the past 25 years Nevelson may fairly be said to have reinvented environmental art for herself. In the 1920s and '30s many artists worked on room-size environments in which painting and sculpture were melded on an architectural scale. But nobody had given this juncture between the categories of art the intense poetic charge that Nevelson brought to it. This became triumphantly clear in the large sculptures she started producing in the late '50s, the environmental walls. Essentially they consist of irregular stacks of shallow boxes, filled with forms in relief and painted black. They have an extraordinarily dignified, almost hieratic sense of presence. Under the unifying skin of black paint (ordinary house paint sprayed on the raw wood), the rich accumulations of shape, the curious offcuts and repeated units, are as effectively transmuted into pure shadow as the objects depicted in a painting by Seurat become pure light.
The box as miniature stage, containing strange images like a diorama of another world, was one of the favorite devices of surrealism, used incessantly from Max Ernst in the '20s to Joseph Cornell in the '40s. Nevelson gave it a unique density and gravity. She took the box's power as theater and subjected it to a constructivist rigor of formal layout. The past life of the wood pieces was still apparent: the nicks and flaws, the signs of use and disuse, all preserved and yet held at an emotional distance by the pall of black. But her instinct for placement, for what shapes to repeat and where to repeat them, and how to break their sequence into daring asymmetries and unexpected detachments of rhythm, was carried out with an unfailing formal sense. This disciplined what might otherwise have been a too lush spread of metaphorical associations—with Russian altar screens, icon covers (for there is something numinous, if not exactly religious, about Nevelson's imagination), tombs and reliquaries.