Untitled

Attending the Art Students League in New York from 1952 to 1955, Lee Bontecou studied sculpture under William Zorach, whose approach to subject matter is reflected in her early abstracted figurative works. The only woman who showed alongside Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol at Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, Bontecou has been creating a body of work in sculpture, printmaking, and drawing since the late 1950s that has stood apart from the mainstream yet also shows affinities with other American as well as European artists of her generation. Marked by an intense materiality, Bontecou’s work points to precedents as diverse as futurism, surrealism, arte povera, and minimalism as well as an unmistakable interest in science and popular culture, which are also central interests of generations of younger sculptors.

In 1959, the American Federation of Arts established the Museum Donor Program to fund the acquisition of “works of art by younger, less well-known American artists” by selected museums, particularly at colleges and universities. The donors behind the program, Audrey Bruce Currier and Stephen Richard Currier, remained anonymous until their death in a plane crash in 1967. Cornell’s A. D. White Museum was one of the thirty-five institutions selected for the program, under the leadership of legendary art historian and curator Alan R. Solomon, the first director of the White Museum. The three works acquired—by Bontecou (59.140), Robert Rauschenberg (59.141), and Michael Goldberg (59.142)—are among the most significant works in our permanent collection of contemporary art.

This relief sculpture from 1959 is an excellent example of the work Bontecou is best known for. It is an early representative of sculptures—mostly created between 1959 and 1967—that are wall-mounted, three-dimensional objects made from sections of discarded laundry conveyor belts and army surplus goods stretched onto welded frames. With their cubist planes and sharp angles these works hover on the boundary between painting and sculpture. Climaxing in craterlike cavities that were often lined with black velvet or soot, Bontecou’s wall sculptures seem to give shape to Cold War anxieties coupled with a sense of human fragility. Writing about Bontecou’s work in 1965, fellow sculptor Donald Judd noted its ability to include “something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.”

(Andrea Inselmann, A Handbook of the Collections, 2018)