Nevelson’s works come in all sizes; they range from objects a few inches tall to Mrs. N’s Palace (1964-77), which is the size of a small house. Although you can’t walk through the front door and step onto the installation’s black-mirrored floor, it’s tempting to do so. This is because everything in the work is human in scale. Not only that, but the components’ familiarity—as fragments of furniture, banisters, tools, machines, musical instruments, or simply wooden boxes—renders them immediately graspable, both physically and intellectually. We know that they are real. We know what they feel like. We know that they have the same substance as we do.

If the details of the Serras don’t give us enough to latch on to, and those of the Stellas betray their artifice, the details of the Nevelsons engage us. This is why they provided her with such a fertile and flexible language, and why she was able to make big sculptures that became neither territorial, like Serra’s, nor trite, like Stella’s.

As sculptures increase in size, their relationship to the human scale becomes more and more important to their achievement. Serra succeeded by one route, which involved erasing human-scale incident so that his sculptures overwhelm their spectators and vie for the space that they occupy. Nevelson succeeded by another, building larger and larger pieces from found components that were, by their nature, human in scale. Stella, one senses, aspires to both Serra’s bravura and to Nevelson’s inherent interest in the human scale. But because his monumental sculptures are cobbled together from a series of all-too-obviously human-scale efforts, they are undone by their relationship with the human scale, rather than resolving it.

 

“Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years” is at the Museum of Modern Art from June 3-Sept. 10. “Frank Stella on the Roof” and “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture“ are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Oct. 28 and July 29. “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” is at the Jewish Museum through Sept. 16.