Avedon. p.4

Recognized as among the most original three-dimensional assemblage artists in the United States, Lee Bontecou generated ferocious icons of welded steel with canvas during the 1960s. Born in Providence, Rhode Island and raised in Westchester County, New York, Bontecou spent summers at her family’s cottage in Nova Scotia, her mother's birthplace. Throughout these vacations, Lee whittled small objects and built miniature environments in the marsh grass. A student of William Zorach and John Hovannes at the Art Students League in New York (1952-1955), Bontecou was a Fulbright fellow to Rome (1957-58) and a 1959 Louis Comfort Tiffany grant recipient. In the late 1950s, Bontecou began creating crude and massive asymmetrical assemblages in predominantly shades of tan and brown. Centered carefully within geometric components and foreshortened branches, is usually a crater or void. This abyss, dark and endless, has been described as Bontecous universe . Although Bontecou s assemblages are nonspecific and nonnarrative, they are a direct response to contemporary politics and particularly war and global destruction. In 1960, Leo Castelli Gallery hosted Bontecou s first solo exhibition Bontecou was one of the few women represented at an elite gallery then and the only female artist at Castelli. In . . 1961. her work was included in the Museum of Modern My most persistently recurring A rts The Art o f Assemblage and in 1972, Bontecou thOUght IS tO WOrk. in a scope aS received her first retrospective exhibition at the far-reaching as possible, to express Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work is a feeling of ireedom in all Its represented in numerous museum collections including neCeSSary ramificatl0ns-~lts awe, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, beauty, magnitude, horror and Washington, DC,The Menil Collection, Houston,Texas, baseness. This feeling embraces The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The ancient, present and future worlds: W'hitney Museum of American Art, New York Bontecou from caves to jet engines, landscapes has worked in seclusion for the past twenty years. to outer space, from visible nature to the inner eye, all encompassed in cohesive works of my inner world. This total freedom is essential.

Lee Bontecou. source unknown.

Untitled. 1964 graphite on paper 22.5" x 28.5", signed

1967. Courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York

Louise Bourgeois^ (b.iqn)

Acknowledged today as a preeminent sculptor of the past half-century, Louise Bourgeois was largely ignored before the 1970s when the feminist movement in art brought her sexually-charged abstract sculptures in marble, latex, bronze and wood to public attention. Born in Paris to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois, tapestry restorationists, her long-suffering mother and charming but chronically unfaithful father produced a childhood atmosphere filled with anxiety for the young Bourgeois and which later provided the content for many of her pieces. Bourgeois matriculated at the Lycee Fenelon and the Sorbonne, before studying art history at the Louvre and studio art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Julian Grande Chaumiere academies. Her interest in sculpture sparked when she attended the atelier of Fernand Leger. Bourgeois met Surrealists and Cubists whom she would later see in New York during World War IF Expatriates included Max Ernst, Andre Breton, and Marcel Duchamp as well as Robert Goldwater, an art historian she would marry in 1938, and with whom she would travel to New York in the same year. Enrolled at the Art Students League. Bourgeois turned to drawing, printmaking and painting. In 1947, she exhibited her work at the Norlyst Gallery, where her "Femmes-Maisons —naked female figures with houses for upper torsos and heads—were first shown. In the McCarthy era, Bourgeois was forced to appear before government committees at the same time that she was applying for citizenship. Although a respected member of the New York School, this artist had no solo shows from 1964 until 1974; however, this situation was to change drastically. In 1977, Bourgeois was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts degree from Yale University, and in 1982, The Museum of Modern Art organized her first retrospective exhibition foday Bourgeois remains the rare creator who—in her eighties—continues to surprise and delight with startling new work.

So if you consider art as a privilege, then, by definition, you feel that you do not deserve it. You are continually denying yourself something—denying your sex, denying yourself the tools that an artist needs—because to be a sculptor costs you money. If you consider art a privilege instead of something that society will use, you have to save and suffer for your art, for what you love; you have to deny yourself in the cause of the art. I felt I had to save my husband's money rather than do sculpture that costs money. So the materials I used in the beginning were discarded objects.

