METZ.- Fifty years after her last exhibition in France (1974) and thirty years after her death, the Centre Pompidou-Metz presents Louise Nevelson. Mrs. N’s Palace, the first retrospective of this magnitude in Europe devoted to the artist Louise Nevelson (Kyiv, 1899 – New York, 1988). This exhibition celebrates an artist whose legacy continues to resonate within the contemporary art scene as well as the world of fashion. Nevelson transformed twentieth-century sculpture into a total and immersive experience.

Sometimes linked to Cubism, Constructivism, or the Dadaist and Surrealist practices of collage, her work extends far beyond these affiliations. If Jean Arp referred to Kurt Schwitters as his “imaginary grandfather,” Nevelson’s own artistic world encompasses a history of the arts where dance and performance – central to this exhibition – play a decisive role.

This dimension took shape in exhibitions conceived as true “atmospheres” or “environments”, radically expanding the field of sculpture, echoing Allan Kaprow’s theories on happenings and Rosalind Krauss’s notion of the “expanded field”.

In 1958, at Grand Central Moderns in New York, Nevelson staged her first large-scale environment, Moon Garden+ One, which included her first “wall”, Sky Cathedral – a vertical homage to her adopted city. Every detail was deliberate; anything that disrupted the installation was excluded. She paid particular attention to lighting, for the first time enveloping some of her works in blue light, heightening shadows and disorienting the viewer in the darkness. The viewer’s entire body was invited to engage in the scene, experiencing a reimagined theatricality.

This early experiment – when the very term “installation” was still in its infancy – was followed by Dawn’s Wedding Feast, created for the Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, and The Royal Tides at Martha Jackson Gallery in 1961. These installations are being reactivated in unprecedented form for this exhibition, highlighting how profoundly Nevelson’s environmental thinking embodied the culmination of her interdisciplinary explorations.

For twenty years, Nevelson studied eurythmy with Ellen Kearns, a form of bodily expression aimed at discovering vital energy and creative force. Combined with her fascination for Martha Graham in the 1930s, this study transformed her life and work, starting with her early terracotta sculptures depicting articulated dancing bodies in motion. Her discovery of Mexico and Guatemala in 1950 infused her work with a monumental dimension, blending geometry and mysticism. Under these dual influences, her environments became increasingly colossal, enveloping, totemic, and sacred. Nevelson created spaces to explore rather than sculptures to confront, carving out a singular path within the American artistic landscape of the 1960s.

In the “walls” that brought her renown, Nevelson elevated the discarded debris of New York into vertical sculptures, unified under monochrome veils – most often black, but sometimes white or gold. A world of forms emerged, shaped by an artist who described herself as an “architect of shadow and light.” These recycled fragments, transformed into abstract columns, can also be seen as reconstructed dwellings – alternative refuges or palaces – later evolving into the Dream Houses series in the early 1970s, echoing the rise of feminist thought.

The fascination her “walls” inspire likely arises from the aura of mystery they radiate. Each environment is charged with a narrative Nevelson composed around mythic figures and landscapes – motifs already present in her early prints – opening a world that exists only in moments of suspended perception, where time folds between dusk and dawn, between the ruins of the old and the promise of the new.

For her final environment, completed in 1977 and titled Mrs. N’s Palace, Nevelson created what was perhaps her own legend. “Mrs. N” was the nickname given to her by her Manhattan neighbours. After witnessing the dismantling of several of her immersive installations – conceived as dissociable wholes works – Nevelson devoted thirteen years to the realisation of this monumental piece, now permanently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which received it as a gift from the artist. A veritable life-sized shrine, Mrs. N’s Palace seeks to engulf the visitor completely. Through this total experience, it crystallises Nevelson’s relationship with space. By borrowing its title, the Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition pays tribute to the artist’s majestic creative vision.

EXHIBITION TOUR

THE ROYAL TIDES

In 1961 Louise Nevelson created her only golden environment, The Royal Tides, which was shown at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. The majestic royal figures that had stood at the center of her work since her first prints of 1953–1955 gave way to the radiant sculptures that covered the walls of the gallery. Unlike Moon Garden + One (1958) and Dawn's Wedding Feast (1959), her two earlier environments – black and white respectively – Nevelson this time chose to leave the center of the exhibition space open, allowing the viewer's body to inhabit the theatrical space bathed in bright light. Although the artist would soon return to black, her use of gold – a color with universal connotations, both solar and lunar – powerfully embodies her cosmic vision of the world.

DANCING FIGURE

After studying singing and drama, Nevelson discovered eurythmy, which she practiced for more than twenty years with Ellen Kearns, whom she met through her friend Diego Rivera. This discipline, distinguished from dance by its lack of formal technique, led the artist to become aware of "every fiber [of her being]." By encouraging the expression of buried emotions through a universal, fluid, and expressive body language, eurythmy enabled Nevelson to channel and transform her vital energy into creative power. During the same period, she developed a passion for the modern dance avant-garde experiments of Mary Wigman and Martha Graham, whose radical movements profoundly influenced her early sculptures.

MAGIC GARDEN

The sculptures brought together in the Magic Garden recreate the atmosphere of the first environments created by Nevelson at Grand Central Modern in New York. Each of her installations was designed around a narrative that made the sculptures interdependent. In Ancient Games and Ancient Places (1955), the Bride of the Black Moon travels across four continents, whose vertical silhouettes, assembled from found wood, evoke Manhattan's urban skyline. The Royal Voyage of the King and Queen of the Sea (1956) immerses the viewer in an Undermarine Scape, where the royal figures move toward the Great Beyond; the voyage becomes a metaphor for spiritual refuge, a space for transcending oneself.

