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In the 1940s this solid sculpture began to give way to assembled pieces looking like figures or standing totems. One influence on them that Nevelson likes to recall was the black iron stanchions of the Manhattan subway stations, "sculptures in themselves"; another was a carved African figure of a leopard she remembered from the Musée de l'Homme in Paris: "It was the first time I recognized the power of that animal, not as an animal, but the power of its forms." Nevelson was drawn to what was mythic and magical in sculpture just as a yearning for the primitive, the instinctively efficacious, was diffused throughout the American avant-garde in the 1940s. It was the root of Jackson Pollock's and Mark Rothko's early work and became an essential part of abstract expressionism in general, as it was of dance through the influence of Martha Graham.
But Nevelson did not want to make her totems from steel—"it was too mechanical for me"—and so she resorted to wood, the stuff of her childhood in Maine. She began collecting stray bits and pieces from the street, from junkyards, from antique shops: scroll-sawed offcuts, bits of molding, battered planks and ribs of crates, balusters, toilet seats, sheets of split veneer, gun-stocks, dowels, finials, anything that seemed to have some character. The amassing of these things was an act of love and salvage. "I feel that what people call by the word scavenger is really a resurrection," she remarked years later. "When you do things this way, you're really bringing them to life. You know that you nursed them and you enhance them, you tap them and you hammer them, and you know you have given them an ultimate life, a spiritual life that surpasses the life they were created for."
Nevelson was not, of course, the first artist to do this: her forerunner in the art of reclamation was German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), who made thousands of collages from street refuse. When the sculptor Jean Arp saw Nevelson's great black environment Sky Cathedral in 1958, he wrote her a poem hailing her as Schwitters' spiritual granddaughter, but the fact seems to be that Nevelson had seen nothing by Schwitters.
Nevelson's attempt at a fusion of painting and sculpture ended by confusing her reputation during the 1960s. The art Establishment was dominated by a formalist view that took it as gospel that art should be "self-defining"—so that painting must eliminate every attribute not unique to painting, and sculpture likewise to sculpture. To this Establishment Nevelson seemed impure to the point of sloppiness and her love of metaphor and allusion quite improper. Nor did it help that she was a woman. Thus, in one of the most celebrated curatorial blunders in recent memory, she was left out of a vast survey show intended to define all that had been important in U.S. art since the war, "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-70," mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since its curator, Henry Geldzahler (now New York City's commissioner of cultural affairs), was a creature of mode and whim with no marked convictions of his own, the exclusion of Nevelson may be said to have reflected a general consensus of dealers and formalist critics at the end of the '60s.