June Leaf, who died last year at 94, refused to put herself in a box, although her art includes all sorts of confining containers. Leaf’s 75-year career trajectory only rarely crossed her peers’; her mythology was too personal, her humour too wry, her work too intense and magnificently repulsive to have found a comfortable place in a movement. She knitted together crassness with grace, wonder with vulgarity.
To the extent that she’s known at all, it’s as the wife of photographer Robert Frank, whose shadow hid her tempestuous creativity. Now, thanks to the indispensable survey by New York’s Grey Art Museum, you can see a powerful selection of her paintings, drawings and sculptures in all their terrible glory.
Co-organised with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Ohio, the show unfolds thematically, rather than chronologically, a better way to apprehend the sweep and scope of Leaf’s achievement.
It begins with the mirrored-glass of “The Vermeer Box” of 1966. Leaf puzzled obsessionally over the mysterious relationships that Vermeer veiled in silent luminosity. She tried at first to reproduce those ambiguities in paint, but in the end settled on a hybrid form, restaging “The Glass of Wine” (c1660) as a diorama. In the original, a man hovers, clutching a jug, over a young woman. His face is obscured by a wide-brimmed hat; hers hides behind a white cap as she sips from a goblet. In Leaf’s version, the man has become a skeleton, his smile a toothy leer. His companion dissolves in a cubist cascade of mirrors, at once reflecting and deflecting the viewer’s gaze.
The artist’s voice weaves through the exhibition, so that the wall labels become a fragmentary narration, full of hauntings and lilting menace. “Now we come to the secret,” Leaf says of “The Vermeer Box”. “The secret is what I must have seen as a child. The secret is that in this room is all the treachery that’s possible between people. He’s going to destroy her. In that safe, quiet, clean room, with all the shadows, the bookcases and the pictures, are all the worst things that can happen: betrayal, lovelessness, falseness and lies.”
Born in Chicago in 1929, Leaf grew up around the tavern that her parents owned and her mother ran while her father (“a man who never woke up”, she recalls) was off gambling. The bar, and the city around it, inspired paintings crowded with grotesques. Her parents’ customers crop up in the form of figures she frankly described as “ugly” and “crude”, populating arcades, theatres, dance halls and circuses.
A gang of such types close in on a frowzy, porcine-faced woman with bleached blond hair who’s metamorphosing into a farm animal before their eyes. Leaf wanted to pump “the highest voltage possible” into “Ascension of Pig Lady” (1968), and the mural-scale painting certainly crackles. A troupe of puppeteers manipulate her arms with strings while a gnomish fellow in a yellow suit pokes her with a stick to find out whether she’s made of papier-mâché or flesh and blood. A family straggles by, enjoying the sinister fun. There’s an air of nihilistic allegory to the scene; it’s a honky-tonk myth about an unfortunate cross between mythology’s Daphne and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa.
This stagy phase of the 1960s recalls Red Grooms’ gleefully vulgar tableaux, plus a whole lineage of virtuosi of grotesquerie. You can find traces of Hieronymus Bosch, James Ensor, Max Beckmann and, especially, Reginald Marsh, whose exuberant pictures of burlesque hoofers, Coney Island bathers and strutting throngs flaunt a taste for the luridly lovely.
In 1970, after stints in Paris and New York, Leaf and Frank moved to Mabou, Nova Scotia — about as far as you can get from urban tumult. Forced to turn inward, she also looked back. What she found there was a memory of herself as a toddler, sitting beneath a sewing machine, mesmerised by the rhythmic movement of her mother’s feet. A treasure floated down from above: a snippet of gauzy blue fabric patterned with white dots. That was the moment she knew that from then on, she would “make everything all my life with my hands”.
In Mabou, the sewing machine — “the only object I ever wanted to own” — became her totem and her topic. “I once bought an old sewing machine and I took it back home and I smashed it,” she said. “I threw it out the window because I wanted to see it break so I could see what it was made out of.”
That act may have satisfied her destructive impulse, but not her curiosity. She collected and took apart many sewing machines, then reassembled the liberated parts, along with hand-cranked eggbeaters and various domestic objects, into a series of art machines. Tin, wire, rods, wheels, shafts and springs became her medium, and even her ink drawings resemble the traces of metal pieces that have bled on to paper.
Her masterwork of creepy bricolage is “Angel on a Treadle”, which came together over the course of the 1980s. It’s a sculptural portrait of a seated woman — perhaps herself, her mother and grandmother fused into one exploded body. The legs are solid, the feet large, poised just above the floor and shackled to the frame of a Wanzer sewing machine. The head and upper torso, too, have a certain heft, which supports the wire angel’s wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. But those parts are threadbare, even shredding, and the midsection — breasts, belly, womb and buttocks — is all but gone.
Yet this jerry-built mechanical figure on an iron throne still has its fearsome life force, projecting an indestructible authority. She reads as an autobiographical archetype. Leaf’s mother had wanted her daughter to follow the conventional path: marriage to a successful professional, a pack of children, a house in the suburbs. The artist had other plans, and their dance of wills went on for years; her internal conflicts lasted far longer. This earthbound angel expresses Leaf’s desire to free herself from expectations, and also the fear that she might succeed. The treadle is both a tool and a cage, the angel a creature divided between fetters and flight.
To December 13, greyartmuseum.nyu.edu
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