Oct 26, 2011 - Sale 2258

Sale 2258 - Lot 494

Price Realized: $ 3,360
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
LOUISE NEVELSON
Untitled.

Color lithograph on cheesecloth, 1967. 915x1225 mm' 36x48 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 2/20 in pencil, lower margin. Published by Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles. A very good impression of this scarce print.

While best known for her monochromatic wooden assemblages, the Russian emigré Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was also a painter and printmaker. She began her career studying at the Art Students League in New York in 1929 and returned to Europe in 1931. While in Europe, Nevelson visited France and Italy and briefly studied with Hans Hofmann in Munich. Returning to New York in 1932, she continued her studies with Hans Hoffman who was a visiting instructor at the Art Students League. She began exhibiting her work in group exhibitions throughout the 1930s, but also relied on teaching classes for income, even being employed by the WPA to teach mural painting to a Boys and Girls Club in Brooklyn

By the 1940s, Nevelson dedicated herself almost exclusively to sculpture; for several years the impoverished Nevelson and her son collected firewood to burn in order to keep warm: these sevred as the starting point for the sculptures that would make her famous. In 1958, Nevelson's desired success finally arrived. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased one of her wall sculptures and in the following year she was chosen to exhibit her work in the MOMA's Sixteen Americans exhibition.

Having achieved financial security and critical and commerical success, by the 1960s Nevelson was able to expand her repertoire, including work on her monumental outdoor sculptures. She also made a return to lithography and etching that she experimented with throughout the 1930s. Though several years removed from her studies with Hofmann, there still remains a sense of his influence in her intimately-scaled works of the 1960s: Untitled exhibits the plasticity of three-dimensionality translated into two-dimensionality, recalling Hofmann's focus on the tension of space, form, color and planes. Baro 100.