The *Discovery* of Lee Bontecou

I'm still in the depths of the Castelli book, but before I go into greater discussion of it, I thought you might be interested in a story about the "discovery" of Lee Bontecou. Bontecou showed her work at the Castelli Gallery for 11 years and was one of very few successful women artists in the 1960s. I wrote about her this past summer here and here. I had wondered how she ever cracked the wall of discrimination against women at that time, and in this book I found the answer.

Lee Bontecou in her Wooster Street studio early 1960s. She moved to this studio after being taken on by Castelli.

The Real Director
Ivan Karp was co-director of the Castelli Gallery from 1959 to 1969 (and subsequently founded O.K. Harris gallery in Soho in 1969). As described in the Castelli bio, Karp was brought in to run the gallery by Ileana and Michael Sonnabend because Castelli was such a poor businessman. (Note: Ileana was Castelli's first wife and long-time friend.)

Ivan Karp with Andy Warhol (also represented by Castelli)

Karp actually ran the gallery and describes himself as not having "an actual title. I was just there. I received the people. I was the cushion. I was able to deal with obnoxious characters.Sometimes Leo would hide in the corner of his office. People would come and see me first, and I would entertain them. There were collectors with questions, there were artists who would show me slides--and if the work was exceptional, I would show it to Leo. I did the preliminary job, I would filter the personalities, the characters. Leo would also come with me to see three or four studios on Saturday morning." (p. 259)
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Incredible Things
Ivan Karp was the person who brought Lee Bontecou to the Castelli Gallery. His description of seeing Bontecou's studio reminded me of Howard Carter opening Tutanhkamun's tomb:

"The gallerist Dick Bellamy told me he had visited a studio in the lower, really dark depths of the Lower East Side, Avenue B or C, which still retains that medieval cast about it. Dick said he had gone there to visit a girl in a loft on the top, and on the way down there was a door open to a studio. The building wasn't heated and everybody kept their doors open to get the heat from a laundry on the first floor. So Dick looked through and he saw these incredible tent-like apparatuses. And he said that if I should ever go to that building I should try to see these things." (p. 259)

One of Bontecou's early works that used canvas from the downstairs laundry (Image photographed from  "Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective" - link here)

Overwhelmed and Unsettled
"The first day I went it was in midwinter, very cold, and the building was violently vibrating from the laundry machinery. I knocked on the door of this studio and a very delicate little girl-like creature came to the door. I said to her: 'I'm looking for the artist who works in this studio, a certain Miss Bontecou, I believe it is. Is she at home? Is she your mother? And she said, 'No, no, I'm Miss Bontecou.' She looked to me like a fourteen-year-old girl, a very fragile creature, with a very delicate face and straight blond hair. I remember going in there and seeing these tent-like structures with their fierce aperatures, and in contrast to them this little girl. It was rather overwhelming. I was unsettled for a week by the confrontation of these objects and delicate, pale, little Miss Bontecour there." (p. 260)

Bontecou in her Wooster Street studio, 1962

A Logical Power About Them
Karp made another visit to Bontecou's studio soon afterwards accompanied by Castelli, and Ileana and Michael Sonnabend. The group didn't know what to make of the contrast between her soft-spoken manner and the "scary" work. Michael Sonnabend "felt very strongly about them. He said they had a kind of logical power that was really more than he had seen in years. Leo was very brave in inviting those works to come into the gallery. They really seemed terribly alien to anything we had ever seen."

Another studio shot from the early 1960s

My photo from the Lee Bontecou show at MoMA July 2010

Another untitled work from the MoMA show

Instant Success
When the first two pieces of Bontecou's works were delivered to the Castelli Gallery, there happened to be two museum officials present at the time. Karp says that he and Castelli were doubtful about how her work would look in "this fragile gallery space," but as soon as they were brought in, "they were really transformed in that setting. They were capable of being seen. They had their clarity and they had their object power. And within seven minutes of their being brought into the room, both works had been purchased by the two museum officials sitting there. We concluded the deal there, without even a show or any promotion!" (p. 261)

For Your Video Obsession
In my earlier blog posts (linked in the first paragraph) I recounted what happened to Bontecou's career when she changed styles and decided to leave the commercial art world. To supplement this post about Bontecou's early career, I just discovered a succinct, 5-minute YouTube video by Veronica Roberts, curator of "All Freedom In Every Sense," the small MoMA show of Bontecou's work this past summer.

