The exuberant work of an artist who lived in her husband's shadow shines at the Addison

Boston Globe

6 days ago

From left: June Leaf, "Shooting from the Heart," 1980; Robert Frank, "June's Hand and Sculpture, Mabou," circa 1980.
Frank E. Graham/Tim Nighswander
Words matter as much as things in 'June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart,' the exhibition's proper title and as good a teaser of Leaf's prodigious output as you'll find. It's also the title of a small 1980 sculptural work here, a ragged profile-in-tin silhouette of a woman in spiked heels, leaning precariously forward into the unknown, and loving it.
Words are important largely because the exhibition cannily uses so many of the artist's own throughout its display, vignettes of thought and feeling about works they're attached to. I don't know if I've ever been as drawn to read an exhibition as
much as
look at it, but from the first few phrases you encounter, you're hooked; Leaf, in her own words, is irresistible.
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Installation view of "June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart" at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Julia Featheringill
'The problem is what do you do when there aren't any angels around?' reads the text panel next to 'On the Pain of Growing a Wing,' 2016, a stirringly visceral charcoal drawing of three human figures shrouded in a gestural fury of ash-black swiped violently on paper. 'As soon as I put my brush to the canvas they're not there at all, ever, it's just when I hear that little tap of the brush. It comes, that part, like music.' Lovely.
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Another out-of-the-blue wonder: 'They are about the pleasures of focusing and not being distracted,' she wrote of 'Glasses,' 2003, a pair of spectacles, slight and wiry, with long cones tapering away from the lenses. Another set she made was fitted with mirrors, 'so you only see what is behind you. … Who needs to paint? Who needs to take photographs? You can just go around loving everything.'
June Leaf, 'On the Pain of Growing a Wing,' 2016.
Murray Whyte/Boston Globe
Not to put myself out of a job, but I'd actually prefer you to just read the show yourself, piece by piece, word by word. But maybe I can provide some connective tissue for Leaf's intoxicating verbal adventures. Leaf, who died just last year at the age of 94, was a heartfelt polymath bursting with feeling. Her deeply humane work — figurative, narrative, personal — began in 1950s Chicago, as the dominant strain of American art began to bend toward the abstract and esoteric. As she matured into the 1960s, conceptualism took hold, making her a tough fit with the reigning ethic, cerebral and bloodless as it was.
And, she was a woman — no small thing in a field dominated by men. 'Woman Machine,' a small 1951 collage here with three curvaceous female forms, semi-abstract and awash in muddy earthtones like a feminine version of Cubism, is a touchstone for all else here, I thought. 'An artist is given one thing in life to do,' are Leaf's words alongside it; 'mine was to recognize that so much of what my life was about was the love of women.'
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Installation view of "June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart" at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Julia Featheringill
A hard path in a male-dominated realm, to be sure. But for Leaf, it was no choice at all. She had ridden alongside the American avant-garde with her husband, Robert Frank, the iconic documentary photographer whose 1958 book, 'The Americans,' endures as a totem of the form. Frank, a Swiss immigrant, famously set out on a nation-spanning road trip in the mid-1950s, photographing an America post-World War II and pre-civil rights. His work, unflinching in its truth-telling, captured an uneasy nation riven with inequities — racial, social, economic — amid the sunny postwar optimism that still dominates nostalgia of the era.
In New York, Frank fell in with beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg,
.
(Frank died in 2019.)
In the midst of her husband's expanding notoriety, Leaf did what she always did: She worked, all day, every day, the spring-coil inside her propelling her into new experiments moment to moment. 'Shooting from the Heart' is disorienting in its material breadth, to the point of confounding.
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June Leaf, "Ascension of Pig Lady," 1968, installed in "June Leaf: Shooting from the Heart" at the Addison Gallery of American Art.
Julia Featheringill
Huge dioramas like 'Ascension of Pig Lady,' 1968, with its life-size figures cobbled from wood and tin and festooned in bright paint and oil stick, speak to Leaf's penchant for the theatrical; dozens of urgent, made-in-moments charcoal and pastel drawings — rough and visceral, like loose thoughts crash landing on paper — reveal the intimate process of an artist living in the immediate now.
Paintings, some vast, some minute, reveal a certain restlessness: 'Marat Sade Ballroom,' 1966, big, expressive and raw, meaty gorgons astride toy horses in an opulent ballroom, a scene of decadent rot; 'Arcade Women,' 1956, is its opposite, strict and grid-like, with its figures imprisoned by taut structural lines.
June Leaf, "White Scroll with Dancing Figures," 2008. © The Estate of June Leaf.
Johan Vipper
Sculptures, though, 'are my love affairs,' she wrote. And with this, where to begin? She created everything from tiny, intricate dioramas and scenes (a dizzying, intricate mirror-box version of Vermeer's 'Gentleman and Lady') to bolts of tin and steel, sparse and minimal, that seem to capture a single gesture ('To the Sky,' 2022, a spiral of steel stretching 8 and a half feet high, seems like the spring itself that propelled her forth). She made working spools hand-drawn with narrative scenes, meant to be hand-cranked; she crafted women warriors from bent and rusted window screen, spear-wielding and ready for battle.
Whatever material, medium, or idea, the wonders are endless; making for Leaf was ever and all. A 2019 video of her here, 'The Life With Others,' is a joy. In fact, the show would feel incomplete without it. It shows Leaf, by then in her 90s, toiling in her studio in the tiny Nova Scotia village of Mabou, where she and Frank moved in the 1970s. 'I have a painting from 1965 I still work on,' she says. 'I could take it out now and work on it.' For Leaf, art was a continuum, not a procedure of finished product. Nothing was ever over, which was how she liked it.
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Film still from 'The Life With Others," 2019.
Roman Chalupnik
I think it's telling that Frank is not mentioned by full name anywhere in the exhibition. He appears only once in her work here, at least by my count, in 'Robert Carrying Wood,' an expressive 1973 painting of a dissembling landscape overlaid with a shaky spiderweb. A small black-and-white Polaroid of Frank in that very act is stuck to the paper with paint.
'Shooting From The Heart,' bursting with warmth and charm, is as much an effort to pull Leaf out from Frank's shadow as it is to acknowledge her supercharged, uncategorizable oeuvre itself. Leaf, as usual, puts it best herself: 'I must have done something right in my long life as an artist,' she wrote not long ago, 'because the wind is behind me.' It was, and she did.
JUNE LEAF: SHOOTING FROM THE HEART
Through July 31. Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, 3 Chapel Ave., Andover. 978-749-4015,
Murray Whyte can be reached at