LACMA

ShopMembershipMyLACMATickets
LACMA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
info@lacma.org
(323) 857-6000
Sign up to receive emails
Subscribe
© Museum Associates 2025

Museum Hours

Monday

11 am–6 pm

Tuesday

11 am–6 pm

Wednesday

Closed

Thursday

11 am–6 pm

Friday

11 am–8 pm

Saturday

10 am–7 pm

Sunday

10 am–7 pm

 

  • About LACMA
  • Jobs
  • Building LACMA
  • Host An Event
  • Unframed
  • Press
  • FAQs
  • Log in to MyLACMA
  • Privacy Policy
© Museum Associates 2025
Collections

Louise Nevelson
Untitledc.1975

Not on view
No image
Artist or Maker
Louise Nevelson
Russian Empire (Now Ukraine), active United States, 1899-1988
Title
Untitled
Date Made
c.1975
Medium
Wood painted black
Dimensions
48 × 96 in. (121.92 × 243.84 cm)
Credit Line
Gift of Milly and Arne Glimcher
Accession Number
M.2021.209.1a-b
Classification
Sculpture
Collecting Area
Modern Art
Curatorial Notes
Louise Nevelson is best known for her monochromatic sculptures and environments made from found materials that she began in the 1950s. These constructions of boxes and walls are created from urban detritus–dismantled furniture, milk crates, balustrades, ornaments, and scraps of wood–which she composed, layered, and painted in a single color, emphasizing the effects of light and shadow. She described this process as “shedding skin,” and called her constructions “worldscapes” to suggest the melding of the personal and the universal. Nevelson’s constructions owe something to Alberto Giacometti’s landscape sculptures and Joseph Cornell’s intimate narrative box constructions. She painted her earliest constructions a matte black; the color suggested spirituality, power, magic, and solitude, but for her, black conveyed an “essence” of experience. Later, Nevelson also employed white or gold to cover her found and constructed elements. Untitled is composed of two attached boxes—one primarily composed of vertical elements, the other predominantly horizontal—that together read like a diptych. The simple forms have been carefully nestled into the boxes and covered with her signature matte black.