Label: By the time Nevelson mounted her 1956 exhibition The Royal Voyage (of the King and Queen of the Sea), she had eliminated from her sculpture any direct resemblance to human or landscape figures. At the same time, however, she presented her new abstract sculptures as elements within loosely defined mythological narratives that imbued these scavenged-wood assemblages with the sense of an epic romance or quest. For instance, Nevelson originally installed The King and The Queen at opposite ends of a gallery, and between them she arranged other non-figurative sculptures, including Distant Land and The Chief. Evocative of innumerable folktales, the sculptures’ titles characterized them as people or places equally at home in a North American saga or one set in Nevelson’s native Ukraine.
Exhibition label from " The Big 4-0: New Views of the Collection, Vol. 2" 2025.
Exhibition History: The Haggerty Collects: Recent Gifts, Haggerty Museum of Art, 12/07/2000 - 02/11/2001
Motherwell, Nevelson and Frankenthaler: Gifts from the Lillian Rojtman Berkman Collection, Haggerty Museum of Art, 02/22/2001 - 05/20/2001
The Big 4-0, Vol. 2: New Views of the Collection, Haggerty Museum of Art, 01/17/2025 - 05/24/2025
