Lee Bontecou Reenters Art World with a New UCLA Hammer Exhibit
By Ann Sagan
& Alex Romano
Contributing Writer
A&F Editor

In the 1950s and 1960s Lee Bontecou was one of the only female artists who was critically acclaimed along with male artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns. Shortly after her 1971 showed at Leo Castelli’s New York gallery met with criticism from many members of the art community, she secluded herself from the public art world for thirty years. Although Bontecou continued to work actively in her Pennsylvania cottage and taught art at Brooklyn College, she did not exhibit any of her new work.

At age 72, Bontecou finally decided to let her artwork reenter the public. Last month the UCLA Hammer Museum opened the Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective exhibit. Over the next year the exhibit will travel to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibited work ranges from wall sculptures to hanging mobiles to large plastic fish. Bontecou’s paintings and pencil drawings are also displayed. The images have a futuristic tone, combining images from technology and dream fantasies. Lynne Berman, a Pomona painting professor, commented,“You really get a sense of the dimensionality of the material, the toughness and the delicacy at the same time.” Bontecou uses a wide range of materials for her series of wall sculptures and mobiles including welded wire, canvas, wood, leather, porcelain, and epoxy.

One of the interesting relationships in Bontecou’s works is in the tension between the harsh materials and the sculpture’s delicate forms. “She was working with a very ‘masculine’ material, which was mostly steel, and she was working with it in a way that was extremely ‘feminine.’ She added a lot of silk to her work, a lot of canvas. She worked with earthtones and fleshtones,” said Joseph Altuzarra ’06, in reaction to the Hammer exhibit. “To me there was a definite message about gender issues and sexuality.” The recurring gender role themes in Bontecou’s work may have their origin in her own gender isolation as a female artist in the 1960s.

So far Bontecou’s exhibit has received praise, and the artwork produced during her thirty years in seclusion seem to be a success. Bontecou’s removal from the art world begs questions about the importance of an artist’s contact with his or her peers. Are those relationships crucial to the development of an individual’s art? Do gallery shows, museum exhibits, and critiques of one’s work actually help artists to further develop their skill, or do they only help pay the bills? As our generation enters the art world, should we look to Bontecou as a role model or simply as a great artist who had the opportunity and ability to grow in seclusion?

Andrew Extein ’07 was impressed by Bontecou’s separation from the critical art world. “I thought it was cool how she tried to seclude herself from the art world because she was able to distance herself from the positive and negative criticism of her peers, which affects pure art making, subconsciously or consciously.”

The Hammer exhibit displays the evolution of Bontecou’s work and the content of it seems to deal with the evolution of our society. The exhibit is open until January 11, 2004, and the Hammer is open on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 11 am–7 pm, on Thursday from 11 am–9 pm, and on Sunday from 11 am–5 pm. Admission for adults is $5. More information on the museum and exhibit can be found at http://www.hammer.ucla.edu.