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Welcome to the Becthler Museum of Modern Art!
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a 36,500-square-foot (3,390 m2) museum space dedicated to the exhibition of mid-20th-century modern art. The modern art museum is part of the new Levine Center for the Arts in Uptown. The museum building was designed by architect Mario Botta.
The museum is named after the family of Andreas Bechtler, a Charlotte resident and native of Switzerland who assembled and inherited a collection of more than 1,400 artworks created by major figures of 20th-century modernism. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened to the public on January 2, 2010, with former mayor of Charlotte Anthony Foxx and Andreas Bechtler in attendance.
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JOHN DOE
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Welcome to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art!
Welcome to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art which opened its doors to the public on January 2, 2010.
The Bechtler is a jewel of a museum, only the second in this country designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. It is intimate in scale, delightfully arresting in its spaces and vistas and simple and elegant in its materials.
The collection presented includes works by the most important and influential artists of the mid 20th century including Miró, Giacometti, Picasso, Calder, Hepworth, Nicholson, Warhol, Tinguely, Ernst, Le Corbusier, Chillida and many others. Only a handful of these wonderful artworks have been on public view in the United States. Until now, the collection was privately held by the Bechtler family of Switzerland.
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art would not exist without the extraordinary generosity of art patron Andreas Bechtler. Inspired by his parents, Andreas made his remarkable collection (amassed by the Bechtler family over 70 years) available for all to engage – whether for solace and reflection, inspiration and surprise or for challenge and self-discovery. These works and their many stories will reward any number of visits to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. It’s my hope that visitors will come to form their own relationship with this remarkable art and the influential artists who created it.
JOHN DOE
Licensed Real Estate Salesperson
Tlf.: +11 111 111 111
jhondoe@realestate.com
www.loremipsum.com
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Welcome to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art which opened its doors to the public on January 2, 2010.
The Bechtler is a jewel of a museum, only the second in this country designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. It is intimate in scale, delightfully arresting in its spaces and vistas and simple and elegant in its materials.
The collection presented includes works by the most important and influential artists of the mid 20th century including Miró, Giacometti, Picasso, Calder, Hepworth, Nicholson, Warhol, Tinguely, Ernst, Le Corbusier, Chillida and many others. Only a handful of these wonderful artworks have been on public view in the United States. Until now, the collection was privately held by the Bechtler family of Switzerland.
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art would not exist without the extraordinary generosity of art patron Andreas Bechtler. Inspired by his parents, Andreas made his remarkable collection (amassed by the Bechtler family over 70 years) available for all to engage – whether for solace and reflection, inspiration and surprise or for challenge and self-discovery. These works and their many stories will reward any number of visits to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. It’s my hope that visitors will come to form their own relationship with this remarkable art and the influential artists who created it.
Germaine Richier was a French sculptor best known for her figurative bronze sculptures created between 1934 and her death in 1959. Born in Grans, a small town in the South of France, she was eleven years old when World War I erupted in July 1914. After the war, she enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, where she studied sculpture with Louis-Jacques Guigues, a former assistant to Auguste Rodin. In 1926, Richier completed her formal studies and relocated to Paris, where she became an apprentice to the influential French sculptor, Antoine Bourdelle. After Bourdelle’s death in 1929, she married his assistant, the Swiss-German sculptor, Otto Bänninger, and established her own studio where she continued to carve in both wood and stone and mold and model clay after live models. In September 1939, Richier and her husband were on vacation in Switzerland when World War II was declared, and they made a split-second decision to remain in Zurich for the duration of the war. During the six years they lived in Switzerland, Richier’s practice shifted dramatically and she began to explore more fantastic themes and subject matter. In 1946, when Richier returned to Paris after the war, she experienced an unprecedented burst of creativity.
Her bronze sculpture, La Sauterelle, grande, on view in the center of this gallery, is based on an earlier work created in 1944 titled, La Sauterelle, moyenne, one of Richier’s first deviations from strictly figurative subject matter. La sauterelle is the French word for grasshopper and also a common slang word, in late 19th and early 20th century France, for both a prostitute and a “picky woman.” In Richier’s sculpture, a hybrid human-animal figure crouches, confronting the viewer with raised hands. Upon one palm is inscribed the outline of a heart.
Also on view in this exhibition are six aquatints by Richier created for a collected volume of poetry by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s best-known poem is Une Saison en Enfer, or A Season in Hell, published in 1873. Bernard Mathieu, one of Rimbaud’s translators, described the poem as, “a brilliantly near-hysterical quarrel between the poet and his other.” This collected volume also includes an incomplete suite of forty-two prose poems by Rimbaud, titled Illuminations, believed to have been written mostly in 1874. Richier’s accompanying hallucinatory images explore themes present in Rimbaud’s poetry such as metamorphosis, nature, creation, and destruction. Her decision to execute these prints utilizing the technique of aquatint is particularly noteworthy. Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. It was most widely used between 1770 and 1830 but saw a revival period in the late nineteenth-century with artists such as Eduard Manet and Mary Cassatt.
