Circa 1970s | Glass, metal

Leonard Nelson was a quiet force in the evolution of 20th-century American art. The figurative studies he produced in New York City in the 1940s helped shape Abstract Expressionism alongside Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko. Nelson moved to Philadelphia in the 1950s. A new movement — the Philadelphia School — grew around him there, influenced by his innovative, luminous color-field canvases with their perceptual suggestions of landscape. This wall sculpture highlights Nelson’s decades-long explorations into the nature of color. Beautifully Brutalist with its tangled wires and sharp shards of glass, it grows organically upward in twists of blue, green, and yellow.