Lee Bontecou:
Drawings from 1958 to 1999
Knoedler & Company (19 East 70 Street, 212.794.0550)
May 6 to July 30, 2004
Sarah G. Austin:
Assemblages
Kimberly Venardos (1014 Madison Avenue at 78 Street, 212.879.5858)
April 22 to May 29, 2004
A version of this
article appeared in the New York Sun, May 20, 2004
see also Victoria
Ludwin on Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art and other venues
By
MAUREEN MULLARKEY
Lee Bontecou Untitled
1962
graphite on paper, 25 x 24-9/16 inches
Courtesy Knoedler & Company
Lee Bontecou is
back! Launched by Leo Castelli in the 1960s, she catapulted to international
attention within a decade. The only woman in Castelli's stable, she
shared the fast track with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Limoucades
lined up for Bontecou's exhibitions until her last, in 1971. Then, abruptly,
she turned and walked away. Her work has hardly been seen since.
Rumors flew around
the motive for her legendary about-face: discontent with critical reception
of her '71 show; desire to avoid competition with her husband Bill Giles,
a less known artist; unease with the gallery scene and its packaging
machinery. However complex the reasons, she withdrew with husband and
daughter to a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. But she kept on working.
Throughout these 30 years, Bontecou maintained her studio routine and
taught sculpture and ceramics at Brooklyn College two days a week.
The harvest of Bontecou's
chosen obscurity is on view now at Knoedler. Thirty-seven untitled drawings,
spanning three decades, inaugurate her return to visibility. And what
a stunning return it is. Her medium is different (predominantly pencil
instead of canvas over welded metal armatures) and the imagery more
varied; but her preoccupations are identical. So is her radial organizing
structure. Almost every drawing spirals around a central darksome aperture,
as ominous and enigmatic as the mark of Cain.
The anger of her
early sculpture, forged in the era of the Cuban missile crisis and the
building of the Berlin Wall, is gone. But the crucial sense of menace
persists. While the circumstances of '60s rage have passed, our own
era brings new dreads. Bontecou's imagery is as fresh today as it was
forty years ago.
In the gallery,
the first things that seize you are the intelligence and rigor of her
invented iconography, counterpoised with the luminous refinement of
her touch. Looking into these delicate, intricate forms, it is hard
to believe they come from the same hand that wields an acetylene torch
with such ferocious intent. Number 4, a graphite drawing from 1962,
is quintessential Bontecou: a closeup of her characteristic chasm with
its surrounding membranes, an intimation of obscure engulfing forces.
Number 5 explores
the same central concavity. Blackened and velvety with soot, it first
suggests a piece of architecture, a rotunda, perhaps, or an observatory.
But the delineated structure turns in on itself and becomes simultaneously
a gaping vortex. Between the sensitivity of the rendering and the oscillating
spatial illusion, the image is hypnotic.
Lee Bontecou Untitled
1998
colored pencil and silver pencil on black paper, 24-1/16 x 18-1/16 inches
Courtesy Knoedler & Company
Bewitchment is
everywhere. A number of casein, pastel or pencil drawings from the 1980s
nestle centripetal force in wave-like shapes that arch and flow with
the expressive precision of Hokusai. Yet at the center of each spins
the ineluctable helix that pulls everything into itself, swallowing
energy and generating it at the same time.
Forbidding cavities
are constants in her work. Only the allusions shift, from the zoömorphic
and botanical to the astronomical and visionary. Science fiction types
will swear they have met these interstellar bodies before: on Ursula
le Guin's 4th planet of Altair or in the somber interstices of Philip
Dick's mind. Gentler imaginations can find flowers, eclipses, insects
eyes, cloud or landscape forms. Art history buffs will spot Surrealist
forebears.
What holds this
suggestive fecundity together, making it recognizably and immutably
hers, is the ethereal grace of her pencil and the particularity of her
inventions. These are precise, dimensional and rational images in service
of a logic that defies all categorization. Bontecou's genius outwits
nomenclature and taxonomic pigeonholes.
Throughout the '60's,
ideologues of the Women's Art movement joined vulgar Freudians in trying
to claim her imagery for themselves. References to "vagina dentata"
abounded. Sophisticates quoted French essayist George Bataille's "solar
anus." Early on, Dore Ashton tried to bring sanity to the classification
game by rejecting all sexual analogies. In a '62 essay, she insisted
that Bontecou's signature cavities were most plausible as signs of destruction,
like the barrel of a gun. Elizabeth A.T. Smith, curator at MOCA, Los
Angeles, and original organizer of this exhibition, quotes poet John
Ashberry's dismissal of critical fixations on sexuality: "It is
hard to feel very erotic about something that looks like the inside
of a very old and broken-down-air-conditioning unit."
The sex-death-and-degradation
crowd that claims descent from Bontecou's work will have to revise their
bios after this exhibition. It swats them like flies on the verandah.
In its entirety,
the work bears witness to that disinterested commitment to a chosen
course, without regard to market trends, that is an artist's decisive
evidence (as an artist [ITALICS]) of moral conviction. Bontecou has
set her own standards and stayed faithful to them. Her reemergence brings
with it an unintended rebuke to the circus of contemporary image mongering.
This exhibition
is adjunct to a full-scale retrospective of her work that opened at
the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, traveled to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary
Art and is on its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Queens this summer.
I am counting the weeks. The last time I saw one of Bontecou's wall
reliefs, it was tucked along a corridor in the acoustic-tiled basement
of Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate. Any day now, a member of the clan
should be moving it upstairs to a more prominent position.
Sarah Austin Surrealism (detail) 1978.
Reproductions, wood, Plexiglas, paint, 60 x 60 x 2-7/8 inches
Courtesy Kimberly Venardos & Company
Secluded treasure
of another kind is on the walls at Kimberly Venardos. Sarah Austin is
a name few people outside the museum world have heard of. Her father
was Chuck Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum from 1927 to 1944
and one of the twentieth centuries most progressive museum administrators.
Young Sarah inhabited the whirl of her father's enthusiasms: from Italian
baroque painting to Cubism, Surrealism and Modernism in all its manifestations,
including music, movies, photography and dance.
Austin inherited
her father's passions and his flair for presentation. She spent a life
creating sophisticated, witty, frequently motorized Cornellian shadow
boxes, each one a retable for the patron saints of twentieth century
art. Artists, composers, writers and auteurs appear in contexts intuitively
evocative of their own creations: Picasso, Ersnt, Mondrian, James Joyce,
Ingmar Bergman, Braque, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollack, others. Duchamp,
for example, is glimpsed through a tiny version of his own miniature
French window of 1920, "Fresh Window." Within, a sequential,
staccato image of him descends a staircase, miming his celebrated nude
in the 1913 Armory Show.
Duchamp, for example,
is glimpsed through a tiny version of his own miniature French window
of 1920, "Fresh Window." Within, a sequential, staccato image
of him descends a staircase, miming his celebrated nude in the 1913
Armory Show. In another construction, a photograph of Duchamp at a chess
board appears behind actual chess pieces. The image is splintered, distorted
by the glass bricks through which it is viewed. Another "explosion
in a shingle factory."
Austin had the resources
and connections to make the boxes public but refused. She neither spoke
nor wrote about her constructions, a secret museum expanding with the
years. An exceedingly private woman, she cloistered her work, not permitting
it to be exhibited until three years before her death in 1994. If only
this gifted woman had been less modest. It is a wonder we have this
exhibition at all. The work is a virtuoso's delight that has waited
too long for an audience. It deserves to be seen.
