It is regrettable that June Leaf has waited for so many years before holding her first one-man exhibition in New York City. The most recent was held in Chicago in 1965, and before that, a decade previously, in the same city. Owing to her enormous conscientiousness and reticence to show, the present exhibition is inevitably going to be viewed either as a raunchy reworking of Chicago nostalgia, similar, but enormously superior, to the Midwest photo albums of, say, Ellen Lanyon, or an even more rank and fetid rendition of Red Grooms. Both views probably have some basis in fact, yet, had June Leaf shown on her return from Paris, after her Fulbright year of 1958–59, I have little doubt that she would have been greeted as a master of what was.still waiting to be called Pop Art. She would have shared the dais with George Segal for her splintered view of a grim, at times sordid, but deeply felt human comedy. What was so important to June Leaf then—as it still is—was a seemingly regressive self-indulgence in a nostalgia which turns upon itself and which is, by instants, beautiful to eyes blinded by childish memory, and ugly on the empirical testimony of adult experience.
Thus, June Leaf double-deals in a simultaneous vision emphasizing those moments of infantile delight and stony amazement at the ambiguous beauty of the Carnival. There are jarring painterly tin-snipped fragments of that memory, mechanical, tin theaters hammered out of chromo-lithographed olive oil tins. Set in such booths are exquisitely macabre dolls, fingers curled up à la Cranach in parodies of elegance. These dolls tightrope walk or are introduced by a tricycling carny-spieler. In her most ambitious piece, Street Dream, The Ascension of the Pig Lady, a wretched porcine waitress is dragged smirking into a voyeuristic proscenium heaven. Observing this epiphany is a little girl rolling a hoop, the image of insouciant innocence, tinseled and driven crazy by the spectacle. The symbol of innocence (I refer the reader to de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street) is transformed in June Leaf’s work from idle anxiety projection into diaristic confession.
—Robert Pincus-Witten