Bourgeois, interview with Donald Kuspit in Bourgeois (New York: Vintage Books, Elizabeth Avendon Editions, 1988) p.38.

Untitled, 1951 black ink on paper 12-25" x 6.25", signed

Pillar, 1949-50 painted wood construction 64.25" x 3.5" x 2.5"

© I he Estate of Mimi Jacobs. 2000. Courtesy of the Jay Defeo Estate

(1929-1989)

I painted this kind of winged vision which announces in my eyes or promises some realization of all that is good in this existence, and more specifically it is a promise to me of the realization of certain powers creatively—and when I say that, I make some association between the words creative and spiritual or divine. Or at least I feel that way when I do my best...I don't choose such titles with any narrow Christian interpretation in mind. It doesn't have to do with any specific religion at all. It is only a symbol. I have to make my own philosophy or religion in my life and I'm too young to understand it yet. I only have occasional moments of understanding and awareness... Jay DeFeo. letter to J. Patrick Lannan. Lannan Foundation. Los Angeles. 1939.

Labeled an abstract expressionist’, a Beat painter and a symbolist’. Jay DeFeo, born Mary Joan in Hanover, New Hampshire and raised in San Francisco, rural northern California and Colorado, received her introduction to art from a neighbor-a "how to draw book that exposed her to the principles of design and basic geometric forms that would later persist in her art. In 1946, she attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned both her BA (1950) and MA (1951) degrees. Awarded the Sigmund Martin Heller [raveling Fellowship in 1951, the first woman to be honored with this distinguished prize, DeFeo traveled to Europe spending time in Paris and London and also Elorence, where she painted prodigiously for six months. Upon her return to the United States, DeFeo settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she became a central figure in the California avant- garde along with friends Bruce Connor, Joan Brown, George Herms and Wallace Berman. Influenced by the first generation of abstract expressionists, DeFeo worked in a broad vocabulary ranging from small welded metal sculptures, large plaster assemblages and photo collages of the 1950s to heroic abstract paintings and drawings, influenced by prehistoric art, architecture and mysticism. After completing her legendary painting. The Rose (now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art), which she worked on almost exclusively from 1958 to 1966, DeFeo produced a large body of drawings, photographs and paintings, focusing on placing large single, rather organic forms of provocative but unspecific nature in spaces that appear limitless beyond the boundaries of the [frame]. DeFeo had her first solo exhibition in 1954 at The Place, a tavern and Beat poet’s hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach before exhibiting in i960 at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.Throughout her life, DeFeo was a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and in the 1980s until her death at Mills College. Although the work of Jay Defeo has consistently been exhibited over the years, mainly on the West Coast, her 1997 inclusion in Beat Culture and the New America: 7950-/965 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has recently redefined her significance in 20th century American art and has demanded the reexamination of her entire life's oeuvre.

Crescent Bridge /. 1972 acrylic and mixed media on plywood 48" x 665". signed

Cabbage Rose, c.1972-73 acrylic on masonite

48.25" x 72.5"

Claire Falkenstein

(1908- 1997)

