The Loft-Waif

Getting up-to-date puts a strain on that slightly oldfangled institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and the strain shows like a taut cable in its 28th Biennial Exhibition. The manner of hanging the show is selfconscious: all the stripes in one room, all the figures in another, all the old auto parts and welded scrap metal in a third. The 145 paintings, chosen from among more than 4,000 submitted as colored slides, display a comic propensity for dated titles: November 25th, July III, 23 September 1959, July 20, '61, Between March and April. Even the winner of the $2,000 first prize belongs to this chronometric school of titling. Thursday, by Manhattan Painter Jack Tworkov. 62, is an old-fashioned abstraction of park-bench green and fire-engine red, organized, says Tworkov, "to achieve a certain dynamism you don't get in other styles of painting. If you don't like this kind of dynamism, you won't like the painting."

Old Laundry Bags. The most striking use of canvas in the entire show is not in a painting at all. Second-prize winner of $1,500 is an enormous construction of steel rods, copper wire and remnants of tarpaulin titled Untitled (57) by Lee Bontecou, 32. Combining symbolic materials on one hand and symbolic shapes on the other, Untitled (57) might well express the history of flight: the canvas wings and tenuous struts of Kitty Hawk are molded into the soaring pinions and howling jet nacelles of Idlewild. Bontecou, who looks as if she might have just stepped down from a Dutch Boy paint poster, is not so sure what it all means. "If I could say it, I'd write it down, but it's not like that," she says. "It's all back here," she adds, touching the back of her head.

Lee Bontecou, a blonde loft-waif of Lower Manhattan, used to do terra-cotta animals, turned to something called "soot drawings" while on a Fulbright in Rome, five years ago started making little boxes of metal rods with canvas sides stitched on with copper wire, treated with sizing for tautness, scorched with a blowtorch for blackness. From there, the elaborate wall structures grew. "I wanted to get sculpture off the floor--sculptures standing on the floor, they don't have anything to do with anything; they're so heavy and, well, I just wanted to get them off the floor." Since she was living over a laundry at the time, she had an ever-ready supply of discarded canvas laundry bags to work with. Since then, she has got canvas from other sources, although the post office curtly refused when she asked if she could have any old U.S. mailbags that might be lying around. Weekend street-scrounging and shopping tours to war-surplus stores provide the metal.

A Hidden Surprise. Some of Bontecou's structures contain sinister gratings behind which sawtoothed mouths grin; others resemble a U-2 photograph of a volcano with rice paddies terraced on its sides. Puncturing most of them is an orifice, a central feature around which her careful convolutions of canvas and metal swirl. In this vortex she often hides a surprise; a pure white throat may contrast with the khaki, grey, and smoky brown of the surrounding topography, or a piece of an old Wehrmacht helmet may gleam ominously. In her barny loft studio, she is currently at work on a winged skeleton, which already hovers above the sheet-metal welding floor, waiting for its skin grafts of canvas. "That one," she says proudly, "may really get off the ground."

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