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.