Four in the Morning

Louise Nevelson is one of the great figures of 20th century American art — not a footnote, not a footnote to a footnote, but a central, world-altering presence whose work hangs in MoMA, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Smithsonian, and a plaza in Lower Manhattan that bears her name. She was the first woman sculptor represented by Sidney Janis Gallery. The Whitney gave her a retrospective in 1967, then another in 1980. Helmut Newton photographed her. Richard Avedon photographed her. She wore false eyelashes made of mink and showed up to Chiron Press every day for months in the winter of 1965 to make these prints, and she was, by all accounts, easy to work with and almost mellow — a woman who had survived enough that nothing rattled her anymore.

Four in the Morning comes from the Façade suite, one of twelve prints Nevelson made in 1966 as a tribute to the British poet Edith Sitwell, who had died two years earlier. Sitwell's own Façade — abstract poems set to music by William Walton, originally performed with Sitwell herself speaking from behind a curtain through a megaphone — was exactly the kind of radical, cross-disciplinary act that Nevelson understood instinctively. She didn't illustrate the poems. She responded to them the way one artist responds to another: obliquely, personally, from her own interior.

The process she used to make these prints is the part that stays with me. She began by screenprinting photographs of her own sculptures onto paper — and immediately felt they were too flat. So she and her printer Steve Poleskie began cutting the images apart, collaging the fragments onto acetate, building new compositions from the residue of the original. They photographed those collages back into screens, layering acetate over wove paper until the image had dimension, shadow, and the unmistakable quality of something that had been physically assembled rather than simply reproduced. Brice Marden — before he was Brice Marden — was a studio assistant at Chiron Press that winter. The room where this print was made was not a minor room.

What you receive is this: a photographic collage screenprint on wove paper with screenprint on acetate overlay, signed and dated in pencil by Nevelson herself, numbered 76 from an edition of 125, published by Harry N. Abrams in collaboration with The Pace Gallery, New York. The structure you see in the image — those vertical forms that suggest columns, or stacked boxes, or something almost Roman in their monumental composure — are her own sculptural designs, photographed, cut apart, and rebuilt into this. The monochromatic palette is not a limitation. It is the whole point. For Nevelson, black was not absence; it was everything, the color that contained all other colors, the silhouette of the universe.

The print is in excellent condition. The frame is original vintage silver metal, which holds it with a restraint that suits the severity of the image. I have never seen any works from this suit in this condition, framed as this one is framed, carrying what this one carries. The old art world — the world of Pace Gallery and Harry Abrams and Sidney Janis and artists who showed up every day in winter to invent new processes alongside master printers — lives in this object. That world produced very few things of this quality that still move through private hands, and this - this is one of them. This is a piece that I personally desire to keep in my private collection, but with the love of spreading beautiful things into the homes of my community, I offer it here to you now.