BAGAGE DE LUNE

Nevelson conceives the fourth dimension as an "elsewhere" within the here-and-now of the third dimension. Whether she is etching, modeling terracotta, carving wood, or assembling various elements into large collages, Nevelson never separates the planar from the three-dimensional and approaches each medium with the same awareness. "My whole life is one big collage," the artist herself remarked. In 1953 she created her first collages, which she considered an autonomous medium. This practice — one she would continue to explore by introducing new materials until the end of her life — developed in the mid-1950s alongside her Tabletop Landscapes and Moon Garden Forms series, composed of salvaged pieces of wood, assembled and harmonized with black paint.

MOON GARDEN + ONE

Conceived at Grand Central Moderns in New York in 1958, Moon Garden + One is undoubtedly one of Nevelson's most remarkable environments. One year after the launch of the Sputnik satellite and ten years before the Apollo mission, Nevelson takes us to the moon, where the dreams of scientists meet those of poets. The sculpture now envelops the entire space, pulling the viewer into the heart of a total universe – a whirl of forms bathed in bluish light that further accentuates the theatricality of the experience. In this enigmatic atmosphere, Nevelson deploys a veritable cosmic stage, designed to receive the nocturnal garden of the “+ One” – an expression that refers both to the viewer and to the artist herself, who performed a druidic dance before revealing her installation to the public.

SHADOW AND REFLECTION

In her quest for a fourth dimension, Nevelson captured fleeting light and gave it tangible substance, transforming the shadows of forms into elements even more solid than the forms themselves. For her, black was the color that most powerfully intensified this depth: an alchemical color associated with harmony and wholeness, a mirror of all colors rather than their negation, it imparts a sense of peace and grandeur. The wall piece Shadow and Reflection I was part of this quest while revealing a new relationship to space, emerging at a moment shaped by minimalist aesthetics. Here, the artist uses manufactured boxes whose symmetrical juxtaposition breathes new energy into the order that arises from chaos.

DAWN'S WEDDING FEAST

The twilight sketched in Moon Garden + One is followed by the dawn embodied in Louise Nevelson's first white environment, Dawn's Wedding Feast, shown in the exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. In Nevelson's art, time – as envisioned by the Mayans, who attributed regenerative virtues and sacred power to it – seems to coil back upon itself in an infinite loop. The bride is nowhere to be found in this vast composition, for it is likely Nevelson's own union with creativity that she wanted to represent. To the surprise of critics, she began enveloping her sculptures in white, a more festive color that also sharpens the contours of the forms. But while white has the virtue of rising in space, black offers an almost physical absorption, and it would always remain her favorite.

TROPICAL RAIN GARDEN

For her first retrospective in 1967, marking the reopening of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Nevelson took an active role in the hanging of the exhibition and created a new environment that harmoniously connected different periods of her work. Designed by the artist as a transformative space, this narrow, darkened corridor – lined with wall pieces and columns – led to her most recent explorations, which incorporated new materials such as Plexiglas and metal. In the same spirit, the atmospheric quality of Tropical Rain Garden is evoked here to guide visitors toward her monumental wooden works, notably Homage to the Universe, and the Atmosphere and Environment series, which expanded sculpture to the scale of the landscape.

DREAM HOUSES

After exploring new materials such as Plexiglas and metal, Nevelson returned to wood to create her Dream Houses series. The artist was constantly immersed in the materials she shaped, and her home-studio served as a matrix for the development of her environments in the late 1950s. Subsequently, the house itself became the subject of her work through sculptures in the form of unique boxes, sometimes at human scale, pierced with multiple doors and windows, creating an ambiguous interplay between voyeurism and the unveiling of intimate space. While for Nevelson the house embodied a place where the richness of the inner world could flourish, this representation of domestic space also had political resonance in light of Silvia Federici's 1975 manifesto, Wages Against Housework.

HOMAGE TO THE UNIVERSE

Like her striking works of the 1960s with their remarkable command of composition and use of geometric patterns, the wall Homage to the Universe focuses on the essential: the boxes contain shadows and attempt to contain the outside world through a subtle play of reflected light. While it resonates with the aesthetic climate of Color Field Painting, championed notably by her friend Mark Rothko, who promoted painting that spread across vast, uniform fields of color, Nevelson affirmed the cosmic scope of her creative vision with this monumental wall, expressing her wonder at the depth of the universe. Like Hamlet, who “could be bounded in a nutshell and count [him]self a king of infinite space” (Hamlet II.ii), Nevelson pays a celestial and Shakespearean tribute to the immensity of the cosmos.

ATMOSPHERE AND ENVIRONMENT

Louise Nevelson's work unfolded across the plurality of spaces that she strove to shape: the galleries that hosted her early installations, her home-studios, the city of New York, and even the immaterial space of dance, where bodies came alive. From the mid-1960s, her reflections extended to public space with the monumental Atmosphere and Environment series, executed in aluminum and later in Corten steel — durable materials that anchored her work in time. In that series, she considered the city and nature as actors in an abstract theater, where fragmented images appeared and vanished as the viewer moved past the multiple windows that punctuate the composition. She thus reinvented her work by creating a new atmospheric experience, further developing her approach to the environment as a comprehensive, landscape-scale installation.