A photograph of the sculptor Louise Nevelson (1900–88), taken by Richard Avedon in 1975, gives us a key to how the artist approached her own work. Dressed entirely in black, like the queen of the dark arts, she is head-on, severe, and over-the-top. Think of a cross between Phyllis Diller and Vampira. Her face and hands are stark white, her mouth is tightly closed, and large fake lashes feather her eyes. As with her signature, all-black, collaged wooden sculptures — which often begin as empty boxes and are built up to mural scale through a process of addition and expansion — she has adorned her body like an altar or a totem. Clutching numerous strings of heavy necklaces close to her body, in a manner that is both proud and protective, it looks as if Nevelson is simultaneously covering herself and thumping her chest.

This peculiar combination of the mysterious and the flamboyant is evident in the survey of Nevelson’s work that opens Saturday at the Jewish Museum. Comprising 60 sculptures and works on paper made between 1928 and 1988, “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend” includes two large installations, the all-black house “Mrs. N’s Palace” (1964–77), and the allwhite “Dawn’s Wedding Feast” (1959), as well as early self-portraits and muralsize bas-relief sculptures such as “Sky Cathedral Presence” (1951–64) and “Homage to 6,000,000 I” (1964). “Dawn’s Wedding Feast,” though not completely intact, has been culled together from 12 collections, and is reassembled as closely as possible to how the artist first exhibited it at MoMA in the 1959 landmark show “Sixteen Americans.”

Organized by guest-curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the exhibit is the first American survey of Nevelson’s work since 1980. If you have only seen her sculptures piecemeal, as I had, the show is a wonderful introduction to the artist. It is rich with the signature sculptures, yet it includes a sampling of work from all periods, including the early pieces inspired by Moore, Noguchi, Brancusi, and Surrealist-period Calder and Giacometti, from the 1940s and 1950s; gold-painted sculptures and Minimalist works in Plexiglas, from the 1960s, and the gorgeous cast-paper reliefs from the 1970s, some of which glisten like morning light on hard snow.

A little overstuffed, however, it also strains the galleries of the Jewish Museum, which at times can tend to constrict the sculptures. A number of them, even though they were designed to be seen in the round, hug the walls like the relief sculpture.

Nevelson, who worked mainly with found objects — collaged fragments of furniture and architecture and organically shaped pieces of wood, all placed in stacked boxes — can be repetitive, and a little Nevelson can go a long way. Because she painted most of the sculptures either all flat-black, all white, or all gold, the no-color color can unify and mute the works simultaneously. The color, especially black, can lend mysteriousness to the best sculptures, and can help them to come across as single organisms. At times, though, her black can swallow too much light, creating surfaces, nooks, and crannies that, too hidden and recessive, keep falling in on themselves.

Although there are exceptions, Nevelson’s sculptures, a seemingly infinite and obsessive accumulation of nearly equal, small moves, can be frenetic. Even though they are structured in grids, they often lack the necessary larger moves — a melodic line — that would tie the smaller incidents together. Rather than rhythmically exploring the grid, she turns it into a mere stage (not unlike her boxes) to hold her collections of things. Much like a Jackson Pollock can tend to exercise a full-frontal assault on the senses, her mural-scale works need room to breathe.

The Jewish Museum show is commendable for its variety, but it is impossible to get the required distance away from the biggest sculptures. Sometimes, Nevelson’s works feel as if they are unable to be contained — as if, an endless series of fragments, they did not know when to stop expanding — and the installation at the Jewish Museum tends to accentuate the sculptures’ sense of sprawl.

In her best works, such as “Three Night Figures” (1960), in which concavities, shadows, objects, verticals, and curves have a playful give-and-take, Nevelson’s forms do not feel like things placed in boxes. Rather, she is able to vary the scale and rhythm and to create music and, through the transformation of her found objects, metaphor and surprise — as she does with four upside-down table legs and an oval in “Night Presence VI” (1955). Placed on a board, the five forms read like a family of aquatic birds.

Occasionally, everything comes together. In “Mirror-Shadow VII” (1988), a large circle sits precariously over a chair back, which has been shoved into the side of a larger rectangle. The chair fragment, which feels suspended, is missing spindles, which gives it both a sad and comical air; slats of wood bow forward from the sculpture. The work has the abruptness of a crushed car and the impact of a collision, yet it also feels as if it were expanding and contracting simultaneously.

The white “Model for the White Flame of the Six Million” (1970), a maquette for the mural-size ark with Torah scrolls at the Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, N.Y., is made up of Arp-inspired, overlapping, abstract, figural forms. Held to the grid, they are stacked in four rows, yet they appear to move vertically, not just horizontally. Beautifully suggestive of people, vases, scrolls, air, water, and plant life, the forms read individually and as generational growth. Here, Nevelson is thinking not only outside but beyond the box.

Saturday through September 16 (1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, 212-423-3232).