Lee Bontecou is an American artist who was born 15 January 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955 where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957-1958 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1959. From the 1970s until 1991 she taught at Brooklyn College.
She challenged artistic conventions of both materials and presentation by creating sculpture that hung on the wall like a painting. She used industrial and found materials including screen, pipe, burlap, canvas and wire. Her best constructions are at once mechanistic and organic, abstract but evocative of the brutality of war.
She is best known for the constructions she created in the 1960s, which art critic Arthur Danto describes as "fierce", reminiscent of 17th-century scientist Robert Hooke's Micrographia, lying "at the intersection of magnified insects, battle masks, and armored chariots...”.[1] She exhibited at Leo Castelli's art gallery in the 1960s, and one of the largest known examples of her work is located in the lobby of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She retired from the art world to Orbisonia, Pennsylvania.[1] After decades of obscurity, she was brought back to public attention by a 2003 retrospective coorganized by the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, that traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2004. The retrospective included both work from her public, art-world career and an extensive display of work done after retreating from the public view.[1] Bontecou's work was also included in Carnegie Museum of Art Carnegie International 2004-5 exhibit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), David H. Koch Theater and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) are among the public collections holding major works by Lee Bontecou.
A picture of Lee working in her studio, taken by Italian photographer Ugo Mulas in 1963, was used as the cover art for Spoon's 2007 album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The apparently completed sculpture on the right is now in the collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (see Gallery below).
References
Bibliography
- Applin, Jo (June 2006) "This threatening and possibly functioning object: Lee Bontecou and the Sculptural Void", Art History 29:3, pp. 476-503
- Danto, Arthur (2004) "A Tribe Called Quest", The Nation, September 27, 2004, p.40-43
- Dreishpoon, Douglas (1996) "From a curator's point of view: making selections and forging connections: Lee Bontecou, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson / Douglas Dreishpoon", Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
- Molesworth, Helen Anne (2005) "Part Object Part Sculpture", Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University
- Smith, Elizabeth A.T.; Ann Philbin (2003). Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective. Dona De Salvo, Mona Hadler, Donald Judd, Robert Storr. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago with Harry N. Abrams Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-4618-1.
External links
Gallery
Untitled 1960 welded steel, canvas and wire artwork by Lee Bontecou, 43 x 51 in.
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Untitled 1997 graphite on paper drawing by Lee Bontecou, 22.5 x 30 in.
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'Sixth Stone I', color lithograph on paper by Lee Bontecou, 1964
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Lee Bontecou in her New York studio, 1963, photo by Ugo Mulas
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