Currently not on view
Untitled,
1963
More Context
Handbook Entry
Dark voids and hypnotic, illusionistic recesses are the hallmarks of Lee Bontecou’s oeuvre. In this untitled drawing, an oculus with a shadowy center is bisected by a series of three smaller voids. At once corporeal and mechanical, the circular work suggests spinning propellers and speeding planes. Bontecou came of age during the Second World War, and her practice responds to the anxiety and excitement, common in the 1950s, about nuclear proliferation and space exploration. While on a Fulbright scholarship in Rome between 1956 and 1958, Bontecou started to employ state-of-the-art industrial machinery for the most elemental of artistic pursuits: drawing. Such is the case with <em>Untitled</em>, comprised of graphite and the soot from a portable acetylene torch, which the artist released onto the canvas by reducing the torch’s oxygen flow. The layers of soot were then manipulated through erasure and scraping. What results is an unusual collaboration between artist and machine.
Information
1963
[Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, New York], sold; to Princeton University Art Museum, 1964.
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"Acquisitions of 1964", <em>Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University</em> 24, no. 1 (1965): p. 20-23., p. 22
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"Gallery of Modern Art: given by George L. Craig, Jr., of the Class of 1921, and Mrs. Craig," <em>Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University</em> 25, no. 1/2 (1966): p. 54-57., p. 55 (illus.)
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"The annual meeting of CAA", <em>Art journal</em> 25, no. 4 (Summer, 1966): p. 390+416+418.
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Carter Ratcliff<em>, Lee Bontecou: [exhibition] March 25 to May 7, 1972</em>, (Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1972)., [unpaginated]
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Elizabeth A.T. Smith, Ann Philbin, et. al., <em>Lee Bontecou: a retrospective</em>, (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles: UCLA Hammer Museum; New York: In association with Harry N. Abrams, 2003)., pp. 59, 224; pl. 54
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John Wilmerding et al., <em>American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors</em>, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 341, checklist no. 866
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<em>Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection</em> (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 235 (illus.)
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<em>Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections </em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 384
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