Lee Bontecou, Acclaimed Creator of Wall-Mounted Art, Dies at 91 - The New York Times

Lee Bontecou, whose enormous, enigmatic wall-mounted sculptures garnered the benignant of nationalist acclaim and organization backing successful the 1960s typically reserved for antheral creation stars astatine the time, died connected Tuesday astatine her location successful Florida. She was 91.

Her representative, Bill Maynes, confirmed the decease but declined to specify wherever successful Florida she lived.

Ms. Bontecou was 1 of the archetypal — and, for a time, 1 of the lone — women shown astatine the influential Leo Castelli Gallery, whose roster of artists included Cy Twombly, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. In the mid-1960s, the creator and professional Donald Judd praised her pioneering usage of “a three-dimensional signifier that was neither coating nor sculpture” and deemed her “one of the champion artists moving anywhere.”

She would permission the New York creation satellite little than a decennary later. But for a time, she seemed energized by the city.

Some critics saw vaginal imagery and assertive sexuality successful her operation of concern materials and dilated apertures, an mentation that portrayed her creation arsenic avant-garde and successful sync with the advent of second-wave feminism. But Ms. Bontecou called that presumption inaccurate and reductive, and she bristled astatine immoderate proposition that her enactment had feminist motivations.

She maintained, successful fact, that the cavities had much to bash with outer space; successful the precocious 1950s, she said, she “felt large excitement erstwhile small Sputnik flew,” referring to the Soviet Union’s motorboat of the archetypal artificial outer successful space.

“Art is art,” she told The Chicago Reader successful 2004, “and it doesn’t mean whether it’s pistillate oregon man. It doesn’t matter.”

She was blunt erstwhile recalling the discrepancy betwixt what she wanted to bash and what she said was expected of her. “When I started,” she said, “they wanted my things wholly wimp feminine, and the assemblage wanted to propulsion that and I conscionable wanted to propulsion up.”

When Ivan Karp, the subordinate manager of the Castelli gallery, archetypal visited Ms. Bontecou, successful astir 1960, she was surviving and moving successful an unheated loft connected Avenue C successful the East Village. She had drilled holes successful the level to seizure the excess vigor from the laundry below.

A “little girl-like carnal came to the door,” Mr. Karp said successful a 1969 interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. He asked whether she was Lee Bontecou’s daughter.

“She looked to maine similar a 14-year-old girl,” helium added, “a precise fragile creature, 94 pounds she weighed then, with a precise delicate look and consecutive blond hair. I retrieve going successful determination and seeing these tentlike structures with their fierce apertures, you know, alternatively terrifying. And successful opposition to them, this small miss was a alternatively unsettling experience.”

While she worked, she listened to a shortwave radio, increasing “angry,” arsenic she enactment it successful an interrogation with the writer Eleanor Munro, astatine the quality she heard. New York’s governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, “was trying to propulsion weaponry shelters connected us,” she said. “Africa was successful occupation and we were truthful negative.” She added, “I remembered the killings, the Holocaust.” She began incorporating saw blades and existent warfare materiel, similar helmets and state masks, into her reliefs.

Completed successful 1964 and installed astatine the ft of a staircase successful the New York State Theater, the enactment incorporated her signature materials of canvas and welded alloy arsenic good arsenic portion of a World War II bomber, giving it a winglike shape. Life mag wrote that Ms. Bontecou had brought the “jet property to Lincoln Center” and likened the portion to “a analyzable flying instrumentality that mightiness really beryllium capable to get up disconnected the crushed and soar.”

For “Originals,” a 1979 publication astir American women artists, Ms. Bontecou told Ms. Munro astir the sublime acquisition of sitting implicit the helping of an airplane, marveling astatine the propeller and the pitchy motor and “how it was each riveted together.”

“You felt that unthinkable force,” she said. “It would conscionable astir marque my imaginativeness spell retired of bounds.”

Along with her parents and her older brother, Lee would walk summers astatine the household cottage successful Nova Scotia, which is wherever her originative beingness began. She started by whittling ox carts and making workplace animals retired of conifer cones, earlier discovering the possibilities of different materials. At the property of 8 oregon 9, she told Ms. Munro, “I retrieve distinctly thinking, I tin bash thing successful the satellite if I lone person the tools to bash it with.”

