Fred McDarrah, Vintage Print Silver Gelatin Signed Photograph Louise Nevelson Sculpture, 1972

Description

signed in ink and with photographer stamp verso and hand written title.

Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, … more signed in ink and with photographer stamp verso and hand written title.

Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures.
Born Leah Berliawsky in 1899 in Perislav, Poltava in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine), she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home. By the early 1930s she was attending art classes at the Art Students League of New York, and in 1941 she had her first solo exhibition. A student of Hans Hofmann and Chaim Gross, Nevelson experimented with early conceptual art using found objects, and dabbled in painting and printing before dedicating her lifework to sculpture. Usually created out of wood, her sculptures appear puzzle-like, with multiple intricately cut pieces placed into wall sculptures or independently standing pieces, often 3-D. In Munich she studied with Hans Hofmann before visiting Italy and France. Returning to New York in 1932 she once again studied under Hofmann, who was serving as a guest instructor at the Art Students League. She met Diego Rivera in 1933 and worked as his assistant on his mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Plaza. The two had an affair which caused a rift between Nevelson and Rivera's wife, Frida Kahlo, an artist Nevelson greatly admired. In 1935, she taught mural painting at the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club in Brooklyn as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). From 1957 to 1958, she was president of the New York Chapter of Artists' Equity and in 1958 she joined the Martha Jackson Gallery, where she was guaranteed income and became financially secure. That year, she was photographed and featured on the cover of Life. In 1960 she had her first one-woman show in Europe at Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris. Later that year a collection of her work, grouped together as "Dawn's Wedding Feast", was included in the group show, "Sixteen Americans", at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In 1962 she made her first museum sale to the Whitney Museum of American Art. That same year, her work was selected for the 31st Venice Biennale and she became national president of Artists' Equity, serving until 1964.
When Nevelson was developing her style, many of her artistic colleagues – Alexander Calder, David Smith, Theodore Roszak – were welding metal to create their large-scale sculptures. Nevelson decided to go in the opposite direction, exploring the streets for inspiration and finding it in wood. A less known but very strong influence was that of Joaqun Torres García, a Uruguayan artist who "in the United States was probably underrated precisely because he was so influential; Adolph Gottlieb's and Louise Nevelson's debt to his work has never been fully acknowledged".Nevelson's distinct and eccentric image has been documented by photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon, Hans Namuth and Pedro E. Guerrero.Nevelson is listed on the Heritage Floor, among other famous women, in Judy Chicago's 1974–1979 masterpiece The Dinner Party.

Over a 50-year span, McDarrah documented the rise of the Beat Generation, the city’s postmodern art movement, its off-off-Broadway actors, troubadours, politicians, agitators and social protests. Fred captured Jack Kerouac frolicking with women at a New Year’s bash in 1958, Andy Warhol adjusting a movie-camera lens in his silver-covered factory, and Bob Dylan offering a salute of recognition outside Sheridan Square near the Village Voice Greenwich Village old office.
Not just a social chronicler, McDarrah was a great photo-journalist.
For years, McDarrah was the Voice's only photographer and, for decades, he ran the Voice’s photo department, where he helped train dozens of young photographers, including James Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Robin Holland and Marc Asnin. His mailbox was simply marked "McPhoto."
An exhibit of McDarrah’s photos of artists presented by the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea was hailed by The New York Times as “a visual encyclopedia of the era’s cultural scene.” Artists in their studios, (Alice Neel, Philip Guston, Stuart Davis, Robert Smithson, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline), actors (Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro on the set of “Taxi Driver”), musicians (Janis Joplin, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan) and documentary images of early happenings and performances (Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, Al Hansen, Jim Dine, Nam June Paik). The many images of Andy Warhol include the well-known one with his Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964. Woody Allen, Diane Arbus, W. H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Joan Baez, Louise Bourgeois, David Bowie, Jimmy Breslin, William Burroughs, John Cage, Leo Castelli, Christo, Leonard Cohen, Merce Cunningham, William de Kooning, Jim Dine, Mark di Suvero, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Indiana, Mick Jagger, Jasper Johns, Kusama, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Elvis Presley, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Lou Reed, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and others have all been shot by him.
McDarrah’s prints have been collected in depth by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. His work is in numerous public and private collections. less