Lot 1
  • 1

Lee Bontecou

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Description

  • Lee Bontecou
  • Untitled
  • welded steel, canvas, fabric and copper wire
  • 38 1/2 by 30 3/4 by 10 in.
  • 97.8 by 78.2 by 25.4 cm.
  • Executed in 1959-1960.

Provenance

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in November 1960

Exhibited

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Lee Bontecou, 1960
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Americans 1963, May – August 1963, p. 15, illustrated
New York, New School Art Center, Sculpture from the Albert A. List Family Collection, October – November 1965, cat. no. 13
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Seven Decades, 1895 – 1965: Crosscurrents in American Art, April – May 1966, cat. no. 344, p. 177, illustrated
Leverkusen, Städtisches Museum Leverkusen; Schloss Morsbroich; Berlin, Kunstverein, Haus am Waldsee, Lee Bontecou, March – July 1968, cat. no. 4, illustrated
Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Governor’s Arts Awards, June – July 1970, cat. no. 1
Ridgefield, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall 1977: Contemporary Collectors, September – December 1977, illustrated
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Lee Bontecou, October – November 1999

 

Catalogue Note

Lee Bontecou is one of the most enigmatic American artists of the 1960s, who created a strikingly original body of work that won critical acclaim, only to disappear from view in the midst of a recognized career. The only female artist to be part of Leo Castelli’s gallery, which included Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist, Bontecou had her first one-person exhibition there in 1960. Represented in several exhibitions including the influential The Art of Assemblage in 1961 and Americans 1963 both at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a 1972 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, she voluntarily withdrew from the New York art scene in the early 1970s.

Admired by her peers, Bontecou was profoundly influential and inspirational for other female artists such as Eva Hesse (who wrote in her diary "I am amazed at what that woman can do… The complexity of her structures, what is involved, absolutely floored me") and later Kiki Smith.

Her unique artistic vocabulary embraces both large and small-scale sculptures and drawings in different media. The works that brought her early critical attention though, are her wall reliefs, created between 1959 and 1967. Neither paintings nor sculptures, these works are the result of the artist’s pioneering technique of stretching the canvas over welded metal armatures, often piercing it with what became her trademark: gaping holes. These openings have been understood (or misunderstood) as machines, kayaks, godesses and female organs.

The importance of Bontecou’s wall reliefs cannot be overemphasized. While challenging the conventions of both materials and presentation in their use of industrial material like screens, pipe and burlap, they bring sculpture and painting together. Bontecou creates an original formal vocabulary of interconnection and mutability between abstract shapes and forms found in nature.