Louise Nevelson

Ukrainian by birth and a naturalized US citizen, artist Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) anticipated the theme of recycling and memory through her work made of assembled objects and industrial scraps. By opposing the conventions traditionally imposed on the women of her time, she anticipated today's polarization regarding gender expectations and women's rights. This is the first volume in a new series from Silvana in concert with the Genesis Association that is dedicated to historical artists whose lives and/or work can be interpreted as prescient of the urgent social issues of today. It includes a critical text by the curator, Ilaria Bernardi and a chronology of Nevelson's life and key works accompanied by archival photographs and texts.

Despite occupying a significant portion of Louise Nevelson’s (1899–1988) creative output, her collages still today remain largely unexplored, with only a few publications and essays dedicated to them. The fact that this body of work was exhibited only on rare occasions during her lifetime (and always alongside sculpture) is undoubtedly a factor in the delay of full scholarship on the subject. Nonetheless, Nevelson was often quoted commenting that “the way I think is collage,” and already by 1960, Jean Arp declared in one of his poems that “Louise Nevelson has a grandfather, probably without knowing it: Kurt Schwitters,” thereby positioning her work within the lineage of avant-garde collage in modern art.”
This book gathers an extensive collection of these collages alongside essays by Yuval Etgar and Pia Gottschaller, and a conversation between Gió Marconi and Maria Nevelson.

In 1967, for her first museum retrospective, Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) was given carte blanche to transform the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University into an all-emcompassing, theatrical environment for her sculpture. Nevelson installed her show across the whole museum, draping the walls of the permanent collection with the colors that reflected the black, white, gold and navy palette of her works. Louise Nevelson: I Must Recompose the Environment includes previously unpublished exhibition layouts (annotated by Nevelson), installation photographs and texts that place this show in the context of Nevelson's career and the museum’s early history. This publication accompanies the now out-of-print catalog of the 1967 show organized in collaboration with the Whitney Museum and serves as a document both of the then-nascent museum and the solidifying legacy of an artistic icon.

A complete monograph dedicated to one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. This gorgeous monograph presents an impressive collection of 560 works: 100 large-format works in full-page reproductions and 460 reproductions of installations, collages, and designs, arranged in chronological order. The works are accompanied by some 200 images of documents, photographs, magazine articles, as well as 50 works by her contemporaries.

Germano Celant is author of more than one hundred publications, including both books and catalogues.