Word: bontecou
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...might be tempted to describe Lee Bontecou as elfin. There's no denying that she's small and lean. And when she tilts forward to tell you, "I'm shy," you can take it to the bank. At 72 she has the same Dutch-boy haircut that she had four decades ago, when she was dynamiting a place for herself in the New York art world. Back then she must have reminded people of the writer Carson McCullers, who would have seemed pixieish only until you read...
...same with Bontecou, who produced some of the gravest, most tough-minded and even belligerent art of the 1960s. Three-dimensional wall pieces, they were constructed by attaching strips of rough canvas to welded metal frameworks, using bristling threads of thin wire. Always featuring one or more mute, sinister holes, the wall pieces conflated all kinds of mysteries and anxieties--about the human body, the primal instincts, the state of the world, the universe itself--into enigmas that shoot forward like field cannons. You don't just stand in front of something like Untitled from 1966. You bob and weave...
...1960s, Bontecou was a well-established name. Not a household word like Warhol but an artist who exhibited constantly in the U.S. and Europe. In the stable of dealer Leo Castelli, the ultimate launching pad for up-to-the-minute talent, she was also the only woman. LIFE, Cosmopolitan and Vogue put her in their pages, where they tended to treat her as the mouse that roared...
...Bontecou show that opened last week at the UCLA Hammer Museum is not just a retrospective; it's a rescue mission. A cross-country one too--in February it moves to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and then, remarkably, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a place that rarely accepts exhibitions from outside but plainly wanted this one. Organized by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, chief curator at the Chicago M.C.A., with Ann Philbin, the director of UCLA Hammer, the show aims to restore Bontecou to the stature she walked away from. And it does. Starting...
...American artists. I, a former billboard painter, was one of them. Leo brought an Old World appreciation, but an understanding of the American spirit, to New York City and the world. In the late '50s and '60s, with his first wife, Ileana Sonnabend, he discovered Rauschenberg, Johns, Stella, Lichtenstein, Bontecou and others. I had joined Bellamy's Green Gallery, but Leo brought visitors to my loft, including the famous collector Count Panza di Biumo. In 1964 I joined the Castelli Gallery and had my first show with Leo in 1965, with my 86-ft. painting F-111. Leo placed young...