MISSING IN ACTION.(artist Lee Bontecou)(Interview)(Biography)

The disappearance of Lee Bontecou has been an art-world mystery for more than thirty years. Only a handful of male artists broke from the starting gate as strongly as she did in the nineteen-sixties, and no women came close. She showed at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the era's primary launching pad for new talent, and her work also appeared in three Whitney Museum annuals and dozens of important exhibitions here and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art's huge and influential "The Art of Assemblage," in 1961, and its "Americans 1963," two years later. Donald Judd, a critic who would soon become a major artist, called her "one of the best artists working anywhere." There were stories about her in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Life, and other magazines, most of which took note of the contrast between her shy-little-girl looks and what the art historian Alan Solomon called "the imposing scale and implied violence in her dark and threatening reliefs." And then, inexplicably, she vanished.

Nobody seemed to know where she had gone, or why, although of course there were rumors. It was said that her husband, a less successful artist named William Giles, was unable to deal with her fame, and that as a result they had moved away from New York and she had stopped making art. Her work from the sixties, the strangely compelling drawings and the big, rather menacing steel-and-canvas relief sculptures, with their black holes and aggressive projections, could still be seen in public collections here and abroad--most prominently in the lobby of the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, where a twenty-foot-long relief, the largest she ever did, commands a wall to the right of the main entrance. Occasionally, someone would put together a small Bontecou show, without her consent or participation, but as the years passed her reputation faded, and her name ceased to register with younger artists. It came as a shock, therefore, to hear in 2002 that a major Lee Bontecou retrospective exhibition was on the way, and that about half the work in it had been done since 1971. The show is scheduled to open on October 5th at the U.C.L.A. Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles; it goes from there to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and then, a year from this summer, to the Museum of Modern Art, where it will be on view for two months at moma's temporary facility in Queens. The seventy-two-year-old artist has worked closely with the exhibition's organizing curator, Elizabeth Smith, and she has promised--dutifully but gamely--to show up for all three openings.

The reentry process may be disorienting for someone who has been so quietly determined to keep the world at bay. Bontecou and Bill Giles have lived for many years in a deeply rural part of Pennsylvania, on property they bought in 1966 as a summer home. It's an hour and a half west of Harrisburg, which makes it about four hours from New York City by car, and the last part of the trip, which I took in late April, involves directions like "Alert! Chickens on roadside" and "Go apprx. 1 mile to five mail boxes on left." A narrow, deeply rutted dirt road takes you over a steep ridge, and leads, in time, to a century-old farmhouse on the far side of a meadow. Lee and Bill Giles both came out of the house to greet me, along with their frantically barking Australian cattle dog, Digger. "You're right on time!" Bill said cheerfully. "That's unheard of."

Lee, a small woman in a baggy sweater and corduroy pants, was instantly recognizable from the photographs that Ugo Mulas took of her for his 1967 book, "New York: The New Art Scene," where she figures as the lone woman artist in a roster of male stars that includes Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg. She looks older now, of course, and her cropped hair and straight-cut bangs are graying, but she has the same trim, tomboyish figure, turned-up button nose, and open-faced appeal. Both she and Bill were relaxed and friendly, and they seemed easy together. "They know how to deal with each other," I had been told by Valerie Giles, their grown daughter, who is a field biologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "I just remember, as a kid, thinking that they were the best friends."

After a while, Bill went off to check on a new house that they're building on another part of their property (it will include large studios for both of them), and Lee and I walked over to her present studio, in a red barn. The studio is somewhat makeshift and ramshackle, with a smallish room on the ground floor, where she does welding and fires her ceramics, and a larger room up a flight of open plank stairs, where she draws and works on the sculptures she's been making since the early nineteen-eighties. The unheated upstairs room was a little chilly on this early spring day, but it had windows on three sides and was full of light. Packing and shipping for the three-museum retrospective would not start for another month or so, and the room, I realized, contained fifty years of her work, on shelves and walls and long tables or hanging from the ceiling: terra-cotta figures of people, birds, and animals, from the late nineteen-fifties; three wall reliefs from the early sixties, one of which, she told me, used to serve as her money box--she tossed loose change into its single projecting hole; a large transparent plastic fish, from the early seventies, quite realistic, suspended from the ceiling in a corner of the room; and two dozen or more of her new ...