Louise Nevelson, who died in 1988, was famous during her lifetime — known for her flamboyant personality and eccentric dress as well as for her sculpture, which was also outsized and dramatic. The art world's difficulty in separating the work from the public persona may explain why the current exhibit at The Jewish Museum in New York is the first major American survey of her work since 1980.

Guiding a visitor through the galleries, native New Jerseyan Brooke Kamin Rapaport, guest curator for "The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend," told NJ Jewish News about the artist and how the exhibit evolved.

"This is vanguard sculpture," she said, gesturing toward the exhibit ahead. "Nevelson was an early celebrity artist — often in ethnographic garb, fanciful headgear, massive neckwear, and an imposing set of multilayered false eyelashes." Here, Rapaport said, as curator she had "an opportunity to separate an enormous persona from the work."

Rapaport, who was on the staff at the Whitney Museum of American Art and an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum, has been an independent curator since 2000. "I brought the idea [of a Nevelson exhibit] to the Jewish Museum," she said. "I knew her work. I had included her in a show I did at the Brooklyn Museum — "Art of the 1940s" — and I contributed an article on her to Sculpture Magazine. I kept wondering, ‘Where were the works from Louise Nevelson?' I did research. I knew there was a new generation of young artists who looked to her for inspiration. I knew it was time."

As curator, she was responsible for the extensive research required to mount an exhibit of this size: She investigated the artist's life and work, chose and located the whereabouts of each piece to be displayed, made arrangements to borrow work from individuals and institutions, and edited the 256-page book published by the museum in conjunction with the exhibit. She also selected the exhibit designers, in this case two architects, an appropriate choice for sculpture with its own distinctive architectural scale.

Standing in the entrance lobby, Rapaport pointed out an important decision she and the designers made. After entering — even before reaching the admissions desk or the security checkpoint — visitors can see a dramatic room-sized installation through a large glass pane cut into a wall especially for this exhibit, a metaphorical window into Dawn's Wedding Feast: a monumental, chalky white structure made up of wooden pieces linked together to form geometric shapes — massive and complex. The assemblage creates recessed spaces and imposing columns and serves as an inventive introduction to the artist's work.

Dawn, last seen in an important Museum of Modern Art exhibit in 1959 and scattered thereafter, was reassembled for this show. Rapaport pointed out the personal references — the allusion to Nevelson's own failed marriage, the central columns called "bride" and "groom," a chapel and wedding "guests." Like so much of Nevelson's sculpture, Dawn "melds abstraction with personal allusions," Rapaport said.

Those links between Nevelson's art and life are explored on the audio tour, which tells the story of Louise Nevelson, born Leah Berliawsky, who arrived in the United States in 1905 at the age of six from Ukraine, driven by "her parents' fierce will to escape religious persecution." The family settled in Rockland, Me., where the absence of other Jews intensified Nevelson's sense of "otherness." She married a Jewish businessman, but left him and her 13-year-old son during the Depression to study art abroad; the Nevelsons were divorced in 1941.

Perhaps her decision to use found objects — pieces of wood, furniture fragments, street detritus, crates — was inspired by memories of her father's lumberyard. Or, perhaps the choice was motivated by aesthetics or expediency. As Rapaport explained, "During World War II she foraged in the streets of New York. The male sculptors were working in metal but this reminded her of war materiel. And, of course, she lacked the money" to pay for metal.

Rapaport said she was thrilled to reassemble. "This is profoundly important 20th-century sculpture. Her work achieved industrial scale, usually a male province. It's important to highlight her work in the context of women's work.

"But," she added, "when I was planning the exhibit, I didn't think of it as feminist. The most important thing about Louise Nevelson's work is the power of her sculpture. I didn't want it to be labeled."

Approaching Homage to 6,000,000 I, on loan from the Osaka City Museum in Japan (another sculpture with this title is owned by The Israel Museum in Jerusalem), Rapaport said, "By 1964, she had become famous, well-recognized, and she moved beyond self-portrait. She could look into the larger culture for subject matter." Grim and austere, Homage consists of "60 boxes, wooden crates — the factories" of Nazi Germany, Rapaport said, "spools of thread — Jewish labor," matte-black spray paint coating everything, compressing the shapes and blocking out even the possibility of light.

Another Nevelson sculpture, the 55-foot White Flame of the Six Million, was commissioned by Temple Beth El in Great Neck, NY, in 1970; it includes an ark for the Torah and an eternal light, all painted white, and evokes flames and twisted bodies.

Rapaport, who grew up in Fair Haven, attended religious school at Congregation B'nai Israel in Rumson, where her parents still belong. She graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts and received her master's degree from Rutgers University. During high school and college, she had internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an apprenticeship at Christie's auction house in Manhattan. "I knew I wanted to work in museums," she said.

Rapaport chose an interesting title for this exhibit, the highlight — so far — of her museum career. She might easily have called it "Deconstructing a Legend," for what she has done is examine the strands that made up the woman and the artist, pay tribute to the persona, and, as she writes in her book, "provide an opportunity to reassess and confirm Louise Nevelson's lifelong achievement."