The Brooklyn Rail

When I first moved to New York after art school in 1977 I was often asked who my favorite artists were. I said, “June Leaf and Lee Lozano.” I often heard “Lee Lozano is living on the street” in response. The collectors Milton Brutten and Helen Herrick in Philadelphia had a lot of her drawings. They told me they tried to support her. I was going to buy one from them made with crayons and pencil of a boiler and some pipes and some lettering that spelled out, “I got fucked in the G<ass by Con ed!” for four hundred dollars but then I needed the money to move and never got it.

I don’t remember any comments on June Leaf. My wife, or almost wife then, who was older than me, knew her from Chicago where first husband had gone to grad school at the Art Institute. Carol told me June Leaf had introduced Claes Oldenburg to the Chicago double fireplug. I became interested in her earlier when I saw June Leaf’s work in a reproduction in the New York Times, the 1973 review by John Canaday. Even a newsprint photograph telegraphed its messy honesty.

This drawing in the Times had a casualness that looked to me then like art school stuff but brought to some unimaginable higher level in its mix of overlapping images, some drawn from life, rambling lines of varied thickness, all with affecting directness and weird gravitas. Always the best experience in art is the one where you react by thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that!” This was one of those rare moments.

We saw the famous photograph of her in 1975 in the famous Avedon show at Marlborough gallery and I saw a drawing of hers at Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator Anne d'Harnoncourt’s house with tremulous figures expressing “Thank you Picasso” that was written on it. I can find no record of it online. While still in Philadelphia we decided to take a trip to Nova Scotia. I had Carol write to June that we were coming up there and would like to visit. She added that she saw her photograph and was surprised at how she had aged.

We got a postcard back. The image on it was of a hang glider in a large mixed atmosphere of sky, much like the backgrounds in her paintings and the glider looked like her flying figures. Her written message was friendly enough, but she was working on a show and at the end, “Now would not be a good time to visit. No, not now”. It only comes to me writing that maybe she thought we wanted to stay with them. We went to Cape Breton but did not seek her out. She told us later that we should have.

Cape Breton is a moody end of the world place but quite lively, full of fisherpersons and fiddlers. The sky at first is gothic and forbidding then strangely sunny then dark and rainy then the heavens open all in a few hours. It appeared clearly in her drawings and paintings for ever after and in her show that opened at Terry Dintenfass gallery in 1976. I remember her installation of it looked like she had stuffed everything in a bag and got on the plane and came to the city and had thrown it up on the walls, including at least one painting off the stretcher with the creases apparent. It was great. I recognized some of this same work in the current retrospective at the Grey Art Museum that had so affected me.

In 1976 it was mostly drawings, combined with Polaroids, painted over, scenes from Mabou, where she lived with Robert Frank, where there was some agreement in their treatment of the photograph as an object, that it can be included in a representative drawing, have words written on it, such as in How Can I Be Sure (1973) even hung on a clothesline and photographed in a landscape as seen on a page in Frank’s book, The Lines of My Hand (1972). Leaf drew images of Frank or herself or others or neighbors or an interior of their house or a long view out their window to the sea and distant embankments. There was always a nervous switching of markers, from pencil, charcoal, and ink to crayon to acrylic, and of styles, some almost in a Renaissance classicism to a clunky grossness. A drawing would be started anywhere on the paper and develop in any direction, with no conscious concern for composition or scale. There were often words or titles near top or bottom. They all seemed emotive in their brusqueness.

At this same moment (’76-’77) I had come across punk. When I came to New York I was amidst it. The various bands were the most interesting art. The problem, for me as for many burgeoning artists, was how to make its visual equivalent. And June Leaf and Lee Lozano became even more relevant, especially since I didn’t understand abstraction and June was doing this bitterly funny, various, defiant, life drawing. Leaf and Lozano had both thrown aside any niceties that were prescribed for painting and had shown direct feelings. Raw ones. Lots of them. Disgusted ones… The rock and roll connection isn’t too far-fetched, actually. After all, June’s husband made a film of the Stones.

After we got to New York we visited June one morning on Bleecker Street. We sat around. Robert was lying on a mattress watching a small black and white television. June was sorting through a large round cardboard container. They had just returned from Chicago and had seen her mother. June was exclaiming about the canned goods they had been given. Then she pulled out some plastic masks that I recognized from her drawings.

Seeming to intuit that I wanted one “You may look at them” she said. I said there were some masks in the ‘Thank you Picasso’ drawing that I saw. “Do you remember those thank you drawings I made, Robert? Where I thanked artists I admired?” “I would have said goodbye” he said. Then she pulled out some bent and cracked overexposed prints of Robert’s older photographs. I coveted them, too. “I don’t know what happened to them, keep them, collectors like that stuff.” Later he complained about the noise from the punk bands late at night from CBGB’S across the street. “Joe loves those bands” my wife said.

Another time we met June at Phebe’s on the Bowery. She was there with the artist Elizabeth Shreve, who complained about this meeting Carol that June had set up. “But she’s interested in fashion.” She said. June talked about H.C. Westermann. (“Cliff”) She thought he was a good model for young male artists because “He’s very masculine.”

