ABSTRACT
The exhibition of sculpture by Louise Nevelson at the Pace Gallery is, except for her retrospective at the John Hay Whitney last year, the best exhibition of her work in some years. Those exhibitions at the Grand Central Moderns Gallery in the 1950's that won Mrs. Nevelson her first eminence were quite different from the present occasion. They were like no other exhibitions at the time. Mrs. Nevelson has, over the years, subjected the sculptural wall to a great many variations, but within these variations there has been one clear tendency–a tendency toward greater clarity, simplification, order. There are, no doubt, some interesting historical reasons for this, but there are also important aesthetic-syntactical reasons, and we see them with especial clarity in Mrs. Nevelson's work. In her work of the fifties, the Constructivist element was a means; in her work of the sixties, it has become both means and end, but more end than means.
