Susan Fanshel

Louise Nevelson was more than 60 by the time the art world acknowledged her as one of America’s greatest living sculptors. In her early years she had little money for materials, so she constructed her art out of discarded wood found abandoned in the streets of New York. Transformed, this unlikely raw material became the stuff of her famous black boxes and, later, the huge cubistic environmental art works which she innovated. For Godmilow’s 1977 film, Nevelson agreed for the first time to be filmed while she worked, during the creation of two major new sculptures, resulting in an invaluable document of her process. A charismatic and dynamic personality with an iconoclastic approach to life, Nevelson admits that her works are “really for my visual eye…a feast for myself.”

The story of Irmi Selver, who lost her family while fleeing Germany in 1939 and overcame tragedy and upheavals to establish a new life in New York.

Louise Nevelson was more than 60 by the time the art world acknowledged her as one of America’s greatest living sculptors. In her early years she had little money for materials, so she constructed her art out of discarded wood found abandoned in the streets of New York. Transformed, this unlikely raw material became the stuff of her famous black boxes and, later, the huge cubistic environmental art works which she innovated. For Godmilow’s 1977 film, Nevelson agreed for the first time to be filmed while she worked, during the creation of two major new sculptures, resulting in an invaluable document of her process. A charismatic and dynamic personality with an iconoclastic approach to life, Nevelson admits that her works are “really for my visual eye…a feast for myself.”

The story of Irmi Selver, who lost her family while fleeing Germany in 1939 and overcame tragedy and upheavals to establish a new life in New York.