The American artist Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) is fascinating in many ways: she is a noteworthy pioneer of the 20th century image of the artist as one free of conventions and historical constraints. As a charismatic person she was befriended with all major contemporaries in the emerging art center of the United States. Like a shaman she drew her artistic energies from the multiformity of the world cultures and established her position as an artist between the trends of Abstract Expressionism (with informal and action painting) and the beginnings of Pop Art (with her discovery of industrial products and advertising). Her oeuvre was product of an unremitting engagement with harmonizing external and internal visions. Her own life and her struggle with artistic and personal autonomy and freedom were also the continual source of her creativity, which did not limit its expression to the visual arts but revealed itself in countless facets. She devoted herself to theater, dance and eurythmy, and cultivated a flamboyantly personal style of apparel. In all walks of her life, her desire was to give her identity a shape.
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