Arnold Newman/Premium Archive/Getty Images
Earlier this year, Getty Images and The Arnold Augusta Newman Foundation donated rights to Arnold Newman’s dramatic portrait of artist Louise Nevelson to The Louise Nevelson Foundation for use on their freshly relaunched website.
Established by Nevelson’s granddaughter, Maria Nevelson, The Louise Nevelson Foundation was created to ensure that her contributions remain alive in discussions about the history of 20th century art.
Born in 1899 in Kiev, Ukraine Louise Nevelson was raised by Jewish parents in Maine and moved to New York City at the age of 20.
“When I Iook at the city from my point of view, I see New York City as a great big sculpture.”
Though she studied voice, acting and dance throughout her 20s and 30s, her search for a creative outlet became focused in the visual arts. While she faced adversity as a female artist in a male dominated sphere, she poured her time and energy into creating sculptures that earned her place in the canon modernist sculpture, integrating elements of cubism into a unique, instantly recognizable aesthetic. It wasn’t until the mid 1950s that she solidified the method that earned her iconic reputation. Her early tabletop sculptures were made up of castaway wood scraps, arranged on a horizontal plane and painted a single color, usually black. Her deep appreciation for the color black is evident in both her artwork and her manner of dress. Her assemblages became larger as her work matured, eventually filling entire walls as installation pieces.
“About what black…the illusion of black means to me: I don’t think I chose it for black. I think it chose me for saying something. You see, it says more for me than anything else. In the academic world, they used to say black and white were no colors, but I’m twisting that to tell you that for me it is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.”
Arnold Newman, Liason/Getty Images
A picture is worth a thousand words, and just seeing Louise Nevelson, one gets the sense that she is an intriguing, creative and confident woman. Arnold Newman, the iconic photographer, whose photographs Getty Images is very proud to represent, sat down with Maria Nevelson in 2007 to speak about his encounters with her grandmother.
Arnold Newman often saw Louise Nevelson at parties from the time they were both young in New York. He observed that she “held her own, and was no wall flower! She never claimed that she was good looking [though she actually was] but she knew that she had no problem getting dates. “That,” he said, “does something for your psyche.”
“Everytime I put on clothes, I’m creating a picture.”
Their paths crossed not only socially but professionally with Newman photographing Nevelson many times in her studio and at her 1980 retrospective “Atmospheres and Environments” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His photographs of Nevelson can be seen in books on Newman and his photograph of her at the Whitney appeared on the sheet of stamps the United States Postal Service issued in 2000 commemorating the innovative artist. Newman said, “If (Louise) had been a mediocre artist, I could understand (young people not knowing who she was). But she was very important. She was very inventive. She broke new ground.”
Getty Images is honored to help promote the legacy of Louise Nevelson, a maverick who carved out her spot in art history and the future of creative expression.
