Lee Bontecou: An Artist Lost and Found

In the 1960s Lee Bontecou was one of the brightest stars of the American art world. Her assemblages-- reliefs constructed of canvas and various other materials stretched over welded steel frames and held together with wire--brought a new vitality to American sculpture. Her usage of everyday materials and resources that otherwise would have been considered junk shared a sensibility with the contemporary Italian movement known as arte povera ("poor art"), but the roughness and brutality of her somber forms and colors seemed rooted in the aggressive power and confidence of American abstract expressionism. In the years since, Bontecou has followed a course very different from that of the typical artist, and therefore her first major retrospective exhibition (Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective), which opened in October 2003 at the University of California's Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was entirely different in nature from the usual retrospective.

After 1971 Bontecou ceased showing new work, and, although her sculptures of the 1960s continued to be widely respected, she all but disappeared as a vital presence in the contemporary art world. Her withdrawal, in fact, became something of a modern legend. Why would an artist of such extraordinary talent, at the peak of her career, leave it all behind? More puzzling still was the widely held assumption that she had quit working altogether. Had she lost her inspiration? Or had the most prominent female artist to have created work that could compete on equal terms with that of the leading male artists of her generation simply retreated into motherhood and a quiet family life?

The Hammer exhibition, along with Bontecou's sudden willingness to speak with a few curators and journalists, finally provided some insight into some of these questions. Examining the statements the artist has made, there appears to be no simple answer as to why she kept such a low profile for so long. Never one to socialize heavily with other artists, Bontecou had little interest in the goings on of the art world even in the 1960s, and the endemic competitiveness and quest for fame and fortune were simply not among her priorities. Moreover, she felt no affinity with either pop art or minimalism, the movements dominating American art in her heyday. There is no clearer expression of her withdrawal than what the artist herself told Calvin Tomkins, a columnist for The New Yorker, in 2003: "I needed a rest. I wanted to explore and expand. I just didn't want to have to make things, and finish things, and show them every two years."

Although Bontecou may have turned her back on the art world, we now know that she most decidedly did not turn her back on art itself. For 20 years, from 1971 until 1991, she taught in the art department at Brooklyn College, practically in the backyard of the New York City gallery scene. This revelation seems to have caught most of the art world totally by surprise. Most important, she has worked continuously on her drawings and sculptures and is still active today. Her isolation, and the self-imposed lack of pressure to exhibit, apparently freed her to develop her work in her own way, under her own rules, to suit herself alone.

As the word retrospective implies, it is a chance to "look back" over the artist's career, and in general parlance it has come to mean a chance to look back over and reevaluate that with which we are already somewhat familiar. Lee Bontecou's retrospective, in contrast, gave the world its very first glimpse of the work of 30 years. Rather than offering the opportunity to review her oeuvre, this exhibition gave us the rare chance to discover it whole. After a long gestation period in near total isolation, we were suddenly allowed to absorb a large body of work in its entirety, all at once.

And what exactly has this extraordinary artist been doing for over 30 years? Bontecou still produces both drawings and sculptures, and, as before, the sculptures develop separately from the drawings. (Now some of the sculptures are suspended from the ceiling rather than projecting from the walls.) The anthropomorphic forms, which began appearing in her work in the late 1960s, are still there; but in contrast to the flowers and fish of the earlier work, they appear now, as often as not, in the form of floating eyeballs or winglike shapes. The new sculptures are still obsessive in their detail, yet their elements are lighter, more colorful, and certainly less menacing than the gaping black voids that characterized her early reliefs. Bontecou does not insist on a dogmatic interpretation of any of her work; she leaves the viewer to take from it what he or she finds there, with little overt guidance.