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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.