Smith, Elizabeth A. T. ert al — Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. Softcover. Softcover with color illustration. 240 pp. Profusely illustrated in color and bw. A large-scale exhibition catalogue for a traveling retrospective exhibition of Bontecou's drawings and sculptures that was presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 28 - September 27, 2004 following stops at UCLA Armand Hammer Mouseum of Art and Cultural Center, Los Angeles, October 5, 2003 - January 11, 2004, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 14 - May 30, 2004. Lacks a tipped-in artists' statement, seem in one other copy, which is not listed on book's contents page. Artist Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) became widely known in the 1960s and 1970s for her welded steel sculptures and plastic molded assemblages--powerful constructions that evoked natural phenomena and organic biological life as well as machines and instruments of war. This book reevaluates the career of this highly influential artist and focuses not only upon the impact of her early work but also on the import she has exerted on a generation of younger artists. Featuring some 50 sculptures and more than 100 drawings from the late 1950s to 2003, the book presents four essays that reposition Bontecou's work within the history of recent art, examine its shifting critical reception, discuss the artistic context in which her work was made, and analyze how science underpinned some of her earliest explorations. Contents as follows: All freedom in every sense / Elizabeth A.T. Smith -- Seek and hide / Robert Storr -- Lee Bontecou / Donald Judd -- Lee Bontecou's worldscapes / Mona Hadler -- Inner and outer space : Bontecou's sculpture through drawing / Donna De Salvo. VG+ .