USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

USA: Louise Nevelson's The White Flame of the Six Million at Temple Beth El, Great Neck
by Samuel D. Gruber

Last October I gave a lecture at Temple Isaiah in Great Neck, New York, and  used the occasion to revisit Great Neck's Temple Beth El, which I had not seen since publishing my American Synagogues book in 2003. At that time I was more interested in the architecture of the 1970 building designed by Armand Bartos & Associates, than the rich collection of Jewish art and memorials which adorn the many spaces of the synagogue, including the 1930s Tudor-style prayer hall with an ark with artwork by Ilya Schor, a small gallery space, hallways, vestibules, and the very large 2-story 1970 sanctuary.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary 1930s, now chapel. Ark doors by Ilya Schor. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 205.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Architectural Record Religious Buildings (1979).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. Sanctuary, Armand Bartos & Associates, architects, 1970. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

On this visit, guided by Temple Executive Director Stuart Botwinick and congregant and good friend Rebecca Anderson Wotman, we looked at the art more closely, and especially the great wood work by the late Louise Nevelson titled The White Flame of the Six Million which spreads across the back of the sanctuary bimah. The work turns 50 this year. It was commissioned as a Holocaust Memorial and as the Torah Ark of the synagogue, a rare combination, and should be better known as an early example of synagogal Holocaust commemorative art.

Naming a work gives it meaning. Without its title and the ceremonies which consequently acknowledge the name, this work might "just" be considered an abstract artwork, or a decorative screen creating focus in the otherwise austere sanctuary space. But by naming the "White Flame," the work now hovers on the boundary of abstraction (familiar from many Holocaust memorials) and symbolic form.

While Nevelson, through the 1950s and 1960s, had been creating larger and larger sculptural works and especially developing her signature approach to constructing wooden walls, such works were made as purely expressive exercises. Some had fanciful titles, but she never attempted to load them with overt meaning. Only a few other works, including two referencing the Holocaust, carried any level of specificity. 

The first, titled Homage to Six Million I, was made in 1964, and consists of two attached curved walls, each comprised of a grid of boxes in which no two boxes and their contents are alike. Though all painted black, they are seen to represent that the "6,000,000" are a collective - but a collective of individuals. A second version, Homage to 6,000,000 II, was also made in 1964. Also of black-painted wood boxes, this is arranged more like a stepped pyramid, and all the box compartments are of different sizes.

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson. Homage to 6,000,000 (1964). Formerly Collection Brown University, Providence Rhode Island, now Osaka City Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Louise Nevelson, homage to 6,000,000 II, 1964. The Israel Musuem. Photo: The Israel Museum in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 23.

Martin Friedman, writing in Nevelson Wood Sculptures, a catalog of a Nevelson sculpture exhibit in 1973 organized by the Walker:

Nevelson's sculpture is about the revelation of daily existence. She is not a literary or historically minded person, nor is she interested in creating descriptive or symbolic forms. Her work is a distillation of impressions and experiences of life and embodies the forms and energies that surround us. In her art, these qualities are translated to an abstract level, with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share.

Friedman's words "with occasional clues in the form of recognizable objects, to a reality we all share" might apply to The White Flame of the Six Million, because in the work the cut wood pieces are assembled in patterns that do recall flames. This work is something of a transition for Nevelson in that it does not use found pieces of wood but instead is entirely constructed of newly shaped and sawn pieces (much like Matisse’s paper cut collages). But the wall is not solid, it is pierced to give alternating strips of solid and void; of white paint and dark shadow. It can look like flickering flames, and both the white silhouettes and shapes of the shadowy voids can appear wraith-like, as if wispy ghosts of the crematoria-burned dead are still present as wisps of spirit in supplication; shadow figures seeking prayers and remembrance, demonstrating their past European lives to the still-present and prosperous American congregation.

Louise Nevelson, The White Flame of the Six Million. Model, 22.5 x 74 inches, 1970. Private Collection. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson, in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), 152.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Rome, Italy. Villa Torlonia Catacomb. Wall painting in cubiculum. The flames here might refer to eternal life after death. Photo: ISJM.

Yehuda Bacon. In Memory of the Czech Transport to the Gas Chambers. 1945. Charcoal on paper. Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection, Jerusalem.Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

David Olere, Extermination of the Jewish People, 1946. Ghetto Fighters House, Israel. Photo: http://fcit.usf.edu/Holocaust/gallery2/D96.htm.

The reality of flames is part of the horror of the Holocaust, as we know that so many people, and so many synagogues and holy objects were burned to nothing. The immediacy of fire has appealed to artists grappling with how to represent Holocaust suffering and destruction. And artists have also looked to fire's smoke. The extinguished flame is a sign of final death, but also one might find something of the face and spirit of the dead in the smoke, as did the very young Yehuda Bacon, in his portrait remembrance of his father, whose face he drew rising above the crematorium.

Showing the flame, too, can represent hope. In Jewish tradition from the funerary art of the Roman catacombs to graphic art of the pogrom-plagued Pale of Settlement, the light of the Temple menorah and sabbath candles has been used to suggest the constancy of the Jewish people, their resilience and revival, and God's covenant.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson, Torah mantles designed by Ina Golub. Photo:Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Architecturally, Nevelson's memorial works as a bimah backdrop and wide screen that enlivens the wide otherwise blank wall. The middle section, not quite centered, bulges out with accent, and this is the functional Holy Ark, the repository of the Torah scrolls. The brightly colored mantles designed by Ina Golub are the only accent of color in the otherwise understated sanctuary. I don't know if Golub's colors were anticipated by either architect Bartos or sculptor Nevelson, or whether they were added to the sanctuary as an antidote of color.