A few years passed and I had split with my wife. She did go into fashion. I was working construction on Elizabeth Street around the corner from June and Robert’s place on Bleecker. The woman running the project had taken it over from her partner, who was in a coma after being stomped by a motorcycle gang. She was a friend of June’s, who would sometimes walk by when the crew, some fresh from prison, would sit outside eating lunch. Local neighborhood people would stand around touching their toes for hours in front of the catholic church that used to be across the street. June asked me about my wife.

After my answer, she said. “You’re more serious than her.” This was a kind thing to say: I didn’t exactly know what the problem had been. It was my first divorce, which always throws you. There was an artistic solidarity there, I guess. Another time she came by carrying some of her work. “I’m bringing it over to Ed’s”. “You sound like you’re throwing it in the dumpster” I said. “That’s what it feels like.”

Another long bunch of years went by, through the uncurtained window I saw her working away in the basement on Bleecker Street at least once and then at a Roy DeCarava opening I re-introduced myself and she said, dismissively, “Yeah, I know who you are”. And that was that. There’s an old saying about how one should avoid meeting your heroes. Maybe a better test is what you think of your heroes after you find out they don’t like you anymore. I shrugged it off. It did not affect my admiration. Nothing does if I take the artist seriously.

*

The current June Leaf exhibition at the Grey entitled “Shooting From the Heart” is arranged thematically “rather than chronologically to honor the artist’s cyclical returns to a core set of motifs” according to the press release. It begins with work from the sixties, which most viewers, including myself, were unaware of, and which put her on the map critically. This meant a lot more then, from what I have heard, as most artists didn’t expect many sales. As I went through the internet archive, she was well reviewed (and widely) for every New York outing through the sixties and most of the seventies.

This first room includes an early painting Arcade Women (1956) made up for the most part of crossed and receding vectors in an investigation of how she could utilize Renaissance pictorial perspective in depicting some seated figures that seem to be in a pinball machine, an early indication of her preoccupation with mechanisms. Across the room from it is a large figurative tableau of stuffed canvas figures, Ascension of the Pig Lady (1968) many in high relief, painted garishly, centered on a mostly three-dimensional woman image dressed as a waitress, roped and poised, ready for ascension by a few urbanized impish putti. A partially convex family of three, somewhat insipid looking, are on her right. The city at sunset is the painted background.

The curators used the term carnivalesque, and the surrounding work here has the variegated colors of carnival, the circus, Times Square. In the same room, there is a sculpture and a painting of Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine (1660). In the painted rendition After Vermeer: Gentleman And Lady (1966) is the first evidence of what became a mainstay, where the structural element of line is cleaved from an intensely multicolored ground that can function variously as indications of contour or aerial perspective or just run off in rivulets.

The relatively early drawings, Murder in the Bronx (1967) and 42^nd Street (1964), two works on paper, the latter interspersed with fragments of comic strip made with pastel and acrylic, the allover frenzied, impressionistic color sorted out with heavy black delineation. Like the large tableau, the works on paper make use of the frontal architecture of the theatre or the frieze but the individual marks are often delicate, its dazzling virtuosity under a cover of exultant grubbiness.

I was reading that in a letter to Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles wrote that “It must be real to me, otherwise I can’t write it.” Next to a drawing Microscope Head (1973) there is a quotation from her, (there are many throughout the show). She says she had a friend teaching Botany and she wanted to study microbiology so she got textbooks and two microscopes and when she looked through it she saw life as it was, a battleground of humans like in Chicago. “They’re mean! And they’re eating each other! And they’re shitting all over everything!”

June Leaf had to work all the time, every day. She was determined to figure everything out for herself and needed to harness information in her own way to do so. Whether it was the behavior of microbes or what her vision was for a particular work, some of which have dates over years. So many works that alternate media must have a been a way to register through the notation of a new thought as the individual piece progressed over time, trying to understand, what is was about, what its subject was. And each idea seemed to demand some new form. Bakhtin’s description of medieval carnival “demanded ever changing, playful, undefined forms” as elements of spectacle applies to her forcefully.

When I had made that first visit with her, I thought she was excited about the canned goods her mother gave her because it was food. But it must have been because the cans were material for sculpture. She had discovered, burning garbage one day in Mabou, that Nova Scotia Bold Apple Juice cans melted in the fire, and it led her to making sculpture from tin, first, tin cans. She eventually built a forge in Mabou and got some sheet metal, but in general she was DIY. She utilized carjacks and the base treadle from old sewing machines to activate her kinetic sculptures. Most of her small metal figures are carefully assembled, sort of woven, really, with wire.

These small sculptures, some mounted on twisting metal rods, as well as the fugitive, splotchy, one-off ink drawings that seem like studies for them, are the most touching, brilliant moments here. She had seen a Julio Gonzales exhibition in Chicago at one point in her life, and perhaps a thank you to him is appropriate. They share the elegance of a scale that approximates jewelry. June Leaf studied dance as a young woman and often referred to herself as a dancer that makes art. An intuitive understanding of the body is inherent throughout, married to a gutsy love of materials. It is a recalcitrant body of work and is perhaps not seen under the best conditions in this standard museum installation. But I am sure there is more to come. She was an extraordinary, underrecognized artist, someone living in the world but in some ways not being of the world at all. This is how artists telegraph reality to their audience, should they bother to pay attention. It’s the difference between art that performs itself and art that is itself. Leaf’s work is of course the latter.