Am I Over-Americanizing?

In posting my "little somethin-somethin'" about the new Leo Castelli book (Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli by Annie Cohen-Solal), I was probably my usual too-hasty self in judging the book's organization. I have to recall how condemnatory I was initially of the wonderful bio of Mark Rothko that I later came to love after spending so much time with it. I rarely think about cultural influences when making judgments that I later come to regret, but today in the NY Times I happened upon a link to a blog called "Bridgers" written by the author of Leo and His Circle, Annie Cohen-Solal.

Author photo of Annie Cohen-Solal from her blog (and the book cover)

Cohen-Solal was born in Algeria, is currently Professeur des Universités at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)-Paris and Research Fellow at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She first came to New York in 1989 as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States, after her Sartre biography, Sartre: A Life, had become an international best seller. She is a 2009 recipient of the Legion of Honor of the French Government. 

Not thinking about my cultural background is an American way of viewing the world, but since I am American, it is not something that strikes me as unusual. Cohen-Salal correctly infers that Americans think differently about this than Europeans, and she emphasizes that difference between the American and European worldviews in Leo and His Circle. She contends that history and cultural milieu are important to Europeans in a way that they are not to Americans. In fact, she believes that this difference is what set Leo Castelli apart from other gallerists of his time. She sees him as a "bridger" between Europe and America, who used his European contacts and worldview to see American art in a less parochial way and introduce it to the world stage. It is also why she organized his biography the way that she did by beginning with his family's cultural history - way, way back. Would an American do this? I doubt it, but here is what Cohen-Salal says about it in her blog:

...To write a long book (four to five years as a whole) is like entering a tunnel without knowing exactly how the text will be received on the other end....What I found so daunting in this project, and so different from the Sartre project, is that, first, Castelli launched most of his achievements through networking and that, second, I had to build the field almost from scratch. There is very little bibliography about the period, and I had to insert Castelli's trajectory both with the tools of the cultural historian and those of the sociologist, as well as keep the scope of the intercultural twist and of the "histoire de la longue durée", which, for some people in the US is somewhat problematic, especially in my decision to go back to Leo's Tuscan roots in the 16th and 17th centuries. Already, in 194", [a reference to a date in the 1940s that appeared incorrectly in her blog] Claude Lévi-Strauss who was teaching at the New School for Social Research, had noted the reluctance of some of his colleagues to deal with History the way we do in Europe. (from http://anniecohensolal.blogspot.com/)

Americans have been notoriously averse to the long view of history and their place in the world. Some would say this is the American way of life: why not a Kardashian reality show as the equivalent of a biographer's five years of effort in researching and writing the biography of a world-changing gallerist? As Americans, we want to cut to the chase, get to the meat of the matter and eliminate all the unnecessary details. In the European view, the long history of Leo Castelli's forebears was a vital part of Cohen-Solal's book, quoting from her blog:

The French reception of the Castelli book was certainly unexpected, especially because some had criticized him for destroying French art or for being a CIA spy or who knows what. But the articles emphasized his Italian ancestors, his Francophilia and even the wide press devoted pages and pages to the story of family in Tuscany. 

This quote refers also to Castelli's influence in moving the center of the art world from Paris to New York with his promotion of art stars such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. Americans think this was our due; the French rue this occurrence....."furthermore, as he had a sense of global culture, he overcame the insularity of American art and gave it a legitimacy that it did not have before; he inserted the career of his artists in the continuity of art history and of European art history ("The single artist I never showed but who was always mentioned was MarcelDuchamp", he said), giving it an intercultural scope."

