Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson and First Lady Betty Ford Viewing to Nevelson's Sculpture "Bicentennial Dawn" at the James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1976. Photo: National Archives.
As a child growing up in Rockland, Leah Berliawsky and her classmates had an art teacher who would bring in objects for the students to copy. One of those objects was a sunflower. Instead of creating a replica of the flower, Berliawsky made the brown center enormous and its yellow petals tiny. When her teacher saw what she had created, she praised Berliawsky’s artwork as “original” and “unique.” The Jewish immigrant from what is now Ukraine often felt different from those around her in Rockland, but through her art, she transformed that sense of otherness into a distinctive artistic style.
Known to the world as Louise Nevelson, Berliawsky was born in 1899 in what was then Kiev, Russia. In 1905, her siblings and mother joined her father in Rockland. It was at a childhood visit to the Rockland Public Library that Nevelson declared her intent that she wanted to become not just an artist, but a sculptor to a librarian asking what she and her friend wanted to be when they grew up.
After marrying in 1920, she and her husband moved to New York City where she began studying painting, drawing, singing, acting, and dancing. Throughout her career she experimented with a variety of artistic forms, but her monumental wood sculptures painted in black brought her international acclaim.
While she never lived in Maine again after 1920, her family connections to the Midcoast community she grew up in meant that guests staying at her brother Nathan’s Thorndike Hotel on Main Street were exposed to her sculptures and other artistic creations long before she became a sensation of the New York City art scene.
After the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture presented her with its inaugural medal for sculpture in 1971, Nevelson renewed her ties to Maine. She gave more than 30 of her works to the Colby College Museum of Art in 1973, and in the years after the Farnsworth Art Museum mounted its first exhibition of her work in 1979, she and her family donated so much of her artwork to that museum, it now has the second largest collection of her art in the United States.
Author: Stephanie Bouchard