Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective

In this retrospective there are two drawings of 1958 that seem to represent a beginning, drawings in soot produced by oxyacetylene torch, which Bontecou used for welding, with the oxygen supply turned down. As both Mona Hadler and Donna De Salvo quote her in their catalogue essays, "Getting the black . . . opened everything up. I had to find a way of harnessing it." Her sculpture up to then, done in Italy while she was on a Fulbright grant from 1956 to 1958, was figurative and somewhat like Giacometti's, or perhaps more evocatively like Giambologna's birds of the 16^th century. One of the 1958 drawings is vertical, with an ovoid shape surmounting several upward strokes, like a flame or an organic figure, plant or animal. The other is horizontal and has several horizontal bands, mostly dark, one cloudy white, like a landscape. They are both very mysterious and definitive statements about the nature, or unknowableness, of things. At about the same time she did other drawings, also in soot, that seem to be about knowableness, about the structure of interwoven strands that tie everything together almost convulsively, sometimes around larger and smaller spaces of white blankness or against general darkness that ultimately suggests something beyond, or perhaps within, the structure.

There followed, from 1959 through 1966, an extraordinary outpouring of sculpture (and drawing). She welded together armatures of steel rods, over which she stretched sections of canvas stitched with wire to the rods. They are like old airplanes, paintings that literally extend Cubist constructivism into space, skeletons covered with flesh and skin, and every aspect of composition, of radiating and concentric lines, is oriented around one or more circles revealing unfathomable blackness or the ominous teeth of a saw or bars of a cage. They are primary objects, as Donald Judd--in a 1965 essay reprinted in the catalogue--famously understood them to be:

"The image is an object, a grim, abyssal one," he even recognized, but Joseph Cornell, whom Bontecou met in 1962, understood more, perhaps, about the range of Bontecou's concerns when he wrote in his diary about her "warnings." The warnings, and Bontecou's anger, were about human conflict, about the terrible struggles in Africa, the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, and they are everywhere in her work, those already mentioned and others suggesting modern weapons, planes, and pilots' gear, in fact gear of all kinds, as though the world could be assembled and reassembled this way, precisely what civilization intends.

In 1966, there was a change. Her mounted wall pieces were still enormous and made with welded steel rods, wire, and stretched canvas and other fabrics. The holes are now sometimes white and color enters strikingly, particularly white, gold, red, and silver, along with black--royal colors. The great shapes curve and billow like sails or shells. They have an alimentary or respiratory quality and the holes are for breathing or eating or defecating, for life entering or leaving--forms seem to fill with air. The jagged sutures, unbearable darkness, and terrible violence of her recent work are overwhelmed by larger forces that belong to the sky and sea. Likewise, her drawings are of sail-like images that careen and swirl through space. This primordial world, closely observed, encompassing the earlier threatening world, is where Bontecou has remained in her art since.

Collection of William Giles