Born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Nova Scotia, Lee Bontecou
began studying sculpture in New York City from 1952 to 1955 with William
Zorach. After she won a Fulbright Fellowship to Rome in 1957 and 1958, and
the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1959, she embarked on a successful career
in which she challenged artistic conventions of both materials and presentation
in such works as Flit. Conceived like a sculpture but hung on the
wall like a painting, Bontecou surprised many viewers with her early works
like Flit, because of her use of industrial materials like screen,
pipe, burlap, canvas, and wire. These constructions or assemblages were
aptly characterized by critics like Carter Ratcliff as "organic machines"
because Bontecou's work evoked not only the mechanical, with its use of
manufactured materials, but also
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the biological, with the biomorphic forms these works suggested. In
the case of Flit, an additional biological reference is implied:
Flit was a commercial bug killer in the 1950s, and that word, so clearly
seen here, implies not only a certain danger and threat, but also a biomorphic,
Venus's-flytrap quality. In her use of industrial and found materials, Bontecou
relates to the work of Richard Stankiewicz and, later, Mark di Suvero. In
her later work, she abandoned burlap and screen for vacuum-formed plastics,
another industrial material, creating fish and flower forms that contain,
in their tendrils and preying appearance, the same sense of menace as her
earlier works. |