0I.eni Iselin, 1954. Courtesy of the Claire Falkenstein Estate

Born in Coos Bay, a small lumber town on the Pacific Ocean in Oregon, Claire Falkenstein remembers making small animals out of wet clay at the edge of the bay. While a student at the University of California at Berkeley (BA, 1930), Falkenstein had her first solo exhibition in 1929 at the Fast-West Gallery in San Francisco. A radical modernist by the 1930s, Falkenstein received a grant in 1933 to study at Mills College in Oakland, California with Alexander Archipenko, w'ho introduced the principles of implied motion and spatial relationships in abstract sculpture. By 1940, Falkenstein, now living in San Francisco, was working predominantly in wood and ceramics, creating abstract, organic three-dimensional forms with moveable parts. Affected by cubism and the abstract expressionists, Falkenstein's 1948 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art demonstrated her evolution to a freer, more open form language. In 1950, Falkenstein From 1950 to 1963, Paris was the moved to Paris, where she was part of an expatriate center of my life and work...I began community that included Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins, and working in metal and developed Mark Tobey and she met among others Jean Arp, Michel some iaeas for jewelry. It was a way Tapie and Alberto Giacommetti. In Europe, Falkenstein of teaching myself the craft of metal exhibited actively and was included (the only non- German) in 1952 in the first showing of the Werkbund work. My first attempt at large- after its suppression by Hitler. In i960, she returned to scale metal sculpture was in 1953 America, and settled in Southern California. Represented when I did a twelve-foot-high steel by both Galerie Stadler in Paris and the Martha Jackson rod space drawing, The Sign of Leda. Gallery in New York, Falkenstein completed numerous It caught the attention of an public commissions around the world including the gates important writer-collector Michel of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice (now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy). Her first Tapie, who commissioned me to public commission in Los Angeles (1963-1965), a welded bring it down to three feet and give tube and glass fountain for the California Federal it mass. He expected a bronze Savings and Loan Association, forced Falkenstein to think casting, but I decided that I wanted in terms of structure and flow' and revealed, like in all to carry it through a direct of her works, her interest in molecular structure, topolotechnique. This piece impelled me to gy, and cosmology. The most monumental commission of discover a way of making my own her career was a series of welded doors and glass windows for St. Basil Church in Los Angeles completed in material: a very plastic method of 1969. A major contributor to 20th century sculpture, brazing stove-pipe iron wire to form Falkenstein is represented in numerous museum collecthe voiumes...it is not a designer tions including the Museum of Modern Art, New' York, form; rather, it is created matter. the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.

Claire Falkenstein, quoted in Claire Falkenstein in San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, and Now, Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1980, unpaginated

Untitled, c.iq-,8 welded metal /)." x x if).-

Sun, i960 welded metal 3 4 ' x 56'' x 13'"

Marilyn Kroplick, c.1969. Courtesy of the Artist 0 Nancv Grossman J A l T fM(b.1940)

Nancy Crossman has created a diverse body of work—mixed media collages, wooden assemblages, landscape paintings, figurative and abstract leather-covered sculpture, and drawings—in a career that spans more than thirty-five years. Grossman, born in 1940 in New York City, grew up on a working farm in Oneonta, New York, amidst a large extended family. Life on a rural farm with parents in the garment manufacturing business shaped Crossman's artistic vision and influenced her choice of materials. Freestanding totems of the late 1960s contain within their surfaces the frames of typewriters, steel brushes, parts of a corn husker, and found metal signs: collages of the 1980s and 1990s are threaded with personal paper memorabilia and signage from her Chinatown neighborhood. A student of Richard Lindner at the Pratt Institute (1997-1962), Crossman received her BA in 1962. After graduation, she traveled to Europe on an Ida C. Haskell Award for Foreign Travel, where she would make her first collages. In her work. Crossman has consistently explored in a very personal and direct manner the human condition and its physical environment. Beginning in 1959, Crossman's work has been actively exhibited. In 1964, the Krasner Gallery, New York mounted her first solo exhibition, and her leather-covered sculpture heads, for which she is most noted-appeared in 1968 at Cordier and Ekstrom Gallery. Remarkably, at thirty, the artist had had five solo exhibitions—yet none

In i960, 1 underwent an internal revolution. I no longer felt that I had to please, and knew that I could express myself. I did that through human figures that were falling from the sky as if falling from grace, like fallen angels, or were suspended. I also fell—out of my harness of familial expectations and school assignments. I fell out of the bondage of being the oldest child in my family with so much responsibility. I was free-floating in space in my life now too. These imagesnad to do with the fierce strife and anxiety of life between the womb and tomb. Any figure not in the fetal position or buried was striving. Or they were jumping on and beating each other up.

of her diversity of genre and media was widely understood before 1991, when a retrospective exhibition organized by the Hillwood Art Museum and seen simultaneously at Hillwood, Ihe Sculpture Center, and Exit Art in New York revealed the scope of her oeuvre. Crossman is represented in numerous museum collections including The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Crossman lives and continues to work in Brooklyn, New York.