Façade: An Homage to Edith Sitwell: Lullaby for Jumbo
Façade: An Homage to Edith Sitwell: Lullaby for Jumbo, 1966
Louise Nevelson (American, 1899 – 1988)
#1982.0008.0028
Born Leah Berliawsky to a Jewish family living in Ukraine, Nevelson and her family immigrated to Rockland, Maine when she was five years old. After marrying and separating from businessman Charles Nevelson, Louise Nevelson moved to New York to study at the Art Students League. She worked for a time as a studio assistant to Diego Rivera and also taught art classes at the Educational Alliance Art School as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). While there, she studied sculpture with Chaim Gross. Well-known for her dramatic presence, she styled herself in over-the-top clothes and mink false eyelashes. She was also the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee’s Occupant, and was commemorated in a series of stamps issued by the United States Post Office in 2000.
Nevelson is most recognized for her “assemblages” in the form of monochromatic wooden boxes and found objects. The assemblages play with line and composition, and reinvent space. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s found object sculptures, Nevelson’s constructions transform the identity of the found object. The Drum and Lullaby for Jumbo come from Nevelson’s 1966 Façade portfolio, which contains selected poems by Edith Sitwell. The images were created using the silkscreen process. Nevelson transferred photographic images of her assemblages to silkscreens, and then cut those elements into collaged arrangements. The resulting collages further play on the dimensionality of Nevelson’s sculptures by representing three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional format.
