Louise Nevelson’s early artistic training included study in the performing as well as visual arts. During her residency at FWM, Nevelson turned her attention to the design of opera costumes, a project commissioned by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis for the 1984 production of Orfeo ed Euridice. Nevelson’s commission also involved the creation of the set design, and marked her first time designing for the stage. She described the set in 1984:
The columns are independent, symbols of male and female, one different from the other. They will be onstage the whole time and the dancing will be around them. We are bordering on surrealism with some of this; instead of Orfeo holding a lyre symbolically I decided we’d just have a thin wire and fly it. It’s not played—nothing touches it.
To create the edition of forty costumes, Nevelson utilized the silkscreen printing process, drawing on motifs from earlier prints and drawings. The background is printed with marbled grey tones—randomized so that no two costumes are alike— with abstracted black patterning on top. The costumes are bold and sculptural in their form, and graphically draw on the same muted tones and dark color that define her well-known three-dimensional work. The element of shadow, which Nevelson called the “fourth-dimension,” is clear in the patterning of the costumes.
