Presents a catalog of an exhibition showcasing the works of the American sculptor and artist.

Louise Nevelson, one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century, was a beautiful woman who lived so audacious a life that by the time of her death she was a legend both inside and outside the art world. Born Leah Berliawsky in Czarist Russia in 1899, she grew up in Maine, ostracized as a Jew and a foreigner. At twenty she escaped to Manhattan as Mrs. Charles Nevelson, eventually leaving her husband for a life devoted to art. She lived and loved with lusty abandon, often in poverty and obscurity, until she finally achieved fame and fortune at sixty. “This biography of a monstre sacre is a tale of hard-tacks heroism and heedless swipes at those who dared to love her,” said Interview magazine. Nevelson found inspiration in cubism, primitive art, and her own unconscious, creating a rich iconography of images. With black, white, or gold paint and perfect placement, she transformed old pieces of wood picked up on the street into powerful sculptures. In later years she appeared in mink eyelashes and flamboyant costumes, all the while going to her studio every day before dawn to add to the astonishing body of work now in collections of museums around the world. Laurie Lisle interviewed Nevelson before the artist’s death in 1988, as well as her lovers, family members, artist friends, and many others. This biography provides fascinating insights and information discovered in archives and public records, letters and diaries, and the artist’s own prose and poetry. Now in a revised e-book edition, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life is the only biography of this important American sculptor. It is “impressive in its thoroughness, which nonetheless results in ‘good reading’ by virtue of its interweaving of personal and professional information, its eclectic introduction of psychological analysis, and a phraseology that appreciates both the pain and the joy surrounding Nevelson’s eccentric behavior,” according to Woman’s Art Journal.

For fans of Olivia and Eloise, this stunning debut from Kelly Light is an irresistible story about the importance of creativity in all its forms. Meet Louise. Louise loves art more than anything. It's her imagination on the outside. She is determined to create a masterpiece—her pièce de résistance! Louise also loves Art, her little brother. This is their story. Louise Loves Art is a celebration of the brilliant artist who resides in all of us.

An award-winning writer rescues seven first-rate twentieth-century women artists from oblivion--their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation. Who hasn't wondered where-aside from Georgia O'Keeffe and Frida Kahlo-all the women artists are? In many art books, they've been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase "identity unknown" while each male is named. Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Loïs Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive; Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar in her heyday but omitted from recent surveys of her era. These women fought to be treated the same as male artists, to be judged by their work, not their gender or appearance. In brilliant, compassionate prose, Seaman reveals what drove them, how they worked, and how they were perceived by others in a world where women were subjects-not makers-of art. Featuring stunning examples of the artists' work, Identity Unknown speaks to all women about their neglected place in history and the challenges they face to be taken as seriously as men no matter what their chosen field-and to all men interested in women's lives.

The most complete biography of the iconic sculptor Louise Nevelson, the groundbreaking artist and fixture of New York’s art world based on hours of interviews the author conducted at the height of Nevelson’s fame In 1929, Louise Nevelson was a disappointed housewife with a young son, surrounded by New York’s vibrant artistic community but unable to fully engage with it. By 1950, she was an artist living on her own, financially dependent on her family, but she had received a glimmer of recognition from the establishment: inclusion in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1980, Nevelson celebrated her second Whitney retrospective. Her work was held in public collections around the world; her massive steel sculptures appeared in public spaces in seventeen states, including the Louise Nevelson Plaza in New York City’s Financial District. The story of Nevelson’s artistic, spiritual, even physical transformation (she developed a taste for outrageous outfits and false eyelashes made of mink) is dramatic, complex, and inseparable from major historical and cultural shifts of the twentieth century, particularly in the art world. Art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson brings a unique and sensitive perspective to Nevelson’s story, drawing on hours of interviews she conducted with Nevelson and her circle. Over 100 images, many of them drawn from personal archives and never before published, make this the most visually and narratively comprehensive biography of this remarkable artist yet published.

Publication accompanies the inaugural exhibition at the new Frost Collection, Florida, which looks at the rise to prominence of the New York art scene in the two decades following the Second World War