blakegopnik: LOUISE NEVELSON, LOST ‘MASTER’ OF WOMEN’S WORK THE WEEKLY PIC: “My whole life is one bi
blakegopnik: LOUISE NEVELSON, LOST ‘MASTER’ OF WOMEN’S WORK THE WEEKLY PIC: “My whole life is one big collage. Every time I put on clothes, I am creating a picture, a living picture, for myself.” That’s a quote from Louise Nevelson, printed on a label near these two untitled collages of hers, from 1972 and 1974. They’re in a tiny permanent-collection show at the Whitney Museum called “The Face in the Moon: Drawings and Prints by Louise Nevelson.” That exhibition takes a first baby step toward restoring the absolutely giant reputation that Nevelson had during her heyday in the 1960s. Her quote got me thinking that there might be a special connection between collage and the everyday lived experience of modern women. Where men mostly put on the outfit they’re expected to wear, with very little thought or freedom involved, women have the daily job of collaging together a distinctive “look” from the mismatched parts they find at hand in their closets. In general, the domestic sphere, once belonging exclusively to women, preserved an interest in hands-on improvisation – whether in quilt-making, cooking, or darning and patching – that men had mostly left behind with the advent of the industrial revolution. That’s when factory owners began telling their male workers precisely what to do with which bits of stuff, and when and how to do it. If modern collage has its roots in Victorian scrapbooking, as practiced by well-to-do women, that clearly grew out of the art of daily making-do practiced by their less leisured sisters. And yes, I do know that Picasso and Braque are credited as the inventors of collage in the standard fine-art sense, but I wonder if they weren’t doing some gender-slumming when they began their inventing. Did their collages mean to grab energy from the temptingly abject, “primitive,” cobbled-together world of women, just as their paintings and sculptures borrowed from the potent abjection that these artists read into African works? And of course by “transforming” the found crafts of women and Africans into Western high art, self-certifying as manly, Cubist collages shed all traces of disempowerment. A half-century after the birth of Cubism, Louise Nevelson won fame for found-object sculptures that were really nothing else than collages writ very large and in three dimensions. By painting almost all her sculptures a “masculine” white or black – the colors of men’s wardrobes since the time of Beau Brummel – Nevelson asserted their escape from fiddly women’s work and their claims to cultural heft. The powerful collages now at the Whitney bring her art back to its feminine roots, at a moment when those carry no stigma. (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Jean and Howard Lipman; © 2018 Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York) For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive. -- source link