Reading Cohen-Salal's blog has given me her perspective on the book's organization. I now understand why she felt it necessary to research and publish such detail about Castelli's family origins. However, as an American (who doesn't spend much time thinking of herself that way), as an artist and as someone who relishes history and biography, I stand by my initial reaction and still think that the publisher needs to alter at least the American edition of Cohen-Salal's book, not by eliminating the family history but by shifting it to a postscript. I would rather read more about the artists, artist-dealer relationships, how Ivan Karp came to be Castelli's righthand man and what his role was in the Castelli gallery, how the Castelli and Sonnabend Galleries interacted based on the former marriage of Leo and Ileana, and more art-related information such as that. While Tuscan history is interesting in a backgroundish way, it is Leo himself that I want to read about, not his great-great-grandfather, and I say that not in a dismissive or over-Americanizing way, but as someone who buys books about art and important figures in the world of art.

But perhaps Cohen-Salal may come to think about reorganizing the book this way. She concludes in her blog post:

...But there is so much more to it, and that will appear little by little, over the next months, over the course of the reading; I consider the book as an open product, whose text is not fully closed; the questions, the suggestions, the critics enrich it and I am, most of the time, grateful for the new insights that I am offered for the second edition.

Just a Little Somethin'-Somethin'

To avoid a total vegetarian boycott of my blog, I'm posting a little something so I can move on from that horrid image of the naked, partially pink turkey. Sorry to all those offended, but turkeys do happen.

Leo and Friends
Regular readers probably know that I'm very big on biographies. There's just something about reading the details of a person's life that really interests me. However, I seem to be having trouble reading these days. I stay on the computer much too late, and by the time I hit my bed, where I do most of my reading, I'm a goner. For the past two or three months I've been trying to get through a biography of Leo Castelli, gallerist and artist star maker.

Castelli by Andy Warhol

It's not all my fault that I've been falling asleep. The first part of the book goes on way too long about Leo's grandparents, parents, the political and social milieu of Trieste, where Leo was born, and, in fact, the larger persecution of Jews by the Nazis and the whole world situation prior to and during World War II.

Certainly a reader likes to have the scene set before the entrance of  the person being bio-ed, but a good editor might have put most of this section in the rear of the book as an addendum so that those who wished to know more about Leo's forebears would have it available to them. Anyway, I dealt with it over many nights when I drifted off with the book on my chest (or sometimes landing on the floor or my face - a good reason for only reading paperbacks although this is a hardbound). I refused to give up and finally got to the good parts.

Leo didn't open his gallery until he was 50 (or in his fifties, I can't quite remember), but anyway, it was later in life. Somehow he had inserted himself into the New York art life prior to that, hanging around the Cedar Tavern and even becoming one of the founding members of The Club with all the Ab-Exer boys. I'm not going to get into all the details now because I'm not finished with the book and pressed for time, but perhaps everyone has heard the story of how Leo "discovered" Jasper Johns through Robert Rauschenberg. This story has to be every artist's dream of instant success:  Leo seeing a Johns painting (Green Target) in a show, noticing and remembering Johns' name and a couple of weeks later happening to hear his name again while visiting Rauschenberg's studio. Leo gave Johns a solo show nearly instantly, invited Alfred Barr of MoMA to see the show, Barr instantly bought four paintings for the museum and Johns was off. Meanwhile, Rauschenberg was left int he lurch to be rescued by Leo's then wife, Ileana Sonnabend, who soon opened her own very successful gallery.

Ileana in later years

It was all so dramatic and arty and unlike the situation today where artists plug along in obscurity for a lifetime, lost amongst the vast hordes of other artists plugging along.

I guess I didn't end on a very cheery note, but, hey, I'm one of the reality-based people.

Lee Bontecou - Personal Inspiration - Part 2

Lee Bontecou at work on a large sculpture in her Wooster Street studio in NYC, 1963. Detail from a photo by Hans Namuth. Rephotographed by me from Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective. (More about this book below.)

History and biography appeal to me for the record they keep of lives and cultures. Artists' biographies make the most fascinating of any of this reading, and I love seeing how their lives and works intersect.

Somewhere I had seen images of some of Bontecou's work a few years ago and tried to find a book featuring more of it. The only one I could find was too expensive for me until Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective was published in paperback in 2008 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Here's the Amazon link for it. It will probably be the best $35 you'll ever spend if you are as much of a fan of Bontecou's work as I am.

A beautiful book showing Bontecou's wonderful work

NOTE: BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO SEE THEM IN LARGER FORM.

