(8 of 9)
Such snubs are long past; for ten years Nevelson has been almost monotonously anointed with praise, and her extreme popularity among collectors has introduced other problems. A fine line exists between fecundity and overproduction, and one may suspect that Nevelson's very success has edged her across it, demanding—in contrast with her actual masterpieces like Mrs. N's Palace—a steady output of second-line goods to keep the market happy. It is hardly imaginable that, 20 years from now, anyone except dealers will be taking Nevelson's abundant prints and recent multiples very seriously.
The only area in which this presents a real problem is in her larger sculpture. Despite her virtuosity, Nevelson has not made a good crossing from private to public space, although she is besieged by commissions. In fact, there is hardly one major 20th century artist—not even Alexander Calder or Henry Moore— whose essential oeuvre includes much public, commissioned sculpture. On the public scale, the suppleness of intuition tends to stiffen and is replaced more often than not by a mild form of self-parody. The old cliché was the bronze general on horseback, humiliated by birds. The new one is the abstract ashtray by some Top Name in the windy downtown plaza, victimized by creeps with spray cans.
Since the death of Calder, Nevelson has become the most frequently commissioned sculptor on the public scale in America, the chief beneficiary of an overflowing pork barrel. Yet a great deal is lost when her work is transferred from the room to the lobby or the plaza. The sense of intimate contact goes. So does the feeling of envelopment, the mysterious orchestration of additive detail in a limited, and hence obsessive-seeming, space. Nevelson's open-form, welded sculptures, such as the set of Shadows and Flags recently installed on a handkerchief-size plot near Wall Street (which New York City benevolently renamed Louise Nevelson Plaza), are big, imposing and mannered. They leave one convinced that this kind of postconstructivist sculpture-in-the-round is not her forte at all. In her hands the idiom has neither the power of David Smith's welded constructions nor the finesse and precision of Anthony Caro's.
Pieces like Nevelson's Celebration, a 30-ft.-high steel construction done for the PepsiCo headquarters at Purchase, N.Y., in 1976, or the 54-ft. Sky Tree, 1977, in San Francisco's Embarcadero Center, have an ornamental blandness that verges on the slick—the last word that could imaginably apply to her wooden walls and environments. One is left with the impression not of sculpture that confidently occupies its own scale but of inflated maquettes. Night Presence IV, 1972, which Nevelson offered as a personal gift to New York City—it stands at Park Avenue and 92nd Street—is the most successful of her public sculptures, but it is a virtually literal copy in Cor-Ten steel of a wooden piece that she made in 1955, enlarged to ten times the height.