Review: “Louise Nevelson, Mrs. N’s Palace” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz

In New York it’s desirable to have some kind of a relationship with your neighbor, but not one that’s too close. A few years ago there was some kind of gas leak in my building. When the burly Italian firemen showed up to save the day—with pictures of saints taped to their oxygen tanks—they asked me if the couple across the hall was in the apartment or at their home upstate. I said I didn’t know, so the firemen crowbarred the door open to make sure that they weren’t. The next time the male half of the couple was in town he buttonholed me in the stairwell to complain about the damage to his doorjamb. This struck me as overly familiar. It wasn’t as if I really knew the guy. I had merely tried to save his life.

“Mrs. N’s Palace,” a new show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, takes its name from a permanent installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), the title of which references Nevelson’s nickname with her own neighbors in the city. Nevelson was a pioneer of installation art and best known for assemblages of debris that come to look like monochrome artifacts from the future. You can imagine the stairwell conversations. While the Met work doesn’t appear in the Metz exhibition, the new show borrows from other impressive collections for what is her first European retrospective of this scale, 50 years after she last showed in France.

Though she came to be associated with inhuman monoliths, Nevelson’s artistic impulses began with the body. She studied eurythmy for two decades and revered Martha Graham. These concerns inform her Moving-Static-Moving Figure series from around 1945, in which a small stack of terracotta elements are strung on a rod so that they can pivot like a dancer. It might be here that she first came to be interested in the color black, for these often were painted that color, which she called “the silhouette, essence of the universe.” These works are nothing but mutable shadows.

Among her blackest pieces has to be Homage to the Universe (1968), a bass note for the show. This wall piece is nearly nine meters wide, a grid of open boxes crammed with turned wood, finials and offcuts. This discarded carpentry of New York might have been burned in a very precise fire, for it is in the thrall of a singular and consistent matte black. Up close it might be garbage. Far away its penumbras turn to inverted stars, with a good tension that feels in conversation with the Color Field painting being done by people like her friend Mark Rothko.

The exhibition recreates three of her landmark environments, Moon Garden + One (1958), her first white work Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959), and her only gold one, The Royal Tides (1961). From this last installation comes An American Tribute to the British People (1960-64), a gilded wall on loan from Tate. There’s mannered grandiosity in this work but it’s of the Nevelson signature variety. The vertical and symmetrical qualities of it make the gaps between the junk feel like the flares of a column. As for the gold, it doesn’t feel precious. Nevelson insisted that color came out of the earth, and this does feel like it has more in common with the sun than it does with jewelry. The work glows and vibrates without insisting upon itself. I wouldn’t mind living with it, or indeed down the hall from it.

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