Lee Bontecou's career as an artist has been anything but the norm. She hit it big early on, having her first solo show at Leo Castelli's Gallery in 1960 at age 29, and continuing to show there until 1971. Right along with all the now-famous (male) names like John Chamberlain, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Olderburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Frank Stell and Andy Warhol, she was featured in the celebrity-building New York: The New Art Scene by photographer Ugo Mulas in 1963. Philip Johnson, noted architect and art promoter, commissioned Bontecou to create a 20-foot-wide piece for his New York State Theatre at the Lincoln Center complex (image later in this post) in 1964. Donald Judd was a huge admirer of her work, citing her as "one of the best artists working anywhere," and wrote about her work in several essays, including one in Arts Magazine in 1965.

Early work completed during a Fulbright Scholarship in Rome, 1957. These birds and animals were constructed of terra cotta segments over welded metal frames.

Bontecou in her Rome studio, 1957

Early, simplified works using canvas over welded steel frames, 1959. The blackness in the central voids came from black paint or black velvet.

Early constructions in which Bontecou worked out the layering of dimension that invoked cubistic divisions of form. and space, 1959

1961, welded steel, soot on canvas and wire, 28 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 17 3/4 inches. (Note that distortion of the form is caused by my photo of the open book. The piece is actually not distorted like this.) Owned by University of Wisconsin.

Constructions from 1960 and 1961 that referenced gas masks. (Today we might think of Hannibal Lector.)

Gas Mask drawings 1961

Another of Bontecou's detailed pencil drawings showing ideas that also emerged in her sculpture, 1961

1961, Welded steel, canvas, wire and velvet, 56 x 39 1/2 x 211/8 inches. Owned by Walker Art Center.

Bontecou's Wooster Street studio, 1962.

Her work was included in three Whitney Museum annuals, in dozens of important shows in the U.S. and overseas, including MoMA's "The Art of Assemblage" in 1961 and "Americans, 1963." She was written up in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Life and other magazines that played up the contrast between her diminutive size, "tomboy looks" and shy demeanor against "the imposing scale and implied violence in her dark and threatening reliefs" (art historian Alan Solomon quoted by Calvin Thompkins in The New Yorker, August 2003).

The piece commissioned for Lincoln center, 1964, 21 1/3 x 5 1/2 x 2 feet. It contained  the Plexiglas part of a WW II aircraft canopy. It first appears symmetrical but then reveals its intriguing asymmetry and inventive passages. Architect Philip Johnson, who commissioned the work for his building, described it as "being so well-suited to the architecture of its setting that it resembled "a baroque statue in the niche of a baroque hall." (quoted by Elizabeth Smith in her essay in The Book.)

Bontecou in her Wooster Street, NY studio, 1963, photographed by Ugo Mulas

This piece appears at the left of the photo above in Bontecou's studio. This has always been one of my favorites. It is composed of welded steel, canvas, epoxy and wire. I think it has a vaguely Egyptian appearance.

This large 1966 piece is the only work in which Bontecou installed interior lighting (size 78 1/2 x 119 x 31 inches). Owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Another one of Bontecou's works of the period that looks Egyptian to me - 1967, welded steel, wood and silk, 26 1/2 x 11 x 11 inches). Owned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution.

But a funny thing happened in 1971 when Bontecou's show at Leo Castelli Gallery suddenly looked very different from her earlier work. The critics hated it but Bontecou didn't want her work pigeonholed. She decided to go her own way and quietly continue working in her studio without pressure of gallery shows and critics' expectations. She got a teaching job at Brooklyn College and commuted there during the week from her rural home in Pennsylvania, where she lived with her husband, William Giles, another independent-spirit of an artist, and their daughter Valerie.

This is the only image I could find for William Giles' work - from AskArt. There was no info on size or materials.

By 1977 when Passages in Modern Sculpture, a survey of contemporary sculpture by Rosalind Kraus, was published, Bontecou went unmentioned. Robert Storr says that this book "established the canon for many curators and critics with power in or over major institutions....To be left out of the book meant oblivion in many academic circles where histories are constructed, and a number of artists of the transitional mid-1950 to mid-1960s who are presently reemerging alongside Bontecou shared her fate, principally Yayoi Kusama and H. C. Westermann. When Bontecou entered discussion in these early years of the 'postmodern' era, it was in the writings of feminists, notably Lucy Lippard, who pointed out Eva Hesse's interest in and debt to her, and in the 1975 publication of Donald Judd's collected art criticism."

