The Fugue

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Louise Nevelson earned international acclaim for box-like constructions she assembled from wood scavenged from her Manhattan neighborhood. Nevelson favored materials that had a history of use and painted her sculptures a single color, here a warm and reflective dark gray. The primary element in The Fugue is the headboard for a child’s bed. Turned vertically, it is bracketed by three sections of zig-zagging plywood and compressed between two rough-cut timbers. For the art critic John Russell, the emotional impact of Nevelson’s work “derives from the tension between the pure formal values … and the capacity of living art to redeem and regenerate what society has discarded.”

Keywords

Sculpture
Wood
American
Assemblage
Box
Headboard
Monochromatic