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At the same time, the flatness of the walls and screens—the boxes were shallow, and Nevelson rarely tried to make sculpture-in-the-round—gave them a great depth of pictorial suggestion. One seemed to be looking not at an explicit sculptural fact but at a dark reef of nuances: form laid beside and over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show at the Whitney), Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white, not black. The chalky surface now produced an effect of mummification, not atmospheric distance; the calcined forms, visually explicit, retreated from the eye in a startling way. She also made a number of gold-painted sculptures that were, on the whole, less successful. The same eloquence of arrangement was there; but because the gold paint was only paint, while trying to manifest a flat-out barbaric opulence, it looked (and still looks) faintly tacky, as substitutes do.
The black sculpture remains the core of her work. It reached its climax in 1977 with a big wooden construction, a sort of tempietto, or metaphysical shanty, called Mrs. N's Palace. "I fell in love with black; it contained all color," she comments. "It wasn't a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Black is the most aristocratic color of all, the only aristocratic color. For me this is the ultimate. You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing."
In no sense could Nevelson be called an intellectual artist. To talk to her for a while is to enter a blurred framework in which precise dates, influences, exact encounters and the normal to-and-fro of an artist's life are blended into a sometimes irritating sense of self-engendered myth. Nevelson is, in fact, the Martha Graham of sculpture, and both her work and her incessant recasting of her life have the same eventual purpose: the exorcism of solitude by fiction.
Nevelson's account of her childhood and youth has the deliberate quality of fiction, simplified and pruned of inconvenient facts. She presents herself as an infant prodigy, continuously inspired, the servant of her gifts, every part of whose life, even loneliness, was an act of choice. She says she knew at five that she was going to be an artist, and by seven that her art would be sculpture. Art did give Nevelson a sense of security and a vocation. "From the first day in school to the day I graduated," she says, "everyone gave me 100% in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you get 100%."