Uncovering Bontecou's Mysteries

Evaluation of essays about a Lee Bontecou's exhibit



“There are so many holes.” I overheard one very observant old lady say to her friend, who nodded in agreement; both not quite sure what to make of them. Those empty gaping spaces seemed to be creating ones in our minds, begging to be explained. Holes filled with mysteries… why are they here?... What do they mean?... And most importantly… Who created these pieces?

Though the exhibit was a collection of the life’s work of Lee Bontecou, by the time I reached the end, I had even more questions about the artist than I did when I started. I didn’t feel satisfied until I read an essay by A.T. Smith entitled All Freedom in Every Sense. This particular essay is one of five essays in the book Lee Bontecou A Retrospective and, in my opinion, the most effective essay in conveying the histories and influences behind Bontecou’s work.

Smith’s essay does a very good job in detailing Bontecou’s background; her family, her schooling and the progress of her art. It made sense of her different use of mediums with sculpture and drawing. For example how she discovered that the blowtorch she used dispersed soot on the paper, thereby explaining how she came to create Plates Six, Seven and Eight at the same time she was creating sculptures. Smith also helps the reader to better comprehend Bontecou’s work by adding quotes and opinions already expressed by other writers and artists like poet Tony Towle, artist Eva Hesse and critic Donald Judd.

In fact many of the critics drew from ideas that had been previously expressed by Donald Judd. His essay, Lee Bontecou, seems to be considered the most comprehensive by the other writers. In his essay Seek and Hide, Robert Storr writes; “Greatest honor goes to Judd, since it was he, starting in 1960, who most enthusiastically supported Bontecou’s work… and it was he who most deeply and clearly understood its formal and poetic significance.” Where Smith’s essay was good for understanding the facts and the background behind the artist, Judd’s essay is a tool to help one analyze the meanings behind the artists’ works. Judd seems to glaze over her history and focus more on describing her work and what the pieces might suggest. One can see this in one of my favorite quotes of his that was also borrowed by Smith in her essay; “The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.”

Where most of the writers drew on quotes from other writers one writer, Mona Hadler in her essay Lee Bontecou’s Worldscapes, draws on quotes from the artist herself. This is the strength of her essay. Instead of blanketing her essay with analyses of her own, she uses things that Bontecou has said about her own work and the work of others to illustrate the ideas behind the art. She gives Bontecou’s own opinions on her use of the color black and how she was influenced by science, more importantly the launch of Sputnik. Where Judd and Storr do their best to analyze Bontecou’s work based on their perceptions, Hadler’s essay does a great job of bringing to light the actual objects and experiences that influenced Bontecou’s works. She uses what Bontecou has already said and admitted about her work to draw her opinions, thereby giving the reader a deeper understanding of Bontecou’s works by giving us a chance to see into the artists thought processes.

The most effective essay though as an art history essay is Inner and Outer Space, Bontecou’s Sculpture through Drawing by Donna De Salvo, because it is a more focused essay. It focuses on an aspect of her work instead of all of her works and the artist as a whole. Its placement in the book as the last essay was a well planned one. After reading the rest of the essays one has a better understanding of the artist and is ready to get into more depth and analysis of certain aspects of her art. De Salvo uses direct quotes from the artist throughout the essay, helping the reader to understand the ideas behind the particular works being analyzed.

There is an absence of direct quotes from Bontecou in Robert Storr’s essay and I think it is because of these feeling of being removed from the artist herself that moved Bontecou to write a rebuttal to his ideas. What I enjoyed about Hadlers essay was the close interplay of thoughts from the author and thoughts from the critique. It makes it so the reader could form their own opinions as well based on what Bontecou has said herself as opposed to what a critique has come up with on their own devises. It is so important to the evaluation of art to stay close to the ideas expressed by the artist. More important than what the audience sees or devises from viewing the art, is what the artist is trying to say, what the artist believes they are portraying. An artist doesn’t create to be evaluated or judged, an artist creates because they feel the need to express themselves. Art is very self-centered. An artist’s self-perception of their work and themselves does outweigh any opinions the public might gather from just seeing a work. No one is as close to the art as the artist is.

