{"id":29170,"date":"2025-09-18T06:47:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T06:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/29170\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T06:47:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T06:47:16","slug":"june-leaf-at-the-grey-art-museum-grace-and-rage-in-one-thrilling-mix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/29170\/","title":{"rendered":"June Leaf at the Grey Art Museum \u2014 grace and rage in one thrilling mix"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 75-year career trajectory only rarely crossed her peers\u2019; 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.<\/p>\n

To the extent that she\u2019s known at all, it\u2019s as the wife of photographer Robert Frank, whose shadow hid her tempestuous creativity. Now, thanks to the indispensable survey by New York\u2019s Grey Art Museum, you can see a powerful selection of her paintings, drawings and sculptures in all their terrible glory.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s achievement.<\/p>\n

\"ARobert Frank\u2019s \u2018June\u2019s Hand and Sculpture, Mabou\u2019 (c1980) \u00a9 June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation\"ADetail of Leaf\u2019s \u2018The Vermeer Box\u2019 (1966) \u00a9 Estate of June Leaf<\/p>\n

It begins with the mirrored-glass of \u201cThe Vermeer Box\u201d 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 \u201cThe Glass of Wine\u201d (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\u2019s 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\u2019s gaze.<\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s voice weaves through the exhibition, so that the wall labels become a fragmentary narration, full of hauntings and lilting menace. \u201cNow we come to the secret,\u201d Leaf says of \u201cThe Vermeer Box\u201d. \u201cThe secret is what I must have seen as a child. The secret is that in this room is all the treachery that\u2019s possible between people. He\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018 Motel Room\u2019 (1975) \u00a9 Estate of June Leaf<\/p>\n

Born in Chicago in 1929, Leaf grew up around the tavern that her parents owned and her mother ran while her father (\u201ca man who never woke up\u201d, she recalls) was off gambling. The bar, and the city around it, inspired paintings crowded with grotesques. Her parents\u2019 customers crop up in the form of figures she frankly described as \u201cugly\u201d and \u201ccrude\u201d, populating arcades, theatres, dance halls and circuses.<\/p>\n

A gang of such types close in on a frowzy, porcine-faced woman with bleached blond hair who\u2019s metamorphosing into a farm animal before their eyes. Leaf wanted to pump \u201cthe highest voltage possible\u201d into \u201cAscension of Pig Lady\u201d (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\u2019s made of papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 or flesh and blood. A family straggles by, enjoying the sinister fun. There\u2019s an air of nihilistic allegory to the scene; it\u2019s a honky-tonk myth about an unfortunate cross between mythology\u2019s Daphne and Kafka\u2019s Gregor Samsa.<\/p>\n

\"An\u2018Ascension of Pig Lady\u2019 (1968) \u00a9 Estate of June Leaf\/Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago\/Art Resource, NY\"TwoDetail of \u2018Two Women on a Jack\u2019 (2001) \u00a9 Estate of June Leaf and Ortuzar, New York\/Dario Lasagni<\/p>\n

This stagy phase of the 1960s recalls Red Grooms\u2019 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<\/a> and strutting throngs flaunt a taste for the luridly lovely.<\/p>\n

In 1970, after stints in Paris and New York, Leaf and Frank moved to Mabou, Nova Scotia \u2014 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\u2019s 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 \u201cmake everything all my life with my hands\u201d.<\/p>\n

In Mabou, the sewing machine \u2014 \u201cthe only object I ever wanted to own\u201d \u2014 became her totem and her topic. \u201cI once bought an old sewing machine and I took it back home and I smashed it,\u201d she said. \u201cI threw it out the window because I wanted to see it break so I could see what it was made out of.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Angel on Treadle\u2019 (1980-90) \u00a9 The Estate of June Leaf\/Mark Gulezian<\/p>\n

Her masterwork of creepy bricolage is \u201cAngel on a Treadle\u201d, which came together over the course of the 1980s. It\u2019s a sculptural portrait of a seated woman \u2014 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\u2019s wings sprouting from her shoulder blades. But those parts are threadbare, even shredding, and the midsection \u2014 breasts, belly, womb and buttocks \u2014 is all but gone.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

To December 13, greyartmuseum.nyu.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

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