L ee Bontecou’s masterful ability to condense the dreams, anxieties, and fears of her t.mes into sculptural form solidified her as one of the most fiercely individual artists of the mid-twentieth century. A sublime example of her most celebrated body of work, Untitled represents Bontecou’s uninhibited exploration of the organic and mechanical, abstraction and figuration, reality and fantasy. Bearing exceptional provenance, Untitled has remained a part of the collects ion of Richard and Kathy Feld, who were friends of the artist, since 1987.
The power of Lee Bontecou stems from her fascination with the paradoxes of the human condition: in her own words, a long standing desire to express “as much of life as possible—no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense.” Employing an organic use of form–largely reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist painters whom she describes as having energized her spirit–Bontecou forged a culturally inspired lexicon. The powerful authenticity of Lee Bontecou afforded her a singular and unprecedented position in the New York art scene: the sole female artist in Leo Castelli’s stable of artists throughout the 1960s, amongst the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Donald Judd and James Rosenquist. A pioneer in terms of both the moment and her method, Bontecou proudly stood at a historical crossroads. At once futuristic and fossil-like, graphic and rich, weighty and weightless, Untitled is a fascinating response to the unknown, the wondrous, and the sublime.
“Since my early years, the natural world and its visual wonders and horrors—man-made devices with their mind-boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, elusive human nature and its multiple ramifications from the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences—to me are all one.”
The technical handling of Bontecou’s chosen materials stem from her early exposure to the process of industrial manufacturing—both her parents were skilled technicians: her mother a worker in a World War II submarine factory wiring transmitters, and her father the inventor of an all-aluminum canoe. In 1956, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome for two years. Bontecou’s t.mes spent there would heavily shape the future of her artistic output, as she was attracted to the inartistic objects and machinery on the city streets and thus began to experiment with new materials, namely an acetylene torch to create soot in her drawings and sculptures. It was also in Italy when Bontecou first learned of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite launched into space. At that moment, she was instantly entranced by the deep and black vastness of this territory – the dusty blackness of the unknown. In 1958, she returned to New York and immediately immersed herself back into the artistic landscape of the burgeoning city. By again incorporating her very immediate surroundings into each construction, Bontecou would produce her most iconic and intimately proportioned wall-relief sculptures.
Bontecou’s oeuvre stands out for its interrogation of boundary-defying craft and form in the history of art. Executed circa 1958, Untitled profoundly reflects her best-known skills: the artist’s welded framework evokes the lightness of boxes and, in stretching over planes of canvas, she imparts a painterly sense of contrasting depth and illusion. Taking canvas from conveyor belts discarded by the laundromat below her East Village apartment, Bontecou stretched her fabric findings across a steel armature and fastened them to the welded metal frame, roughly stitched together with twisted wire. The resulting fabrications were characterized above all for their ingenious, unsettling use of space: gaping black cavities projecting from the surface of the work itself, exciting both fear and fantasy. Jutting out from the wall, the present work simultaneously invades the spectator’s space and draws one into the dark, cryptic abyss. As one of the first and most eloquent champions of Bontecou’s revolutionary, category-defying work, Donald Judd remarked: “Bontecou’s reliefs are an assertion of herself, of what she feels and knows. Their primitive, oppressive and unmitigated individuality excludes grand interpretations. The explicit power which displaces generalizations is a new and stronger form of individuality. Bontecou's work has an individuality equaled in the work of only a few artists” (Donald Judd, Arts Magazine, April 1965).
Richard and Kathy Feld amassed a fascinating collects ion of sculpture by artists such as Betty Parsons, Alexander Calder, Lee Bontecou, Mark di Suvero, Dorothy Dehner, and Louise Nevelson. Beginning in the 1970s, the Felds became avid collects ors, particularly of sculpture, taking their three children into New York City nearly every weekend to visit galleries. Most notable was the Felds' profound care for each of the artists in their collects ion, often forming deep friendships and connections with many of the artists they collects ed. In particular, the Felds were staunch supporters and friends of Lee Bontecou. They passionately attended her gallery exhibitions, encouraged her creative pursuits, and acquired works directly from her studio, believing firmly in her unique artistic vision. After Bontecou moved to Pennsylvania, Richard and Kathy traveled to visit Lee and her husband, enjoying the pastoral scenery and sharing a cherished friendship and many fond memories. Later, Bontecou gifted the Felds one of her works and often sent letters and postcards from her travels, checking in on the couple frequently. The Felds' passion for sculpture, particularly that of female sculptors, combined with their deep care and understanding for the art and artists they collects ed, was ahead of its t.mes and a test.mes nt to the couple as true collects ors.
The importance of Bontecou’s early canvas-and-wire constructions cannot be overstated. Firmly resistant to categorization, Bontecou was profoundly influential for numerous other female artists, including Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith, while critics and artists alike immediately grasped the impact and magnitude of her developments as she married the Cubist brushstroke to sculptural form. Dore Ashton said of the artist in a 1963 essay: "In this image-making prowess there is an originality that would be difficult to define in the logic of language, an originality in the quite literal sense: one is absorbed by the reigning image and knows instinctively that it had its origin deep in the artist's psyche... The reigning image is the black tunneled hole central to anything Bontecou undertakes... the intensity of her expression and the currents of authenticity that one feels so strongly lead one to sense for a moment the depth and inexpressible sources of her imagery" (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, 2004, p. 174). Working with a technique both refined and raw, equal parts beautiful and strange, Bontecou’s wall-reliefs have made her a singular voice of her generation, and they linger with a curious embrace of the otherworldly that is poignantly tied to our own existence.