But the art is out there for the public to see, analyze, critique and formulate their own opinions of. And the connection between artist, artwork and audience is a special one and not to be discarded or overlooked. There is, undeniably, something magical about standing in front of a piece that was given life by an artist and experiencing this creation with a total stranger who just had one comment; “There are so many holes.” This was not negative or positive, this was not a comparison or a critique, this was a statement, and a way to understand what we were seeing, what we were experiencing together because of a person who had to express themselves in an effort to uncover life’s mysteries.



Copyright Megan Tharpe 2003

Impressions of an Impressionist Paiting

An essay on Mary Cassatt's painting A Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child which can currently be found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.



Mary Cassatt was one of the few female Impressionist painters. Although she was an American she moved to Paris after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and lived there for the duration of her life. While there, she met Degas who invited her to submit her work in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879.1 Mary Cassatt’s body of work consists primarily of paintings of women in domestic and social settings. She had always exhibited an interest in painting scenes of mothers and their children. But it wasn’t until 1880 when her brother, Alexander, arrived in Paris with his young family that she was provided the opportunity to study and paint children from life.3 One of Cassat’s earliest work on the theme of mother and child, is entitled Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child (1880). In this particular painting Mary Cassatt is not only able to capture an exact moment in time in doing this it becomes an image that has great significance to her body of work.

Impressionists were a closely-knit group of artists that “stressed the need for recording momentary sensations on the canvas and the importance of spontaneity.”4 They thought it important to record how the eye really sees, by sometimes depicting figures cut off or caught in spontaneous movement. Their brush marks were used as a way to not only capture light but also to capture the constant motion of all life.4

The brush strokes of Mary Cassatt’s painting do a great job of portraying motion. The outlines of the figures are blurred and there are no contour lines, suggesting motion from both subjects. Since there are no set outlines the forms of the bodies are portrayed by the use of color and brush strokes. It seems as though it was painted in a frenzy; there are long sweeping strokes like she used in the lower portion of the mothers dress, juxtaposed with short brush strokes that she used to create the look of the wash basin and the baby. The suggestion of movement in the way the work was painted was not only a common Impressionist technique, but in the case of this particular work, it was also a way to represent the subjects of the painting. A baby perched on a mother’s lap is not going to be a stationary object, it’s going to squirm and move about and because of this it’s mother will have to move around as well in order to keep control of her child.

For the Impressionists it was just as important to capture the lighting of a moment as it was to capture the movement. The painting utilized pastels, creating a very bright image. The mothers dress seems to glow white in the light, while the child’s face is illuminated, almost as bright as his light blonde hair. Pastels seemed the right choice for this kind of image because they are colors that pick up the light and make the image brighter and this is an image of intimacy and sweetness. The combination of the loose brushwork and the pastel colors are very representative of the Impressionist movement.

Mary Cassatt has done and excellent job in this painting of capturing an exact moment in time. The momentarines of the image is best represented by the position of the child’s left foot. It’s turned inwards in a very awkward manner. It is not positioned in a way to suggest a child was posing for the picture. This suggests that, as mentioned before, the child was squirming and, in the moment Cassatt was trying to capture, his foot was turned in an odd angle. Also, as mentioned before, Impressionist painters thought it important to represent a moment just as a person would view it from their own eyes. They would sometimes cut off some parts of their subjects by leaving it off of the canvas. Cassatt has cropped the woman’s elbow with the edge of the canvas’s frame and cut off her legs and a part of her knee. The painting is more similar to how the eye would see it. Rarely do people view the entire image, rather they focus in on a particular sights. Cassatt has put a lot of thought into how she frames her subjects. “Proximity and compression are also characteristic of the works of Cassatt.”4 There is a reason that she has painted her subjects up close. In Pollock’s article she describes another one of Cassatt’s images, Young Woman in Black: Portrait of Mrs. Gardener Cassatt (1883) but her description also holds true to this painting as well; “the viewer is forced into a confrontation or conversation with the painted figure while dominance and familiarity are denied by the device of the averted head of concentration on an activity by the depicted personage.”2 In other words, it forces the viewer to become even more intimate with an already intimate image.