There are many examples of such screens in mid-century modern synagogues, such as in the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948), designed by Percival Goodman; the Park Synagogue in Cleveland (1953) designed by Erich Mendelsohn; Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel in Port Chester, New York (1956), designed by Philip Johnson, where sculptor Ibram Lassaw created a wire sculpture screen that is now owned by the Jewish Museum in New York;  Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Seattle (1960), designed by Detlie and Peck with B. Marcus Pritica; Temple Oheb shalom in Baltimore, Maryland (1960), designed by Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt; and the chapel at Temple B'rith Kodesh in Rochester, New York (1962), designed by Pietro Belluschi with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski.

Port Chester, NY, Congregation Kneses Tifereth Israel, Philip Johnson, architect, 1956. Photo:

Kampf, Contemporary Synagogue Art: Developments in the United States, 1945-1965.  (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966),195.

Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore Hebrew Congregation (1948-1953).

Cleveland, Ohio. Park Synagogue. Eric Mendelsohn, arch., 1948-1953. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Seattle, Washington. Temple De Hirsch Sinai, 16th Avenue and Pike Street. Detlie and Peck, architects; B. Marcus Pritica, consulting architect, 1960. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

Baltimore, Maryland. Temple Oheb Shalom. Walter Gropius and Sheldon Leavitt, architects, 1960. Photo: Paul Rocheleau, 2002.

Rochester, New York. Temple Brith Kodesh, chapel. Pietro Belluschi, architect with a bimah/ark by Richard Filipowski, 1962.

In 1970 Louise Nevelson was recognized as one of the greatest living American artists, and her work in wood and metal influenced and dominated contemporary trends in sculpture. Her work developed out of surrealism and abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s, but was able to respond and adapt to - as well as push and shape - developments in 1950s and 1960s including pattern and abstract design and the rise of minimalism and installation art.

Nevelson was born in Ukraine and came to America as a small child, settling with her family in Rockland, Maine. Throughout her life she constructed her autobiography in similar ways to her sculpture, by compartmentalizing, rearranging and obscuring the main narrative, and building structure from scavenged and modeled pieces arranged, attached, and repeated in accordance to her particular aesthetic. All these details were first painted black, and then sometime beginning in the early 1960s she also made works in white - white-washed if you will. For Nevelson, truth was found not in precise facts, but in the real or fictive arrangement of fragments to create an experience or tell a story.

Thus, knowing her early life, and discerning any role of Judaism and impact of being Jewish on her art is hard to discern. But biographers Michael Stanislawski, Laurie Wilson, and others make it clear that the impact of her outsider immigrant-foreigner status in Rockland status and the widespread and persistent antisemitism in early-20th century Maine was strong. In 1925, just four years after Louis Berliawsky, soon-to-be Nevelson left, the Ku Klux Klan had over 150,000 members in Maine. That was, according to Laurie Wilson, more than in any other state at the time. The KKK in Maine was there to protect the white Protestant make-up of the state against foreigners - especially Catholics and Jews. The rise of the KKK in the Jim Crow South was paralleled by its rise in the anti-immigrant Northeast and Midwest. Publicly, Nevelson spoke of the more positive influences of Rockland and Maine - timber, ship building and ornate wooden houses with stick style porches and rooftop captain's walk.

Throughout Nevelson's long career her work was uniquely recognizable as hers, and hers alone. Yet decade by decade Nevelson kept pushing boundaries and creating new types, forms, and audience relations for her work. In the 1960s her work became increasingly monumental, first as fragments, then as walls, and then entire environments. She began to be commissioned to create pubic art. Her large wall sculpture for Temple Beth El is a good and early example, but there were others that were made with Jewish content or for Jewish context.

Louise Nevelson. New Continent, 1962. St. Louis Art Museum.
Photo: Nevelson Wood Sculptures (1973).

Great Neck, NY. Temple Beth El. The White Flame of the Six Million by Louise Nevelson. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.

Three years after her work in Great Neck, Nevelson created a twenty-foot-high and-wide Cor-ten steel sculpture installed in 1973 outside Boston's Temple Israel, which was expanded by The Architects Collaborative, with which the idea of the Nevelson installation apparently originated. The AC thought the Nevelson piece would "establish an appropri­ate frame for the formal approach to the Temple and a counterbalance to the strength of the existing portico.”

The work, titled Sky Covenant, with its grid of twenty-five boxes more closely resembles some of Nevelson's black-painted wooden walls of the 1960s than the Temple Beth El memorial. It is very much part of a metal sculpture series Atmosphere and Environment which she was making in the early 1970s. But like the painted wood Beth El memorial wall, these work are transparent; there are spaces that allow the eye and hand to penetrate the grid. In this, Sky Covenant is as much a screen as a wall. It was described by Temple Israel's Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn as symbolic of the universe - perhaps a bit of rabbinic hyperbole - and there is no indication one way or the other that this interpretation or intent was Nevelson's.

Louise Nevelson. Big Black, 1963. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.

Boston, Massachusetts. Temple Israel. Sky Covenent by Louis Nevelson, 1973. Photo: Temple Israel in Rapaport, ed. The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (Jewish Museum, 2007), p. 61.

Today, the sanctuary of Beth El in Great Neck is not used every week - the congregation prefers the smaller 1932 chapel, with its wood ceiling and stained glass windows. But the 1970 sanctuary is used on major holidays, for important life cycle events, and for concerts and memorial services. The Nevelson sculpture is still an important part of this space but it may be that after fifty years it is often taken for granted. Now, as it celebrates its Golden Anniversary, it seems worth taking another look. How does abstraction lead to reaction? Can form lead to contemplation or serve as mediation to meditation? Or are sensibilities in the 21st century too demanding, requiring action over abstraction; distraction over contemplation?