Lee Bontecou

Infobox Artist
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name = Lee Bontecou


imagesize = 250px
caption = "Untitled," welded steel, canvas, black fabric and wire, 1959
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birthdate = 1931
location = Providence, Rhode Island
deathdate =
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nationality = American
field = Sculpture, Printmaking
training = Art Students League of New York
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awards = Fulbright scholarship, Rome 1957-1958; Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, 1959

Lee Bontecou is an American artist who was born January 15, 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955 where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957-1958 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1959. From the 1970s until 1991 she taught at Brooklyn College.

She challenged artistic conventions of both materials and presentation by creating sculpture that hung on the wall like a painting. She used industrial and found materials including screen, pipe, burlap, canvas and wire. Her best constructions are at once mechanistic and organic, abstract but evocative of the brutality of war.

She is best known for the constructions she created in the 1960s, which art critic Arthur Danto describes as "fierce", reminiscent of 17th-century scientist Robert Hooke's "Micrographia", lying "at the intersection of magnified insects, battle masks, and armored chariots...” [Danto 2004] . She showed at Leo Castelli's art gallery in the 1960s, and there is a large piece of hers in the State Theater of New York, New York City's Lincoln Center. She retired from the art world to Orbisonia, Pennsylvania [Danto 2004] . After decades of obscurity, she was brought back to public attention by a 2003 retrospective coorganized by the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, that traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2004. The retrospective included both work from her public, art-world career and an extensive display of work done after retreating from the public view [Danto 2004] . Bontecou's work was also included in Carnegie Museum of Art "Carnegie International 2004-5" exhibit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), New York State Theater and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) are among the public collections holding major works by Lee Bontecou.

Trivia

A picture of Lee working in her studio, taken by Italian photographer Ugo Mulas in 1963, was used as the cover art for Spoon's 2007 album "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". The apparently completed sculpture on the right is now in the collection of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (see "Gallery" below).

References

* Applin, Jo, 'This threatening and possibly functioning object'" Lee Bontecou and the Sculptural Void, "Art History" 29:3, June 2006, pp. 476-503
*Smith, Elizabeth A. T. et al, "Lee Bontecou : A Retrospective", H.N. Abrams, 2003
*Danto, Arthur, "A Tribe Called Quest", "The Nation", September 27, 2004, p.40-43
*Dreishpoon, Douglas, "From a curator's point of view: making selections and forging connections: Lee Bontecou, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson / Douglas Dreishpoon", Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1996
*Molesworth, Helen Anne: "Part Object Part Sculpture", Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, 2005

External links

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20070629100944/http://www.leebontecou.com/ Lee Bontecou A Tribute]
* [http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bontecou_lee.html ArtCyclopedia]

Gallery