After increasing up successful Westchester County N.Y., Ms. Bontecou attended Bradford Junior College successful Massachusetts and past the Art Students League successful New York, wherever she studied coating with Robert Brackman and sculpture with William Zorach. During a summertime residency astatine the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting successful Maine, she learned however to weld, a accomplishment she continued to make portion studying successful Rome connected a Fulbright scholarship.

While successful Rome, she created abstracted birds retired of terra cotta. But her welding torch introduced different possibilities: Turning disconnected the oxygen produced a spray of soot, a heavy achromatic that “opened everything up,” she aboriginal said. She called her soot drawings “worldscapes.”

Ms. Bontecou joined the creator William Giles successful the outpouring of 1965, and their daughter, Valerie, was calved soon after. In the 1970s they moved to a workplace they bought successful rural Pennsylvania; she had grown progressively impatient with their Manhattan neighborhood, SoHo, which she said had turned into a “zoo.”

Her husband, with whom she moved to Florida a fewer years ago, and her daughter, Valerie Giles, are her lone contiguous survivors.

In 1971, Ms. Bontecou exhibited a assemblage of enactment astatine the Leo Castelli Gallery that looked similar a departure from the canvas-and-steel reliefs that had brought her renown. The amusement featured integrative sculptures of food and flowers. Taking the Styrofoam recovered successful bulkheads of airplanes and canoes, she carved retired her forms and utilized a vacuum property to make the caller translucent objects, galore of which looked little delicate than sinister: food speckled with rivets, flowers with agelong tubes spilling distant similar mutant stamens oregon intravenous lines.

Critics acquainted with her earlier work, and accustomed to the reigning Minimalism of the day, gave the caller pieces a mixed reception. Despite uncovering them “engaging and admirably crafted,” James R. Mellow of The New York Times concluded that the sculptures were “dissatisfying” for their “illustrational stodginess.”

It would beryllium Ms. Bontecou’s past solo amusement successful New York for astir 3 decades. At the tallness of her fame, she seemed to vanish from the creation world. She continued to marque caller enactment aft moving to Pennsylvania, but she had small involvement successful showing. Her girl was inactive young, she needed a rest, and she “wanted to research and expand,” she aboriginal explained to Calvin Tomkins, who wrote a profile of her for The New Yorker. “I conscionable didn’t privation to person to marque things, and decorativeness things, and amusement them each 2 years.”

She utilized the cavity from 1 of her ’60s-era partition reliefs to store her spare change. When the curator of the 1995 Whitney Biennial asked her to participate, she ignored his letters for months until yet turning him down with a definitive no.

Ms. Bontecou commuted into the metropolis to thatch creation astatine Brooklyn College for the adjacent 20 years. She was a gentle and well-liked teacher, according to the creator Lois Dodd, who was connected the module astatine the aforesaid time. During the year-end critiques for creation students, Ms. Dodd recalled, “Lee wasn’t 1 to chopped them disconnected astatine the knees.”

A 2003 retrospective of Ms. Bontecou’s work, organized by the Hammer Museum successful Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art successful Chicago and shown astatine the Museum of Modern Art successful New York the adjacent year, included sculptures and drawings from the 1980s and ’90s that seemed to fuse her seemingly divergent inspirations — outer space, concern mechanics, marine beingness and the earthy satellite — into a coherent oeuvre, similar a missing link: iridescent spheres resembling eyeballs oregon marbles oregon planets rendered successful colored pencil; galactic constellations constructed from porcelain, silk and ligament that could besides walk arsenic alien birds oregon insects.

She explained that her main crushed for agreeing to the retrospective aft each those decades was that she had developed aplastic anemia a fewer years before, and that it had astir killed her. “I abruptly feared that I was going to dump each this worldly connected my children,” she told The Times successful 2003. “What was I going to bash with it?”

Ms. Bontecou credited her husband’s determination to find alternate treatments with redeeming her life. She besides objected to the conception that her retreat from the New York creation country constituted a disappearance from the creation satellite — arsenic if the creation country and the creation satellite were 1 and the same. “I’ve ne'er near the creation world,” she told Ann Philbin, the manager of the Hammer Museum. “I’m successful the existent creation world.”

Ms. Bontecou was little confounded than the critics by the trajectory of her enactment implicit the decades, seeing each her creation arsenic connected to and adjacent seamless with her life.

“I kept reasoning however bully it was to beryllium capable to change, not to beryllium stuck successful a mold,” she told Ms. Munro successful the precocious 1970s. “But the unusual happening is that adjacent aft you person changed, arsenic you judge you have, and past look back, you spot determination is 1 thread done it all.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.