Hidden treasures

Directions to artist Lee Bontecou’s farm come with a chicken alert. Visitors are warned to watch for wayward fowl at two precise spots on the narrow highway that winds past rural homes, a field of dead cars and the Sinoquippe Scout Reservation.

No chickens appear on this sun-drenched morning, but deer bound through the meadows, a turtle takes a breather in the middle of the road, and a beaver shuffles down an embankment. The directions lead “uphill, downhill, level through woods, downhill to left at Y” to a little white house and a big red barn.

This is where -- as legend has it -- Bontecou has hidden out for the last three decades after dropping out of the art world. And this is where -- as fact has it -- the 72-year-old artist has created dozens of sculptures and stacks of drawings that have never been exhibited.

“Everyone has to find their own way,” she says. “Some people love to work with people, and they do good work. I found that I could do other things and it would feed into my work.”

About 60 of Bontecou’s unseen pieces will be the highlight of a retrospective exhibition that’s a major event of the fall season. Organized by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, in association with Ann Philbin, director of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the show will open at the Hammer on Oct. 5, then travel next year to Chicago’s MCA and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Like most art-world legends, the one about Bontecou’s disappearance is a mixture of fact and fiction. As a New York art star who rose in the late ‘50s and shone in the ‘60s, she seemed to have it all -- a Fulbright Fellowship that took her to Rome, representation by Leo Castelli’s prestigious New York gallery, a commission for a wall relief at Lincoln Center, works in major museum collections and star billing at international exhibitions.

The only woman in Castelli’s stable of artists -- which included such celebrated figures as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd and Jasper Johns -- she was a petite, sweet-faced sprite who worked with gritty materials on grand scale. That made her something of a curiosity, and her tomboyish good looks endeared her to press photographers. But her signature abstract sculptures, made of sooty canvas stretched over welded steel armatures, attracted serious attention. Critics praised her singular vision and wrestled with the meaning of her mechanistic, vaguely sinister works in terms of feminism, social issues and art history.

Judd, who was an exacting critic as well as an artist, declared her “one of the best artists working anywhere” in a 1965 review in Arts magazine.

But in 1971, Bontecou introduced a group of vacuum-formed plastic fish and flowers at Castelli. The response was tepid at best. New York Times critic James R. Mellow likened the show to “a science fair or some corner of a natural history exhibit.” He found the sculptures “engaging and admirably crafted” but “crabbed, unadventurous, too fussily detailed” and concluded that they seemed to be “trapped between the claims of fantasy and realism.”

That was her last solo show in New York until 1999, when Castelli mounted a survey of her early work.

“I thought half the critiques just missed the point,” she says of the 1971 exhibition. But that wasn’t the only reason she dropped out. A fiercely independent artist, Bontecou was tired of being categorized by critics and wanted to free herself from the pressure of producing new work for regular gallery shows.

“I needed a break,” she says.

Hiding in plain sight

With her husband, artist William Giles, Bontecou has spent several months each year since 1967 on this bucolic piece of rural Pennsylvania, and she has lived here full time since 1991. Instantly recognizable to those who have seen pictures of her in 1960s magazines, she now wears glasses and her hair has gone gray, but it’s still short and straight. Friendly, inquisitive and completely without pretense, she is dressed for work in jeans, V-neck sweater and tennis shoes.

“Life changes,” she says, reflecting on her move to the country. She and Giles needed to raise their daughter, Valerie, a biologist born in 1966. And SoHo became unbearable, she says, when an around-the-clock factory moved into the space below their apartment and boutiques proliferated.

But Bontecou hasn’t been totally absorbed in her private life. For a full two decades, from 1971 to 1991, she was hiding in plain sight while teaching at Brooklyn College. And the fact that she stopped showing her work didn’t mean she stopped making it.

The big red barn is her studio. It’s a bare-bones structure where the only creature comforts are battered folding chairs, but it’s richly furnished with evidence of creative energy. A room that occupies half of the ground floor is full of welding and ceramics equipment. Upstairs, Bontecou has taken over the entire space. One side is a dimly lighted, cavernous storage space for sculptures made many years ago. But the other side is a rustic wonderland of recently finished work and art-in-process. Light streams through a row of windows, illuminating a panoply of naturalistic sculptures that hang from the ceiling or perch on shelves and long tables.

Some of the newest pieces are wiry mobiles that radiate from porcelain eyeball-like centers and evoke thoughts of magical space ships or supernatural insects. Measuring up to 6 feet in diameter, they have steel-wire skeletons, partly fleshed out with silk or metal screening and punctuated with tiny porcelain spheres. These abstract sculptures mingle with vacuum-formed plastic fish and flowers, porcelain and steel birds’ heads and a slew of forms that might be construed as bones, shells or seed pods. Similar themes appear in meticulous drawings tacked up on walls or stored in cabinets and portfolios.

