The Brooklyn Rail

“The secret is not drawing but DANCE.” So declares a work in charcoal on paper by June Leaf included in her current retrospective at NYU’s Grey Art Museum. Titled Drawings in Movement (2020), the piece depicts a circular stage where tiny, naked figures alternately recline, loll, lurch, and sprawl. Though Leaf (1929–2024) made drawings, sculptures, and paintings throughout her eight-decade career, she once wrote that “I’m really a choreographer.” Drawings in Movement only says aloud what the rest of this show makes implicitly obvious: that the movement of human bodies through space lies at the core of Leaf’s project.

June Leaf: Shooting From the Heart is organized thematically rather than chronologically, but it opens with a gallery of mostly early works, many of which were included in “Street Dreams,” the artist’s breakout 1968 New York exhibition at Allan Frumkin. This room’s a party, with works gesturing to the perverse trouble one might’ve gotten into in the Midtown of that era. Leaf’s carnival act begins in drawing and painting but spills over into sculpture: witness the snake-like Tight Rope Walker [Woman on Tightrope] (1968), made of stuffed painted canvas, who leans forward, umbrella aloft, and tip-toes a line climbing the wall behind her; or the miniature dancer who cavorts nakedly while an absolute gargoyle of a man grins to her left (Dancer and Old Man [1966]). Here the painted flesh of Leaf’s figures, crusted on in a pallid oil with touches of colored neon, is the tactile expression of carnal vulgarity—less Lincoln Center pas de deux, more Times Square smut show.

This fête inélégante reaches a fever pitch with the 1968 Ascension of Pig Lady, a mural-sized tableau in which painted cut-outs, as well as hewn, sewn, and stuffed characters, gather against a backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River skyline. Our titular “Pig Lady” (apparently based on a memorable Second Avenue waitress who claimed to be possessed by demons) raises her arms in delight as the surrounding cast of James Ensor-like characters (idiot children, suited men, a grinning goblin in a cone-shaped helicopter hat) laughingly hoist her up to the work’s wooden proscenium arch.

Yet if these early works channel the bass-ackward Saturnalia of Manhattan’s mid-century madness, later galleries find Leaf turning inward, making the studio a stage for the creative act itself. The large eye in Threading the Story Through the Eye of a Needle (ca. 1974) recalls Philip Guston’s self-referential studio scenes from about the same period, though on the whole the archetypal creators Leaf depicts favor gesture and touch over vision and intellect. Head (1975), an ink drawing with colored pencil, presents a figure, eyes closed, with an opened cranium, her brain rendered as a tangle of strings from which she teases out lines of thought, holding them on her fingers like a game of cat’s cradle.

Yet on the basis of this exhibition, Leaf found her greatest poetic abilities as a sculptor, with real objects, sensitively arranged, holding a suggestive power that outstrips her painted spaces. Diorama-sized figures—with echoes of Bill Traylor and Lotte Reiniger, among others—appear in the round or cut from sheet metal, gesturing atop bits of broken machinery. A clay man strides forward, gripping a wire that meanders from an arch of three simple rods. A lady pushes a hoop atop a wire-drawn revolver; another tumbles head-first along a wall, knocked off by a metal curlicue, delicate and sharp. In Woman Drawing the Man (2014–19), Leaf choreographs a gender-swapped Pygmalion: a kneeling woman marks the crotch of a man, who seems to emerge from the picture plane of an upright metal sheet. Such pieces show how the simplest of materials—dead, mute, and inert—can simultaneously obstruct and conjure a more fictive kind of motion. In these works Leaf seems to offer a sculptural translation of Wallace Stevens’s definition for poetry: “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.”

One pleasure of this retrospective is watching as Leaf’s sketches plant the seeds for sculptures, which then collapse back into more drawings, collages, or paintings. There’s a self-propulsive energy to these transformations, and Leaf’s recursive attention to familiar subjects and settings mimics the dynamic, looping throughlines—across the wall, upstage and downstage—that her characters travel. Leaf died last year, aged ninety-four, late in the planning of this retrospective. But her work still tucks, tumbles, punches, kicks, and dances.