"Black is the most aristocratic color of all." — Louise Nevelson, Dawns and Dusks
Louise Nevelson (Leah Berliawsky, September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor and one of the central figures of twentieth-century American art. Born in Pereyaslav in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), she was brought to Rockland, Maine, with her family in 1905 and grew up in the small Maine port town's Jewish immigrant community. Her 1920 marriage to Charles Nevelson took her to New York, where she began her artistic training in painting, drawing, dance, theatre, and music; in 1931–32 she studied with Hans Hofmann in Munich, was introduced to Cubism and collage, and continued with Hofmann after his move to New York. She subsequently worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera on his American mural projects and as a WPA art teacher.
She had her first solo exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in 1941, but did not develop the signature monochromatic wood-assemblage idiom for which she is now best known until the late 1950s. The wall-scale, deeply shadowed, painted-wood pieces — Sky Cathedral (1958) and the long sequence of black, white, and gold walls and totems that followed — established her as one of the leading American sculptors of the postwar period. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1962, was given a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967, and saw her work enter the collections of the Whitney (which holds more than ninety pieces — one of the largest single-artist holdings in the museum), the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, the National Gallery of Art, and essentially every other major collection of postwar American art.