Two vacuum-formed plastic pieces, left 1969 and right 1968. Left 21 x 7 x 9 inches, right 21 x 10 x 9 inches

Another vacuum-formed plastic piece from 1969, 30 x 13 x 12 inches.

Vacuum-formed fish, 1970, 30 x 57 x 24 inches

Detail from back cover of The Book showing how individual plastic sheets were joined to the fish's body. If the plastic was canvas and the rivets were wire, the method of attachment would be the same as in Bontecou's earlier work where pieces of canvas were fastened to steel frames.

These works were inspired by Bontecou's investigation of nature and of a new process for forming plastic, a lightweight, see-through material that seemed to belong to the newly-evolving Space Age. Elizabeth Smith says of this work:

These are among Bontecou's most enigmatic and arresting works. Frankly representational, they embody curiously disturbing interpretations of their subjects; the fish are sharply scaled, with ferocious teeth, and are shown in the act of swallowing and ingesting smaller species, while the flowers and plants, revealing affinities to internal organs, appear sinister and mutated - one wears a gas mask. Contemporary with the publication of Rachel Carson's influential late 1960s treatise on the dangers of pesticides, Silent Spring, this body of Bontecou's sculptures directly reflects the negative implications of humans' degredation of the natural world.
(The Book, p. 177.)

The show in 1971 in which Bontecou presented these works was her last solo show in New York for thirty years.

1982, colored pencil on paper 24 x 36 inches. (excuse my distortion)

1984, casein on primed plastic paper, 15 x 12 inches

1989, colored pencil on paper, 20 x 28 inches

1986-2002, welded steel, porcelain and wire, 38 x29x 17 inches

1983, welded steel, porcelain, cloth, wire mesh and wire, 23 x 23 x 23 inches

1994, steel, porcelain, string and wire, 10 1/2 x 15 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches

1995, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 (sorry for the distortion)

1986-2002, welded steel, porcelain and wire, 13 x20 x 16 inches

1994, welded steel, porcelain, wire mesh, silk and wire, 22 x29 x 17 inches

For about the next fifteen years, Bontecou taught at Brooklyn College, commuting there from various parts of New York and Pennsylvania, while caring for her husband, daughter and aging father and pursuing her private studio work in drawing and sculpture. After retiring from Brooklyn College in 1991, Bontecou returned to her studio to continue work on sculptures she had begun 10 or more years earlier. She makes all aspects of her own work, firing the porcelain parts in a kiln and working for months to build up the obsessively detailed and intricate hanging sculptures such as the one currently on display at MoMA.

Bontecou's studio in Pennsylvania  in a 2003 photo by Bill Brown (be sure to enlarge this - it's fabulous.)

Here's a description of what it was like to walk into Bontecou's studio in 2003 by Calvin Thompkins in The New Yorker:

...and Lee and I walked over to her present studio, in a red barn. The studio is somewhat makeshift and ramshackle, with a smallish room on the ground floor, where she does welding and fires her ceramics, and a larger room up a flight of open plank stairs, where she draws and works on the sculptures she's been making since the early nineteen-eighties. The unheated upstairs room was a little chilly on this early spring day, but it had windows on three sides and was full of light. Packing and shipping for the three-museum retrospective would not start for another month or so, and the room, I realized, contained fifty years of her work, on shelves and walls and long tables or hanging from the ceiling: terra-cotta figures of people, birds, and animals, from the late nineteen-fifties; three wall reliefs from the early sixties, one of which, she told me, used to serve as her money box--she tossed loose change into its single projecting hole; a large transparent plastic fish, from the early seventies, quite realistic, suspended from the ceiling in a corner of the room; and two dozen or more...

Lee Bontecou is a model and hero for me, not only because of her wonderful work, but because she pursued her own goals at her own pace, unpressured by the commercialism of the art world and the desire to sell. She made work because she believed in it, because she was curious about materials, the natural world and making her ideas a reality and because that's just who she was and what she did.