Return-Trip Ticket

By Richard Lacayo

You might be tempted to describe Lee Bontecou as elfin. There's no denying that she's small and lean. And when she tilts forward to tell you, "I'm shy," you can take it to the bank. At 72 she has the same Dutch-boy haircut that she had four decades ago, when she was dynamiting a place for herself in the New York art world. Back then she must have reminded people of the writer Carson McCullers, who would have seemed pixieish only until you read her.

It's the same with Bontecou, who produced some of the gravest, most tough-minded and even belligerent art of the 1960s. Three-dimensional wall pieces, they were constructed by attaching strips of rough canvas to welded metal frameworks, using bristling threads of thin wire. Always featuring one or more mute, sinister holes, the wall pieces conflated all kinds of mysteries and anxieties--about the human body, the primal instincts, the state of the world, the universe itself--into enigmas that shoot forward like field cannons. You don't just stand in front of something like Untitled from 1966. You bob and weave in its range of fire.

By the end of the 1960s, Bontecou was a well-established name. Not a household word like Warhol but an artist who exhibited constantly in the U.S. and Europe. In the stable of dealer Leo Castelli, the ultimate launching pad for up-to-the-minute talent, she was also the only woman. LIFE, Cosmopolitan and Vogue put her in their pages, where they tended to treat her as the mouse that roared.

Then she simply went away. For years she taught art at Brooklyn College in New York City, but she stopped exhibiting. With her husband Bill Giles, an artist disillusioned with the scene, she eventually retreated full time to a Pennsylvania farmhouse and the natural world she had loved since her childhood in Westchester County, N.Y. She raised a daughter--and a lot of vegetables. A few of her pieces hung in prominent museums, but in the standard accounts of postwar art, her name dropped out of the indexes.

So the Bontecou show that opened last week at the UCLA Hammer Museum is not just a retrospective; it's a rescue mission. A cross-country one too--in February it moves to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and then, remarkably, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a place that rarely accepts exhibitions from outside but plainly wanted this one. Organized by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, chief curator at the Chicago M.C.A., with Ann Philbin, the director of UCLA Hammer, the show aims to restore Bontecou to the stature she walked away from. And it does. Starting now, a lot of art-history indexes are going to have to make room for Bontecou, because her mighty, bewitching work of the '60s was even better than we realized.

Maybe even better than she realized. Why did she walk away? There have always been theories. That her less famous artist-husband was uncomfortable with her success. Or that she had recoiled from the bad reviews for her last New York show, in 1971, when she showed vacuum-formed plastic fish and flowers that were completely unlike her earlier work. Bontecou insists that she simply wanted a break. "I needed time to experiment," she says. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to try to jump out of myself.'" She's back now in part because a bout of serious illness convinced her that it was time to take stock. And because, better late than never, her more recent work is finally ready. "I didn't want to focus on the past," she says, "while I was still working on the new."

In 1956 Bontecou traveled on a Fulbright fellowship to Rome. But what she took home were the earth and anvil tones of the Spanish Baroque. Honey beige, umber and charcoal, with the occasional flash of lethal red--these are the colors of ancient objects unearthed from burnt cities. They gave to her wall pieces, which she began making after her return, a feeling that's both modern and primeval. Into some of the holes she would occasionally insert bent band saws to suggest jaws full of sinister teeth. (When these remind you of that creature in Alien, and they will, keep in mind that Bontecou came first.) To some critics of the time, armed with ready-made Freudian explanations, it all looked like emanations of lethal female sexuality. Which, to an extent, it was. To look at those fang-baring tunnels and not think the words vagina dentata would be like hearing the William Tell Overture and not thinking of the Lone Ranger. It would take a superhuman effort of refusal. But the swellings and cavities of her wall pieces bring to mind not just the vagina but also the mouth, the eyes and even the rectum, all the fateful human openings, all the ways we admit and expel and devour.

Then again, they also resemble the exhaust holes of jet engines. Bontecou loves aircraft but hates warplanes. There are no raw polemics in her wall pieces, but her revulsion against the violence of what was supposed to be a postwar world is one of the few things she will admit to as a deliberate theme. When she mingles the human and the mechanical, when her pieces suggest both gun barrels and blood vessels, gas masks and mouths, she gives form to an intuition most of us share: that the instruments of war are extrusions of the beast within us all.

In the 1960s, when American art was divided between ever more airtight geometric abstraction and the worldly free-for-all of Pop, Bontecou's wall reliefs represented a third path. They were abstract but with plain gestures toward the wider world. They were allusive but not literal-minded. You could have fun with them, but it was fun of a high order. Then, without warning, she began making those plastic sculptures of fish or of flowers with tubes hanging from them that suggest something diseased and unnatural. Three decades later, they still look like a wrong turn in her work, weak commentaries on the endangered environment, one step removed from political cartooning.

Bontecou sees them as a crucial return to nature as the wellspring of her art. Since then, she has been working her way through the forms of plant and animal life and even the galaxies to find a new metaphor. Along the way, she has gone down paths that have more than a bit to do with sci-fi Gothic--alien faces and stylized bird skulls. But her newest art is getting somewhere more interesting. Hanging pieces, some derived plainly from the shapes of fish, they deconstruct nature with a vengeance, exploding it into a million mysteriously related bits, spiny networks and oddball orbital systems. This show may be a retrospective, but it doesn't have to be a final summing up. Welcome back, Lee. This time, stay a while.