The sight of all this art, created in isolation and never exhibited, is astonishing. But Bontecou says she simply did what she needed to do.

“I just didn’t want to have any goal,” she says, “and I’m glad I’ve had this nice period of time to go with my flow.”

But now she’s back on the circuit -- working with curators, posing for photographs and telling her life story.

An early career whirlwind

The tale begins with her birth in 1931, in Providence, R.I., and childhood in Westchester County, N.Y. She grew up in an adventurous, can-do family that was attuned to nature. Her father and uncle invented the aluminum canoe, and her mother wired submarine transmitters during World War II. Bontecou’s fondest memories include summers at her maternal grandmother’s house in Nova Scotia, where she developed a keen interest in marine life, and outings with her mother, who whisked her off to art exhibitions in New York and made sure she didn’t miss celestial wonders.

“With mother, it was just always exciting,” she says. “One time, she jerked my brother and me out of bed and took us to an athletic field where we lay on our backs and saw the Northern Lights. It was a historic event that filled the sky, like a kaleidoscope.”

Bontecou began drawing when she was very young. “It was a natural thing,” she says. Her formal training began at Bradford Junior College in Bradford, Mass., and continued at the Art Students League in New York.

“You took classes by the month and paid by the month,” she says, recalling the league’s freewheeling atmosphere in the early 1950s. “You could go to class or not; instructors came in and gave critiques, but there were no grades.”

Abstract Expressionism was the reigning style and painting was the leading discipline, but Bontecou gravitated to figurative sculpture. She studied with William Zorach and struck out on her own. She learned to weld at the Skowhegan School in Maine in summer 1954 and made a 13-foot-tall iron figure -- finishing the job while standing on the top of a car.

Bontecou went to Rome on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1956 and stayed for two years, mainly working on sculpture that evolved from abstracted human figures to animals and birds. She also discovered that her blowtorch could be a drawing implement. If she turned off the oxygen and moved the torch across paper or canvas, she got a stream of “real nice dark, soft” soot, she says.

Around the same time, Bontecou began experimenting with welded frameworks and covered them with wire mesh or fabric. That led to her trademark abstractions, which grew larger and more complex after she returned to New York. Soon she was known for creating an original body of work that hovered between painting and sculpture. For many years after she withdrew from the gallery scene, Bontecou declined or ignored requests to exhibit her work. Smith, who was a curator at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art before moving to Chicago, tried in vain to solicit Bontecou’s help with a show of the artist’s 1960s work that she organized in 1993. Her effort eventually paid off. Bontecou began talking to Smith as the show was being finalized and went to see it at MOCA. Late in 1998, when Smith notified colleagues of her move to Chicago, Bontecou responded with an invitation to visit her studio.

“I was amazed and overwhelmed ,” Smith says. “Here was a completely new body of work that I hadn’t a clue about. I had come upon this treasure trove of material that was so incredibly beautiful and also so important to our understanding of her contribution.”

It was “an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up,” Smith says, and that meant offering Bontecou a major exhibition.

Apparently the time was right.

“I said fine,” the artist says. “I knew I had to do something about all these pieces.”

But before the project took shape, Bontecou came down with aplastic anemia, a debilitating blood disorder. She was seriously ill for a year but gradually gained enough strength to work on drawings and eventually finished the sculptures.

“I couldn’t leave this for Billy and Val to deal with,” she says, “but it was a fight.”

By the time she got back to work, Smith had a partner, Philbin, who tried but failed to do a Bontecou show at the Drawing Center in New York, which she directed before taking charge of the UCLA Hammer Museum in 1999. They decided to publish an extensive book on Bontecou rather than a standard exhibition catalog. Both the show and the book cover her entire career and point out the cohesiveness of her aesthetic inquiry, Smith says.

Still, they haven’t been able to track down all the work. Some of the large plastic flowers made in the early 1970s are lost, but the curators hope that the show will bring them out of hiding.

For Philbin, the Bontecou phenomenon is “sort of a test-tube experiment.” The idea of an artist being in seclusion for 30 years raises questions, she says. “Does one need a dialogue with the outside world? Does one need to talk to one’s colleagues? Does one have to know what work is being made elsewhere to further one’s own work?”

“Clearly the answer is no,” Philbin says. “She has used her imagination and her content has filtered up through her concern with world events, politics and the environment. In the 30 years that she was gone, she absolutely grew.”

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Lee Bontecou:

A Retrospective

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Opens Oct. 5. Tuesday- Saturday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursday to 9 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: Jan. 11

Price: $3-$5

Contact: (310) 443-7000