Louise Nevelson - Seated Female Nude for Sale

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Seated Female Nude, 1930

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About The Work

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) stands as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. She is renowned for her monochromatic sculptural wooden constructions. However, it is important to emphasize that Nevelson toiled and experimented for nearly 30 years before arriving at her signature style in the late 1950s.

In recent years there has been an increase in scholarship, awareness, and collector interest in Nevelson's early work, as she was an early adopter of modernism in America. This drawing is a fine example from this era.

Increasing scholarly and market attention has been placed on Nevelson's early work. For example in 2018 the Whitney Museum presented "The Face and the Moon" which explored Nevelson's prints and drawings from the first three decades of her career.

The 1930s are a particularly interesting time for Nevelson. After she divorced in 1931, she was finally liberated to devote herself to art-making. She studied at the Art Students League in New York and made several influential trips to Europe where she began studying with Hans Hoffmann. Back in New York, she worked briefly for the Works Progress Administration, where she met Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and befriended other "downtown" New York artists.

Courtesy of Caviar20

About Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson, a towering figure in 20th-century American art, was recognized during her lifetime as one of America’s most prominent and innovative sculptors. The sculpture for which she is best known was made of cast-off wood parts—actual street throwaways—transformed with monochromatic spray paint. Through her elegant room-size works, Nevelson regularly summoned themes linked to her complicated past, fractious present, and anticipated future. Whether expressed literally or metaphorically, in representational paintings or outsize abstract sculpture, in early self-portraits or edgy middle-year projects, Nevelson’s sense of selfhood was a force that propelled her work. The artist’s personal story—her migration to America, her initial struggle as a woman artist, and the march of modern art movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, feminism, and installation—form a rich platform from which to view Nevelson’s compelling sculpture. Louise Nevelson constructed her sculpture much as she constructed her past: shaping each with her legendary sense of self as she created an extraordinary iconography through abstract means.

Major retrospectives of Nevelson’s work have been presented in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Jewish Museum. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at institutions such as Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, and PACE in New York. She participated in Documenta III in Kassel and the 1962 Venice Biennale.

Courtesy of The Jewish Museum