cover image Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow

Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow

Laurie Wilson. Thames & Hudson, $39.95 (512p) ISBN 978-0-500-09401-3

In this biography of Ukrainian-born American sculpture artist Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), who’s famous for her work with shadow boxes and black wooden walls, Wilson (Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic, and the Man), a practicing psychoanalyst who teaches at NYU, uses her professional expertise to explore the inner life and motivations of the artist and her artwork. Nevelson herself is a fascinating, idiosyncratic character, in part because she crafted a persona for herself that sometimes even upstaged her art: she donned fake eyelashes, furs, and turbans even in the summer heat, lived a sexually uninhibited single-woman lifestyle in conservative mid-century America, and eschewed food and sleep in order to work nonstop. Wilson details the artist’s eccentricities and places Nevelson’s success in the context of the 1970s, specifically the male-dominated contemporary art scene in N.Y.C. Her descriptions of Nevelson’s art are vivid, carefully observed, and insightful, but her fixation on Freudian psychoanalysis—she traces much of Nevelson’s motifs and artistic choices (the color black, weddings) to her failed marriage and her longing for her mother—is distracting and often grating. 98 illus. [em](Oct.) [/em]