The theme of the image is supported by form and content. It is a picture about mothering and nurturing and its supported by many circular forms. The mother’s head is circular topped with a rounded bun, the child is one large plump circle, the mother’s extended hand leads the eye to the circular bowl where her fingers curl in it to form yet another circular shape. It is representative of the female form, swelling breasts and round stomach when baring a child, and most importantly reminiscent of the womb. All of these suggested forms support the theme of the painting- mother and child.

The only thing that makes this painting different from the typical Impressionist paintings is that it takes place indoors as opposed to the prevalent outdoor scenes. Positioned next to Cassatt’s painting in the same room, was a painting by Gari Melchers entitled Writing (1905-9). It is a depiction of a woman sitting down at her desk to write a letter. It too is an image of a female in a domestic space involved in an intimate activity. The museum was probably trying to show a dialogue between the two images about the theme of women in domestic spaces instead of the general theme of Impressionist paintings. Melcher’s painting called to mind Vermeer’s paintings of women with letters. (For example, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter c. 1662-1665.) These images can both be compared with Cassatt’s as well. Both Melcher and Vermeer paint a female figure in a domestic setting and although they are alone, the idea of a male figure is also present through the letter the women hold. Cassatt’s mother is participating in a very intimate feminine activity but the idea of a male figure in her life is still present by her child, which could not be conceived without a male.



Though Cassatt’s painting is similar to Vermeer’s paintings in theme, it is very different in content. Where Vermeer’s work is dark and although it seems that the viewer is a voyeur witnessing an intimate moment of femininity, the colors, movement and framing of the images are quite different. Cassatt’s painting is Impressionist so the image is comprised of pastels and bright lighting. The subjects look as if they are moving around, and in Vermeer’s it looks as though the women could have been posing for the painter.

Mary Cassatt’s use of vibrant color, bright light, loose brush strokes and theme all came together to produce a great example of Impressionist art. As an example of Cassatt’s earlier work, this painting is a great representation of Impressionism and is a great starting point for her many paintings of the mother and child theme.

1. Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2002
2. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988.
3. “Mary Cassatt; The First Lady of Impressionism” WetCanvas.com 25 Mar. 2003
www.wetcanvas.com/museum/artists/c/mary_cassatt/mother.html
4. “Impressionism (1870s – 1890s)” Humanities Web 25 Mar. 2003 www.humanitiesweb.org/cgi-bin/human.cgi?s=g&p=i&a=d&ID=12
5. Mary Cassatt. Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child. 1880. Oil on Canvas, 62x8x14
6. Johannes Vermeer. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. 1662-1665. Oil on Canvas, 18 1/4x15 3/8 in.

Raising Status Through Self-Portraits

Short essay comparing Artemisia Gentileschi’s La Pittura (1630) and Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

In Mary Garrard’s essay Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting she writes about the class status of an artist, particularly a painter, during the Renaissance rivaled that of a laborer “by the association with manual arts” (Garrard, 101). Garrard goes on to explain how Gentileschi’s painting entitled Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting or La Pittura is a “sophisticated commentary upon a central philosophical issue of later Renaissance art theory, indicating an identification with her profession on a plane of greater self-awareness, intellectually and culturally, then has previously been acknowledged” (97). Another work that attempts to make this same statement is that of Diego Velazquez entitled Las Meninas. Both Gentileschi and Velazquez’s works strive to raise the class status of artists.

In La Pittura Gentileschi paints a self-portrait, one that represents her as the “allegory of painting” itself. By doing so she is representing herself as much more than just a painter, she has become more than just a mortal human being! She also shows herself as an artist at work, but she “working” in a beautiful gown, with a gold locket. These are clothes that an upper-class person would wear, not a low-class laborer on while they’re “on the job.” This suggests that she, as an artist and while being an artist (in the process of using her hands) is most decidedly upper class.


