White Column (from Dawn’s Wedding Feast)

Close up of White Column (from Dawn’s Wedding Feast)

A tall, slender, square column painted white and covered in geometric shapes of various sizes. Triangles, squares and cylinders come together to resemble decorative building components or tools.
A tall, slender, square column painted white and covered in geometric shapes of various sizes. Triangles, squares and cylinders come together to resemble decorative building components or tools.
Louise Nevelson, White Column (from "Dawn's Wedding Feast"), 1959; Painted wood, 110 x 15 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of an anonymous donor; © 2012 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Right Society (ARS), New York

Louise Nevelson created White Column as part of her groundbreaking sculpture installation entitled Dawn’s Wedding Feast. In a 1959 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York about trends in American art after abstract expressionism, the installation filled a 14 x 24 x 22-foot space.

Indivisible abstract wood sculptures represented a bride and groom, their guests, a wedding chest, pillow, and cake, and architectural elements suggesting the walls and columns of chapels. The sculptures composing Dawn’s Wedding Feast were subsequently dispersed into many collections, but the work established Nevelson as a pioneer of sculpture installations.

Inspired by Cubist art, Nevelson began making assemblages in the 1940s from wood that she salvaged, assembled, and painted a single color. Until creating Dawn’s Wedding Feast, Nevelson had used black paint almost exclusively to create works that embody themes of royalty, marriage, and celestial bodies.

The color black gave the sculptures a sense of gravity or monumentality. The white hue that Nevelson selected for Dawn’s Wedding Feast signaled a more serene viewpoint for the artist, despite her own marital and familial trials at the time. She noted: “For me, the black contains the silhouette, the essence of the universe. But the whites move out a little bit into outer space with more freedom.”

Artwork Details

  • Artist

    Louise Nevelson
  • Title

    White Column (from Dawn’s Wedding Feast)
  • Date

    1959
  • Medium

    Painted wood
  • Dimensions

    110 x 15 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.
  • Donor Credit

    Gift of an anonymous donor
  • Photo Credit

    © 2012 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Right Society (ARS), New York
  • On Display

    No