Complicated and yet stark, precarious but somehow balanced—Nevelson’s works, like those of the Cubist painters who inspired her, push recognizable forms toward abstraction. She collected scrap wood, pieces of furniture, even wheels and then stacked, assembled, and bolted them into carefully framed compositions. Often, she painted them entirely in black. Unlike other artists in this room, Nevelson reduced her palette to add content. For Nevelson, black had a mystical sense of wholeness: it “is the total color. It means totality. It means: contains all.”

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