A world-renowned 20th-century sculptor who put Rockland, Maine on the map loved scrounging in trash bins for scrap wood.
That’s the reminiscence of Louise Nevelson as recalled by her granddaughter in a CBS Sunday Morning interview promoting a new Nevelson exhibit.
“She’d dumpster dive, she’d get into the garbage can, she’d pull out filthy pieces of wood, and we’d have to take ’em home,” said Maria Nevelson. “I would say the streets of New York weren’t paved with gold for her; it was paved with garbage. And she loved it!”
Nearly six decades after the artist’s first Whitney Museum of American Art showing, the Manhattan institution is holding a new Nevelson exhibition, open until August 10.
“She was given her first retrospective at the Whitney in 1967,” said her granddaughter, who runs the Louise Nevelson Foundation.
“I was seven years old. And there was a line of people all the way around the block, up to the front door. I really did get chills. It was the first time I responded to artwork in general, and to my grandmother’s artwork.”
CBS reports: “Nevelson’s attraction to wood may have grown from her family tree – her family owned lumber yards in present-day Ukraine, where she was born in 1899. Louise was a young girl who spoke no English when her father decided to move the family to Rockland, Maine.”
“It was a bustling seaport town,” said Maria. “They got off the train and, she said, rednecks threw mud at them. And she said, ‘I knew I was a Jew, I knew I was different.’ She was about five, six years old then. That’s her greeting to America.”
Undaunted, Nevelson learned English, and at age nine, announced she was going to be a sculptor.
That’s where diving in dumpsters – with a ready supply of scrap wood for sculpting – came in handy for Nevelson.
Louise Nevelson, a proud, fashionable woman who wore “an assemblage and layering of rich brocades and silks,” diving into trash bins. Just so rich.
In 1979, Charles Osgood, of “CBS Sunday Morning,” spoke to Nevelson when she was 79 years old and, arguably, at the height of her career.
The artist told Osgood, “You see, dear, if you are doing your creative work, you don’t have age or time as such, and consequently you’re not caught in it. So, you go on.”
Nevelson never forgot her humble upbringing so she felt at home in the gritty fishing town of Rockland, Maine, which ultimately embraced her family.
Nate Berliawsky, who was the artist’s brother, ran the seedy Thorndike Hotel on Rockland’s Main Street (Route 1) where he had some of her sculptures on display in the lobby.
The juxtaposition was breathtaking – priceless sculpture on public view in a cheap hotel inhabited by the working class.
Berliawsky himself was as much a full-of-life character as his younger sister – and no one to fool with even in his late 70s.
When a burglar tried in 1976 to grab Berliawsky’s money bag, the elderly hotel proprietor grabbed a golf club he kept on hand and beat the thug over the head.
Berliawsky died in 1980 at the age of 81. His sister died in 1988 at the age of 88.
