Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou (born January 15, 1931, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.—died November 8, 2022, Florida) was an American artist whose work ranged from dark, dramatic abstract constructions to softer, transparent natural forms, evoking a correspondingly broad range of response.

Bontecou studied art at Bradford Junior College (now Bradford College) in Massachusetts through 1952 and in New York City at the Art Students League from 1952 to 1955 with the sculptor William Zorach. She also spent the summer of 1954 at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned to weld. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957–58. In 1959 she had her first solo exhibition, and the next year she first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City, where she became one of the first female artists he represented.

In that show Bontecou presented her first assemblages of canvas stretched and tied over a structure of welded steel rods. Initially her constructions took on the organic forms of fantastical birds and animals, before she developed a more abstracted, machinelike aesthetic. The fabrics she used in her work came from old conveyor belts, laundry bags, and knapsacks, reinforcing the combination of biomorphic and man-made construction. Soon after, Bontecou added a dark opening to the centre of her relief constructions that became the focus of speculative interpretation by critics. Loosely associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, Bontecou intentionally created works that functioned as both painting and sculpture.

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In 1964 Bontecou received an important commission to create a large wall relief for the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, titled 1964. She created an armature that formed two winglike structures spanning 20 feet (6 metres), made from a Plexiglas turret of a World War II bomber and other molded and abstracted shapes. Bontecou continued working in that genre until the birth of her daughter, an event that dramatically transformed the style and intensity of her work toward a gentler aesthetic. She moved from primitive and mysterious canvas-covered constructions to much-softer more-fluid creations of natural forms, such as fish and giant flowers, often using plastic that reflects rather than absorbs light. Those works frequently contained cautionary political overtones. At the height of her critical attention in 1966, Bontecou won the first prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her greater level of personal expressiveness continued through the 1970s, at which point she retreated from the art scene. During the next two decades, however, she continued to make art and also taught art at Brooklyn College in New York (1971–91).

After nearly three decades of working in isolation in rural Pennsylvania, Bontecou reemerged in 2003–04 with a large-scale retrospective of her work co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition, which also traveled to New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), featured familiar works from the late 1950s through the 1970s as well as never-before-exhibited works that had been created during the years she spent away from the art world. After her return to the spotlight, Bontecou was the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, including “Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense” at MoMA in 2010 and an exhibition of her drawings and works on paper organized by Houston’s Menil Collection in 2014.