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Here, at last, the big world started to act on the intense, self-dramatizing neophyte from Maine. "I've always had to overcompensate for my opinion of myself," Nevelson recalls. "I had to run like hell to catch up with what I thought of myself—if someone went six, I'd go twelve, you know? I had to move, not to get frustrated; and I was frustrated enough. In 1920 I went into everything you could imagine—Bahai, Ouspensky, Krishnamurti, vegetarianism ... well, that didn't last long. I have to eat meat." She studied art, acting and dance; she also took singing lessons ($50 a shot, at a time when a quarter bought a meal) from Metropolitan Opera Coach Estelle Liebling. The remnants of the drama and dance lessons can still be seen in Nevelson's carriage and in the ceremonious gestures of her hands when she talks.
These interests soon drowned her marriage to Nevelson—a cultivated and decent man, but by her terms "not a poet." The birth of her son Myron in 1922 threw her into a severe depression: "I wasn't ready for motherhood; I didn't know how to live." Mother and father stayed together nine more years, finally separating in 1931.
She fled to Europe. "Everything had collapsed, and it was of my own choosing in a way, but it didn't make it easier," she says. She decided to seek out in Munich a famous avant-garde teacher named Hans Hofmann—the same artist who, a year later, would emigrate to America and play a formative role in the ideas and practice of abstract expressionism. It was Hofmann who made her look at cubism, "the key to my stability ... Positive and negative. A block of space for light. A block of space for shadow. Light and shade are in the universe, but the cube transcends and translates nature into a structure." On seeing her first cubist Picassos, Nevelson recalls, "I understood it at once. I felt related, as if I had done them. So was I going to leave that?"
But she was still unfocused and drifted around Europe, doing a little film acting in Vienna and Munich, visiting museums. After coming home, she returned the next year to Paris "to really study." On the boat she had an improbable involvement with the bitterly anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who, she says, wanted to marry her. ("Don't you know that fanatics, if they hate Jews, love to marry Jewish women?") It was from this trip that she came back fully determined to be a professional. Nevelson enrolled at the Art Students League, joined the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera's army of assistants, took up modern dance and worked at her sculpture.
Her early bronzes and terra cottas were heavily influenced by French Cubist Sculptor Henri Laurens, and their dominant rhythm was taken from Mayan art—a blockish, crankshaft-like sequence of shapes. They may have been stylistically uncertain, but they were powerful, and on seeing them, a leading New York dealer named Nierendorf gave Nevelson her first one-woman show, in 1941. She was past 40, an age when some artists start thinking not about their debuts but about their retrospectives.