June Leaf, a painter and sculptor whose whimsical, elegant and sinister explorations of the feminine paved the way for subsequent generations of feminist artists, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.
Her friend and agent at management company Hyphen, Andrea Glimcher, said she died of stomach cancer.
Mrs. Leaf worked outside the mainstream for much of her long career. Idiosyncratic and intuitive, she developed a unique blend of expressionism and primitivism, combined with a childlike sense of play. Her diverse output included toylike kinetic sculptures, frantic ink drawings with tense and tense lines, satirical social scenes, and grotesque skeletons painted on canvas or tin.
Female power was a recurring theme, initially represented by goddess-like figures with enormously expanded hips and breasts, women with bat-like wings or gyroscopic torsos, and later by a series of powerful metal heads reminiscent of tribal sculptures.
Her work never quite aligned with the dominant trends in contemporary art, and for much of Ms. Leaf’s life she lived in the shadow of photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. Nevertheless, she has won the admiration of a small but dedicated audience and a small following of critics and curators tuned in to her unique frequency.
Reviewing her first solo show in New York in 1968, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her work “astonishingly powerful and solid, the product of a naive imagination with a remarkable gift for projecting images that are simultaneously fierce and macabre, satirical and touching.” He added, “She is a rare presence in painting today: a poet with a taste for and a gift for complex imagery.”
She maintained her ability to surprise throughout her nearly 70-year career, splitting her time between Manhattan and the Mabou Mines in Nova Scotia. She exhibited at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York in the 1960s, in Chicago in 1970, and later at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York, which she joined in 1985.
June Leaf was born in Chicago on August 4, 1929, and grew up in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the city's west side. Her father, Phillip, a visionary and chronic gambler, helped run the family's tavern and liquor store. When he failed to make much money, his parents brought in his wife, Ruth (Ettleson) Leaf, to take a leading role in the business.
June began drawing as a child. In elementary school, she had a kind of epiphany when she approached her teacher's desk to show her a drawing based on the Bible story of Joseph and his brothers.
Her teacher pointed to the door so she could go to the bathroom. “I looked at her, I looked at my hands, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s it,’” Leaf recalled in a 2016 interview with the online publication Hyperallergic. “You can make something and see it, but you have to dedicate your whole life to it so that the world can see it.”
She studied ballet. Many of her works feature women doing pirouettes. She worked as a model before enrolling in the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1947. She dropped out and lived in Paris for a year before returning to the United States, where she earned a bachelor's degree in art education from Roosevelt University in 1954. That same year, she earned a master's degree in art education from the Institute of Design.
In Paris, Ms. Leaf spent time “bowing her head and looking at the textures and patterns of the pavement.”
“I was thinking about Mark Tobey and Paul Klee,” she told Hyperallergic. “I was still rooted in the abstract tradition. I was making little pictures with pebbles.”
She quickly developed an expressionistic style, working on paper with collage and watercolor and ink. A gallery of the grotesque emerged, to which she returned obsessively, including the mechanical woman symbolically represented in “Gyroscope Woman” (1952) and the goblin-like male figure scolding her in “Eat Too Much and You'll Be Paid!” (1962-63).
“I work with these dolls and I work with them until I’m free of them,” she told Hyperallergic. “I’m just grateful when I can free myself of these creatures that keep me stuck in place.”
After moving to New York in 1960, she married jazz musician Joel Press. The marriage ended in divorce. Her second husband, Mr. Frank, died in 2019. There are no living immediate family members.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ms. Leaf began making small tin and wire sculptures that sway and wiggle, including “The Painter” (1980), which depicts a woman sitting on a T-shaped stool on wire, wielding a baton-like paintbrush. Later, she began incorporating egg beaters and sewing machine treadles into her fantastical sculptures.
She also began one of her most distinctive series: the head of a woman with a calm, mask-like face, her skull elongated into a chignon. “Life is like this whole ecstasy burning itself into my brain,” she said in a 1991 interview with the Washington Art Project.
Her talent for the grotesque resurfaced in her later series of skeletons, some painted on canvas or metal, others made of thin wire, recalling the macabre atmosphere of the Belgian artist James Ensor.
Sexual politics continue to occupy her attention, most notably in the multimedia work Woman Drawing Man (2014), which features a nude man looking down in bewilderment as a kneeling woman touches his genitals with the tip of a pencil.
Ms. Leaf had a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1978, and a survey exhibition, “June Leaf: Thought Is Infinite,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan in 2016.
Ms. Leaf continues to actively exhibit her work. In late 2022, an exhibition of her drawings, paintings, and sculptures was held at Ortuza Projects, a gallery in Tribeca. Her work is currently on view at the James Cohan Gallery in Manhattan and the Winter Street Gallery in Edgartown, Massachusetts.
Ms. Leaf's agent said her work will be the subject of a traveling retrospective at museums in Massachusetts, New York and Ohio in 2025 and 2026.
Alexandra E. Petri Contribution Report.