User talk:Neith Nevelson

Deconstructing Neith Nevelson

Named after an Egyptian goddess, Neith Nevelson was born in New York City in 1946, to a family whose name will forever be associated with one of the most respected female sculptors of the twentieth century, Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), Neith’s grandmother.

Assuredly, simply by being related to such a well-known master of modern painting, Neith’s childhood was unique in many ways, a childhood that, as an adult, would become reflected in her art.

Neith lived a dual citizenship mostly between Florence, Italy, and the United States with her mother, Susan Nevelson, and later on in the mid 1960’s with her grandmother at Louise’s studio in New York City.

Not surprisingly, though Neith grew up in a world which included horse-back riding, home-taught schooling, and a typical bohemian lifestyle, most of these things never made much of an impression on her. Suffice it to say that even recognizing the fact that by the time she was a teenager her grandmother had become an icon in the art-world neither Nevelson’s seemed to be very impressed by all the trappings of fame, money or the obvious regality that followed. In fact, similar to Neith, her grandmother had worked so hard and for so long for some name-recognition that when it did happen, she would shun the world that had seen her rise from poverty and obscurity to the woman she is known to be today.

Unfortunately, the immediate association to the Nevelson last name has worked against Neith’s development as an artist, something which is tragic in many ways, and unfair. Immediately, as by association, most people tend to associate the Nevelson name with Louise, while immediately discounting the merit and worth of Neith’s own oeuvre.

In 1991, a critic for the Miami Herald went so far as to write that though well-intentioned and with “lots of heart,” Neith’s art proved, nonetheless, that “talent is not always passed down in the DNA.” What this critic failed to point out was that Louise Nevelson’s own defiance against the artistic convention of the times, would eventually become masterly achieved and uniquely priceless works of art achieved by after a long process of trying to find her own artistic vision and after being influenced by many artists of her times-- as it is obvious if one pays close attention to Louise's works pre-dating the 1960's.  In fact, Louise and Neith do share something in common. They were never comfortable with the art world and they would always be outsiders.

The question, though, then becomes this: why has Neith’s merit as artist go unrecognized for so long, often being criticised in ways that are anything but professional when her art, is viewed in its entirety, its development and maturity, is impressive. The proclivity to resist any serious attempts to study, analyze and accept Neith Nevelson's art in this wider context is very disturbing.

NEITH’S ART: WHAT IS IT?

Neith’s art is complex, representative of tragedy by the emotional evocation it causes. Experimental combinations of colors, quick brushstrokes, and an obsessive desire to fill every inch of the canvas, can often make it difficult to understand. But this is hardly a problem. The energy is counterbalanced by a fine proportion between line and color, a proportion that makes the overall effect delicate, vulnerable almost. And the more we observe, analyze, scrutinize, the more it becomes obvious that what we are seeing is 1) a painting that may have begun as a dialogue between the artist and her inner world, and then the empty canvas; 2) a dialogue that ended with our own projections.

Neith’s art is not art for art’s sake, and one thing is not is commercialized and therefore overpriced. Her art does represent something. It means something. What exactly these are is what’s so baffling about them. If you seek to interpret them, usually the lack of balance, solidity or proportion makes the attempt impossible. There are traces of cubism in her paintings, as has often been pointed out especially during a period of intense artistic maturity that lasted for most of the 1990s, especially 1996. But even though this period was also Neith’s most intense, she never seemed comfortable with the one-dimensionality of cubism, especially as they applied to faces which are laden with such overpowering human emotions.

At her most complex and overbearing, and at her most uncategorized, Neith takes over the canvas as if possessed by a force larger than herself; making large, monstrous creatures reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica, a fact that has often been pointed out by art critics but which, again, fail to see the essential vision that makes her so different. Unlike Picasso’s large works which seem to be political critiques of his times, Neith’s larger pieces are as powerful, if not more, simply by the fact that she’s almost physically crippled as the result of a car accident which nearly killed her and that went on to aggravate an already physical deformity caused by sclirosis. Furthermore, none of these paintings seem to be about anything in particular to which a deeply dividing social issue can be compared to, again such as in Guernica, but to give the same example.

At her most minimal, smaller works such as sketches, which are usually done on anything she can paint on (even over blueprint plans,) Neith captures a suffocating reality that disrupts our sense of limits and proportion by the sheer smallness of it. It is an art whose objectivity dissolves and whose ultimate effect on us unresolved and irreconcilable, like life itself. She calls many of these lithographs her “nebulas.”

