Lee Bontecou is an American artist whose abstract drawings, prints and sculptures resemble the world of science fiction and fantasy movies. The imaginary artworks explore the influence of technology on nature and the environment. Her best-known artworks are the sculptures from welded steel frames and industrial substances produced in 1959 and the 1960s.
Background
Lee Bontecou was born on January 15, 1931, in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.
Since her childhood, Lee became fascinated by the world of engineering and mechanics because her parents were related to this field. So, her father, Russell Bontecou, served as an engineer making gliders for the military during the Second World War and her mother worked at the war factory.
Bontecou spent her free time swallowing science fiction books and exploring the marine life in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia province of Canada where she came in summer to her grandmother.
The Second World War and the impact of its industry and technology on nature influenced the further art of Lee Bontecou.
The artist had an elder brother named Frank.
Education
Lee Bontecou received her general education at the Bradford Junior College (currently Bradford College) from which she graduated in 1952. Then, Lee moved to New York City where she pursued her artistic training at the Art Students League. She had studied at the institution till 1955 under the tutelage of the sculptor William Zorach. In summer of 1954, Bontecou learned the metal welding at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Later, the young artist obtained the Fulbright scholarship from the United States-Italy Fulbright Commission which allowed the young artist to develop her artistic skills in Rome in 1957-1958.
The early sculptural compositions of Lee Bontecou produced at the end of the 1950s were made in form of fantastical animals and birds. In 1957, her artistic mind was influenced by the launching of Sputnik satellite in space by the Soviet Union.
Two years later, the young artist had her debut solo exhibition which provided her with the attention both from the public and art critics, Donald Judd among others. He became one of Bontecou’s art earliest supporters and produced some essays on her artworks during the beginning of the 1960s.
This first solo show was followed the next year by her personal exposition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. As one of the first women exhibited at the gallery, Lee Bontecou demonstrated to the audience her first assemblages of canvas stretched. The exposition increased the success she had previously received. As a result, Bontecou was featured in various periodicals, like Art in America magazine, Time, Life, Vogue, Mademoiselle, and Cosmopolitan. She also took part at the Ugo Mulas's landmark exhibition, New York: The Art Scene along with Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
The same period, Bontecou began to produce her first lithography pieces.
In 1964, the artist obtained a commission to decorate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. For that, she produced a huge wall relief called ‘1964’.
Thereafter, Lee Bontecou gave birth to her daughter. The event somehow changed the character of her artworks which began to represent softer forms and creatures, like fishes or flowers made mostly from plastic instead of metal. By 1966, the artist reached the top of her career.
At the beginning of the new decade, Bontecou tried her hand as a teacher. So, in 1971 she joined the lecturing staff at the Art Department of the Brooklyn College where she had taught ceramics and sculpture during the subsequent 20 years. Although, the artist continued her artistic activity – the same year, she demonstrated her creations again at the Leo Castelli Gallery. The exposition preceded the thirty-year pause in the active artist’s career. Despite, Bontecou remained to work at her studio.
Only in 1993, Lee Bontecou added to her exhibition list the participation at the show organized by the art curator Elizabeth A. T. Smith. The exhibition shown in 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City brought Bontecou’s artworks back to the art scene and gave a start to the long collaboration of two women.
Lee Bontecou was invited at the Carnegie International exhibition of 2005 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Five years later, her retrospective, All Freedom in Every Sense, was held again by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
In 2014, the artist presented to the public her drawing compositions at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas and at the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey. In a couple of years, Bontecou participated at the show titled ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016’ at the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel.
One of Lee Bontecou’s recent shows took place in 2017 at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands in collaboration with Joan Banach.
Nowadays, Lee Bontecou lives and works in Pennsylvania, United States. The artist is represented by the sole agent named Bill Maynes.
Untitled from The New York Collection for Stockholm
Untitled
print
Untitled from The Atelier Project
Untitled
Untitled
Eleventh Stone
Thirteenth Stone
Eighth Stone
An Untitled Print
Fourth Stone
Untitled
Untitled
Second Stone
Third Stone
Untitled
Tenth Stone
First Stone
Ninth Stone
Study for An Untitled Print
Seventh Stone
Untitled
Etching One
Untitled
Sixteenth Stone
Fifth Stone, Sixth Stone
sculpture
Untitled
Untitled
Bird
Views
Lee Bontecou is an avid naturalist.
Quotations:
"The little pencil is a magic box ... You can take a piece of paper and walk anywhere."
"I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room. I wanted it to go into space."
Membership
National Academy of Design
,
United States
2004
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"She's drawing with metal, she's painting with canvas. One of the things she pioneered was to get sculpture off the ground, to make something that was neither a painting nor a sculpture, but something in between." Elizabeth Smith, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
"Bontecou's work embodies the paradox of the space age, especially in her pairing of the cosmic and the brutal. She speaks passionately of dichotomies and sees her sculpture as divided between optimistic works and angry war pieces, representing the positive and negative sides of science." Mona Hadler, author
"Bontecou [has made] her work so strong and material that it can only assert itself...It is credible and awesome." Donald Judd, sculptor and art historian
"Bontecou's art is a masterful tour de force, mesmerizing and poignant." Christopher Knight, art critic at Los Angeles Times
"The drawings involve strange jumblings of serene and sinister, sensual and clinical, comical and foreboding. And all reflect Bontecou's odd penchant for mixing feminine with masculine and hybridizing attributes of the natural with those of the machine–made, and the machine itself." Christopher Miles, art critic at Artforum International
"She became important by her absence. As a woman artist who had made it, she came to represent a model of how to escape, how to leave the art world and keep on working, which I think about all the time." Kiki Smith, artist and sculptor
Interests
nature
Connections
Lee Bontecou became a wife of the artist William Giles in 1965. The family produced one daughter Valerie.