June Leaf was a spirited artist with a fantastical touch
June Leaf, an idiosyncratic artist who trained in ballet as a child and went on to think of herself “as a dancer making art,” leaping between paper, canvas and metal while crafting fantastical pieces that seemed plucked from dreams and nightmares, died July 1 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94, and had continued to work from her New York studio, just off the Bowery, until two weeks before her death.
The cause was gastric cancer, said her friend and agent Andrea Glimcher.
Leaf’s life and art seemed to be in perpetual motion. She made expressionistic watercolors and ink drawings of winged goddesses, mechanical beings and totemic figures climbing the stairs. She crafted whimsical kinetic sculptures out of wood, wire and tin. She fashioned handheld pieces that could be turned with a crank or set off with a trigger. Even when she drew and sculpted skeletons, a macabre motif that she embraced late in life, her bony creations were far from ossified: Lounging around tables and chairs, they often seemed to be on the verge of dancing, like the drunken revelers she watched as a girl while hanging out at a tavern her parents ran in Chicago.
“She animated — with her deft hands and engineer’s imagination — every bit of her material: endless amounts of wire, piles of tin, magnets that would play hide and seek on many metal surfaces, and handmade gears,” Glimcher wrote in a tribute.”She ironed paper, sewed with wire, stitched canvases together to enlarge her picture plane; she drilled, hammered, soldered and welded. She was always working toward something so physically challenging to achieve.”
Interviewed by the New York Times in 2022, Leaf said she realized her calling during a teenage trip to Tucson, where she saw a performance by the writer, artist and mime Angna Enters: “She danced and painted on the stage. I remember thinking, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’”
While Leaf never embraced
performance art, she turned her studio into a private stage of sorts, filling each space with raw materials, unfinished pieces and sculptural inventions. Bouncing from project to project, she fashioned pieces that came across, as art critic Will Heinrich once put it, “less as objects than as urgent gestures, thoughtful but intuitive, that Leafjust happened to make with charcoal or sheet metal instead of with her body.”
Her pieces “have such an urgency about them, such a bloody physicality,” Washington Post art critic Paul Richard wrote in 1991, “that they feel as if they’ve been squeezed out of her flesh.”
Leaf made her solo-show debut in New York in 1968, at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in Midtown, and exhibited regularly until her death, including in a 1978 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and a 2016 survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A retrospective of her work will open next spring at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Massachusetts before traveling to New York and Ohio.
For years, however, her work was frequently overshadowed by that of her husband, photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. They split their time between New York and Nova Scotia, where they renovated a weather-beaten house (her agent described it as “an old 1890s fishing hut”) in Mabou, on the west coast of Cape Breton Island. The area was desolate — Frank described it as “a sad landscape” where “the sheep ate all the trees” — but proved fruitful for Leaf, who drew many of her neighbors and found inspiration from the coast, the beach and the hills.
Critics noted that the shapeshifting quality of her pieces, which eluded easy labels like pop or minimalist, may have made her a harder sell to audiences and dealers. The wildness of her work didn’t seem to help either.