Lee Bontecou
Hammer Museum
From 1960 to 1971, Lee Bontecou showed consistently at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, where her large-scale wall reliefs were admired by critics and collectors alike. During this period, she also had several European museum shows and was included in Documenta 3. And she was often photographed, most famously by Ugo Mulas and Hans Namuth, but also by Diane Arbus. Despite these and other sanctions, by the ’70s Bontecou decided, for reasons that are not entirely known, to stop exhibiting her work. She left Castelli, moved out of New York City, and, it turns out, kept right on working. So the