Louise Nevelson’s legacy rests on monumental, solid structures made mostly from steel sheets, metal and dark wood. These sculptures seem to be representative of life as a process of transference, not opposition. Non-representational—with only colors adding to their distinctive strangeness-- these sculptures are unsettling, but more complete, compact. The elder Nevelson wants to remind us that life can be lived to its full potential. How can it not? How did we ever miss such ancient maxim? In many ways, this is art in the service of an ideal, a Platonic belief which gives life its conceptual and moral worth, not its rudimentary, divided, and raw primitiveness.

BUT YET, AGAIN, WHAT IS IT?

The question remains, though, what is it? What is Neith’s art all about? Unquestionably, it is dark and disruptive. It is Nietszchean in nature, and hence brutal. She sees life at this level as harsh, forced, and raped almost. The pained simulation of colors, becomes part of a physical and psychical dissociation between, say, the individual who suffers, who questions, who spends a lifetime trying to make sense of who he or she is, and a world bereft of meaning, at worse indifferent. While the conflict becomes enlarged such as in her larger paintings, so does the gap between any reconciliation between society as a medium of salvation and nature as a force of destruction; ironically, it is this same nature, this resplendence landscape she gives birth to with such colors, that seems to hold the key to our own salvation. Seek within and you shall find, perhaps. Seek without and become one more clone of civilization, assuredly your own destruction. Surprisingly, the person herself says very little. She plays with your mind by staying in the background. What you see if your projection— if that means that what you will see is fear let it be; if you see joy, an exuberance of colors, then, why not? Either way the choice is yours.

FACES, WOMEN AND HORSES

Throughout a long and prolific career, Neith has narrowed her artistic interests to three main categories: naked women, faces and horses. In turn, each of these categories captures the essence of a common denominator: from chaos freedom, from freedom rebirth, from rebirth death.

Neith’s horses, which are also her most perfect renderings as far as forms and shapes, are often only swirls of lines over a large stretched canvas. With horses, there are no embellishments or experimentations with colors, just simplicity for simplicity’s sake. Again, though at times these horses are paired in groups, the effect is always one of serenity, union. Her naked females are almost all amorphous, with weird curvilinear shapes that seem to be refractions from under water, and their effect, nonetheless, is nothing less than astounding.

Her faces, like the naked women, have a rudimentary and unfinished lack of proportion, though unlike both the horses and the female, these faces seem trapped, disturbed (mental, physically or both). The youthfulness of these male faces makes the overall effect striking, even odd, sad, and violent all at once. At first, they seem threatening, hostile and accusatory. On closer look, there’s an almost delicacy that further compounds our sense of balance. Neith has called these male faces her ‘nebulas’, perhaps referring to unresolved emotional problems, or perhaps emphasizing the sad legacy of slavery and its continued effect on the psyche of our society.

“NEITHICISM”

Long ago, Neith understood that personal empowerment, (often misinterpreted to mean just ‘happiness’), begins, ends and continues to be a transformative mysterious force that evolves in a recurring pattern beyond time and space. However, representing this into something that does revolve around spiritual or abstract metaphors, this power is best expressed in the cyclical symmetry of her main interests—her horses, women and faces. Each is a pattern of the other. Each a string to be pulled before another facet of this same representation becomes embodied in the hollowed parts of a woman, or in the sad face of an unknown male, or the naïve brutality of horses in different surroundings. Larger works of the females have a fractured force to them. The cubistic impression leads to a magical dynamic refraction about to be washed away by water before transmuting into another reflection, and another, and another; hence the power of Neith’s paintings, the ability to become transformative in a reversal of cause-effect once set into motion.

In a world where there are no perfect blueprints for living are given and where our future in itself is an undisclosed territory of fear, the only mechanism for survival that a human being is given is the gift of the imagination, perhaps the only assurance that divinity does exist somewhere. This gift, talent, or whatever else you call it is of course no guarantee of greatness or even a guarantee of anything innately special unless it is harnessed and turned into something palpably beautiful, gratifying, often strange and surreal—art, like life, is always symbolic, archetypal; hence mysterious, and universal. And that’s what visceral, serious and genuine art can do to us, a generation of people living in a self- described post-modern, a world where no nook or cranny of its topography is no longer a mystery, a cosmos that shrinks and expands at the same time that we break down sub-atomic particles, but a group of people still as awed by this strange sojourn through a dark meaningless infinity because just like pharaohs realized almost six thousands years ago, this journey, though seemingly long by standards of each individual dreamer, ends just as soon as it begins—in a second. Who knows, for some of us perhaps this journey might be fun. Hopefully, it will also be a worthwhile journey for each and everyone of us.