JTF (just the facts): A total of 47 black and white photographs by Aaron Siskind and 9 sculptures/wall assemblages by Louise Nevelson, displayed against white walls in the entry area and the front, main, and back gallery spaces. The 47 photographs are mostly vintage gelatin silver prints (some mounted to board), made between 1940 and 1984; physical sizes range from roughly 5×7 to 20×24 (or reverse). The 9 sculptures/wall assemblages are variously made of plaster, terracotta, tattistone, wood, metal, and paint, made between 1945 and 1981; physical sizes range from 12x5x3 to 92x35x4. A catalog of the exhibit, with essays by Laurie Wilson and Shelley Rice, is available from the gallery. (Installation shots below.)

Comments/Context: Before seeing the announcement for this show, I don’t think it ever once crossed my mind that the sculpture of Louise Nevelson and the photography of Aaron Siskind might have something interesting to say to each other. My shorthand memory of Nevelson’s work includes mostly monumental sculptures (often outdoor) containing hundreds of discrete shapes and boxed patterns slathered in all over blackness, and with that in mind, the connection to Siskind isn’t altogether obvious. But the true unexpected revelation to be found in this standout exhibit is that by carefully selecting lesser known works by both artists, a pairing full of staggeringly similar themes and echoes emerges, making us wonder how on earth we missed the commonalities and resonances before.

In an academic sense, we might start by seeing both Nevelson and Siskind as outsiders to the mainstream tug of 1940s/1950s Abstract Expressionist painting. Even if their work had clear affinities for that flow of ideas, they were working in alternate mediums that had their own specific constraints and opportunities, and as a result, they could never be more than tangential players to the core of the coalescing movement. But what is strikingly apparent here is that at much the same artistic moment, both Nevelson and Siskind were building their abstractions not from swooping human gestures like the painters but from the complex spatial combinations of found objects. Nevelson was gathering up leftover wood blocks, railings, and plywood scraps and combining them into intricately balanced textural forms, while Siskind was using his camera to isolate and flatten seemingly random objects into tightly controlled formal compositions. Seen together, the two look like they were starting from radically different places, but heading for the same ultimate goal.

The pairings of Siskind and Nevelson works in this show are so perfect that they seem almost impossibly exact. Siskind’s arcs of weathered driftwood in the sand echo the sweeping form of a stylized Nevelson bird, while Nevelson’s articulated pile of faceted stones mirrors the grid of interlocking lines found in Siskind’s Cuzco walls. Both artists had a strong sense for the power of negative space, seen in the vertical lines and arcs in Nevelson’s Standing Figure and Siskind’s broken window, and in the pairing of Siskind’s sideways black and white letters and Nevelson’s landscape of black blocks and curves and the empty white space peeking through. And the gestural affinities between the two come together in images of delicate seaweed and looped dock ropes from Siskind and a sinuously swirling composition of arced chair backs from Nevelson. Again and again, the juxtapositions seem almost too good to be true; even the dark spot of Siskind’s famous Gloucester 16A abstraction has a direct analogue in Nevelson’s plywood relief, her circular dot in almost exactly the same location as his.

But while all this visual matching certainly makes the connection between the two artists easy to grasp, I was most struck by a humble pairing in the back room. It brings together one of the most quiet and pared down Nevelsons I have ever seen (basically a small rectangular box with a handful of plywood geometries held inside) and a simple flattened view of notched plywood and other loose boards on the Gloucester dock made by Siskind. Neither work will make anyone’s greatest hits list for either artist, and in all likelihood, both works have largely been forgotten I would guess. But hung together, they both sing with elegance of proportion, unpretentiously triumphant in celebrating the simplicity of a vertical line balanced by angles in relief. It’s abstraction at its most modest and restrained, and the parallels in thinking between the two are astonishing.

Part of the reason I think this show is worth praising is that it takes a risk with its topic (pairing two well known artists heretofore largely unconnected) and then delivers a compelling argument for reevaluating our previous understanding of their work. It offers the kind of unexpected ideas that wake us up and keep us thinking, bringing freshness to material that we all assumed was fully analyzed. The Nevelson-Siskind pairing is an inspired one and I came away from this excellent show energized by the thought that with the application of some curatorial creativity and hard work, there are still plenty of new ways to reconstruct the history of art.

Collector’s POV: The Siskind photographs in this show are generally priced between $7500 and $45000 each, with the set of 25 images sold together for $100000; I did not inquire about specific prices for the Nevelson sculptures. Siskind’s prints (both vintage and later) are regularly available in the secondary markets, with recent prices ranging from $1000 to $73000; later prints are generally under $10000 and vintage prints are up from there.