In Velazquez’s work he is conveying that very same concept of the artist as “upper-class.” Like Gentileschi, he has painted himself into his work, but he has placed himself in a court scene, surrounded by expensive and upper-class objects and people. He even puts the King and the Queen (their reflections are in the mirror behind him) into the very same painting in which he has put himself! This is an obvious allusion to his status as upper class.


While the two works seek to raise their audiences’ opinions on artists they differ in how they want their audiences to see them personally. Gentileschi wants to be thought of as a great and skilled painter who deserves respect. Velazquez seems to want to be seen as a man of great importance, who is right at home in the company of kings and queens.

Whatever the deeper meanings behind the paintings, the messages are still the same. Not all people that work with their hands are of low-class stature. Both Gentileschi and Velazquez strive to raise their status through self-portraiture in their artwork.

Copyright Megan Tharpe 2003

The Sistine Differences

A small paper on the differences between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar.

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and five years to paint its altar. Between those two jobs he took a twenty-eight year break. It is because of this break that the two works, the ceiling and the Last Judgment look as if two different artists completed them.

Michelangelo started the ceiling in 1508. His idea was to paint scenes from the Bible in the order of how they are told. Beginning with God Separating Light from Darkness to the Drunkenness of Noah. Michelangelo’s painting techniques stayed fairly similar. In general the ceiling looks as if he could have finished it in a week. All the scenes, though some painted four years apart, are painted in the same style that Florentine humanism inspired in Michelangelo. These painted bodies followed in the tradition of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David (sculpted from 1500 to 1504) which was possibly inspired by the classical statue of the Apollo Belvedere. this means that the male nudes are beautiful, heroic, realistic representations of the male body.

And as a whole the Sistine ceiling has a very orderly feel to it. All the different scenes are framed by “illusionistic marble architecture” (Stockstad 696) that separates all the stories from each other.


When Michelangelo returned to paint the altar it was after a period of many violent political and religious events, including the Protestant Reformation. The earlier idea of united one big church under Catholic order fell apart. Devotions to saints and religious images were destroyed and, in Northern Europe, entire churches were white washed by vandals. Because of this, the very authority of art was called into question. As an artist Michelangelo was very affected by this idea, and the altar reflects the change which took place within his own work as a response.


While the stories on the ceiling are mostly uplifting images, the story and the images on the altar are mostly of tragedy, despair and pain. Where those differences are best represented are in the ways Michelangelo depicted the human body. The bodies on the ceiling follow the idea of heroic male bodes that look beautiful, virile and virtuous, the ones behind the alter do not. They resemble the male nude body in the ancient statue of the Laocoon that was discovered a couple of years before Michelangelo started work on the ceiling. (He would have, in all likelihood, had knowledge of this statue as it was in the Vatican collection of Julius II.) These types of nude male figures look as if they are on steroids. They are bulky, the muscles look harder and over-defined, a more idealized version of the male body. Because of the pain that most of the men are feeling their bodies are in poses that look distorted, in order to outwardly represent their inner turmoil.

detail from altar detail from ceiling

The images on the ceiling had a feeling of order and containment with the frames around each other; Michelangelo does away with the frames on the alter, thus creating a chaotic mass of bodies against bodies. On the ceiling the bodies had a very normal relation to space and to each other, Michelangelo ignores that on the altar because the bodies are supposed to be falling through space and for that reason there, logically, is not really a “normal” way for the human body to conform or react.

Michelangelo was responding to the frustrations and disenchantment of the people of the Catholic Church in a period of upheaval. His altar mirrored the Laocoon that became the violent substitute for the Apollo Belvedere as a representation of the mid-century struggle of human beings in response to their own deaths by the outside forces with wars, revolts and reformations. With all these social changes it is no wonder that Michelangelo’s two works would look so different. An artist’s work is very influenced by the world around him and his responses to it.

Copyright 2003 Megan Tharpe