Catching up with Bontecou: a young star of the 1960s, Lee Bontecou voluntarily dropped off the art world's radar. Now her richly imaginative art is being discovered afresh thanks to a major retrospective that arrives in New York in July

In a variety of ways, the traveling retrospective of works through Lee Bontecou represents a healthy tonic for the contemporary art world. This is not business as usual. The exhibition--curated by the agency of Elizabeth A.T. Smith of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Ann Philbin of the UCLA Hammer Museum--far caps standard expectations for museum retrospectives, for it includes in its four-decade overlook of over 150 sculptures and drawings a dazzling clump of heretofore unexhibited works made since Bontecou dropp without of the gallery scene in the early 1970 This "show within a show" of approximately 20 plastic arts and 35 drawings and paintings sets a fresh spin on our understanding of a major artist whose unravelling can at last be full appreciated. Bontecou emerges as a crucial participant in an alternate manner of 20th-century practice, one distinct from established changes and textbook categories.

As a young artist, Bontecou--the sole woman showing alongside Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol at Leo Castelli Gallery in the '60s--received a great deal of critical attention for her formidable canvas reliefs made from sections of discarded laundry conveyor belts and army surplus advantageouss stretched onto welded frames. Crisply angled in built-out forms resembling 3-D topographical maps, these works strike one as being to give shape to postwar anxieties. With their cubistic, angular planes, the reliefs climax in craterlike cavities, sometimes lined with black soft that completely absorbs light. They have evok a variety of political and psychosexual interpretations, serving as images that reach out as Donald Judd put it in a 1965 review, "from something as social as war to something as private as sex making single an aspect of the other." (1)

Proclaimed "the find of the year" by means of Art in America in March 1960 and the make submissive of profiles in Vogue and Life, Bontecou was included in MOMA's "Art of Assemblage" (1961) the Sao Paulo Bienal (1961) Documenta III (1964) and five Whitney Annuals between 1961 and '68 The spotlight, however, was inhibiting. Disgruntled with the art world and preoccupied with her personal life, she withdrew from exhibiting in the early '70 and mov to rural Pennsylvania with her daughter and husband, the artist William Giles. As she later explained to Smith, "You have to give leave to it go. What I saw happening to Pollock's work was that it was being explored through everybody but himself and I thought: he doesn't have a chance." (2) Although Bontecou continued to exchange to a teaching job at Brooklyn society from 1971 to 1991, her art-world nearness faded.

For years, art historians and cognoscenti speculated about the works the artist might be making. Bontecou fend not on studio visits and exhibition solicitations. Finally, independent of the artist, in 1993 Smith set together a small show of pre-1971 work at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art [see A.i.A., clan '93] and succeeded in gaining Bontecou's trust. Six years later, Smith was invited to the farm studio and propos a replete retrospective. Bontecou continued tinkering with the latest works until, after recovering from a debilitating illness in 2000 she decided that she was finally ready. (3)

The retrospective reveals that Bontecou's retreat from the public organ of vision in no way impeded her creativity or productivity. Unlike the retrospectives of many artists of her generation, this individual does not taper off in activity two-thirds of the way [i]or[/i] part of to the other Although radically different in tone, the post-1970 works clutch their own against those of the 1960 Made in relative isolation, they appear to be the products of a parallel, more gratifying art world, individual that nurtures innovation and complexity rather than hype and record-breaking sales.

Center in forms and ideas gleaned from natural science and technology, Bontecou's more novel mobiles and sculptures reassert with novel insouciance the power of fantastical imagery and intricate spatial forms, as if the artist were transcendently unmindful of the mass-media image-glut and art theory's obsession with it. Indeed, Bontecou's dark, fanciful, "back-to-basics" interpretations of the down-reaching structures of molecules, skeletal combination of parts to form a wholes and galactic space have emerg at a timely jiffy when the prolonged postmodern critique of the media have the appearances redundant or pointless. Undogmatic and cosmopolitan, Bontecou's engagement with organic, technological and cosmic forms seems to throw open doors that have felt clos for decades.

Beyond its brilliant draftsmanship and command of manifold three-dimensional space, Bontecou's entire material part of work is distinguished through visual metaphors that are at one time precise and protean. A simple shape is carried from one side many works to evoke a range of referent and meanings. Bontecou's trademark image engageed throughout the 1960s--the black hole--variously prays a blank television screen, a camera len a cave, a injury the pupil of an organ of vision a crater, a skeletal socket a porthole, a periscope, a bullet aperture a well, a proscenium arch, a fire-arm barrel, an open mouth, a vagina and the satellite in eclipse.