During her lifetime, Louise Nevelson’s unapologetic ego and her regal public bearing made her famous, even infamous. Nevelson’s self-glorification served a long-term, counter-cultural mission. By avowing her destiny as a great artist early and often, she was rejecting comfort and middling conformity to claim a vocation that, the record proves, involved scrupulous, uncompromising experimentation.
The Face in the Moon: Drawings and Prints by Louise Nevelson at the Whitney Museum speaks toher considerable craftsmanship, as well as the range of her imagination and her risk-taking. This exhibition’s cross-section of 26 prints, engravings, etchings and collages positions Nevelson’s rare pencil drawings from the 1920s as her first stabs toward the poetic heights she reached with more multilayered works from the 1950s and ’60s, before her turn to a more geometric abstraction in the 1970s.