Located in front of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the museum’s largest piece in the collection is Niki de Saint Phalle’s Le Grand Olseau de Feu sur l’Arche (French); English translation The Large Bird of Fire on an Arch. Or as Charlotteans commonly refer to it, The Firebird. The only public sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle on the east coast, this work of art stands 17-feet-5-inches high, 11-feet-wide, 5-feet in diameter, weighs 1,433 pounds, and is covered in an estimated 7,500 mirrors. This monumental outdoor sculpture was completed in 1991, purchased by Andreas Bechtler in 2006, and installed on the museum’s outdoor plaza in October 2009.
© 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation. All Rights Reserved / ARS, NY / ADAGP, Paris.
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, located in Charlotte, North Carolina, is designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta. The Bechtler’s architecture displays a sculptural power that connects to the dynamic art inside it. Botta is considered one of the world’s foremost architects whose career spans a variety of building types. He has accepted only two commissions in the United States: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art – iconic structures that enhance each cityscape.
Maja Godlewksa is a Polish artist and currently Associate Professor and the Area Coordinator for Painting in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the Academy of Fine and Design Arts, Wroclaw, Poland. Her large-scale paintings compel a sense of impermanence and instability and are influenced by her travels.
Of the works held in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, she said, “I was looking at natural forms and phenomenon. I was fascinated by the fact that whatever we look at, whatever we see or encounter, it’s in a constant state of flex- that nothing stays the same from second to second, it changes.” Her recent research has focused on the spectacle of global tourism, the gaze of the tourist, visual consumption of nature, and a phenomenology of landscape.
Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker best known for her monumental sculptures such as Le Grand Oiseau de Feu sur l’Arche (The Firebird), 1991, permanently on the plaza of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. Saint Phalle was born in Paris, one year after Black Tuesday, the major American stock market crash that occurred in the fall of 1929, which greatly affected the French economy. Within months of her birth, her father’s finance company closed, and her parents were forced to relocate to New York for work, leaving her with her grandparents in France. Around 1933, she joined her parents in Connecticut, where her father managed the American branch of the Saint Phalle family’s bank.
Saint Phalle experienced a traumatic childhood. Her mother was temperamental and violent, and she later revealed that she had suffered years of sexual abuse from her father. During her late teens, she became a fashion model appearing on the cover of LIFE magazine and French Vogue, and at the age of eighteen, she married the American writer, Harry Mathews. Their first child, Laura was born in 1951, and soon thereafter, they moved to Paris where Saint Phalle began to make art. The family spent the next decade moving around Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle, settling for some time in Spain where her son Philip was born in September 1954 and where she was exposed to the work of Antonio Gaudi. Her first exhibition was held in Switzerland in 1956 and in 1957 she met the Swiss sculptor and Bechtler Collection artist, Jean Tinguely, who would become her second husband in 1971.
Saint Phalle’s earliest mature works were a series of sculptures she called Tirs (Shots), dense assemblages of found objects painted white that she, or a collaborator, would shoot with a rifle. These extreme expressions of violence attracted significant media attention, catapulting Saint Phalle to international fame. In 1964, Saint Phalle began to make a series of works that explored the various roles and stereotypes of women. In 1964, inspired by the pregnant body of her close friend, Clarice Rivers, Saint Phalle’s sculptures became more joyful and colorful, exuding a more optimistic view of the position of women in society. She called these works “nanas,” a French slang word for a broad or a chick. Vive Moi (Long Live Me), 1968, on view in this exhibition, is an exceptional example of her work from this period.
From 1972 until her death in 2002, she produced approximately 3,000 sculptures, ranging from monumental outdoor works, such as The Firebird, to small editions. From 1978-1995 she worked on The Tarot Garden, a massive sculpture garden in Italy, that contains sculptures representing the twenty-two cards of Major Arcana found in the tarot deck of cards. Saint Phalle’s friend and the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s architect, Mario Botta, built a fortress-like protective wall and a porthole-shaped gateway at the garden’s entrance. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems, attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks. In 1994, she moved from Paris to La Jolla, California for health reasons, where she lived and worked until her death.
Also on view in this exhibition are three painted polyester sculptures by Saint Phalle from her series Last Night I had a Dream, a modular grouping of sculptures that included many elements from her earlier life and dreams.
“I couldn’t get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I
stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles, triangles, and the sensations they give rise to . . . It is untrue that my work depends on any literary impulse or has any illustrative intention. The marks on the canvas are sole and essential agents in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting.”
Bridget Riley is an English painter best known for her singular geometric abstract paintings, often described as op art. Although born in London, she was raised in Cornwall after her father, a member of the Territorial Army, was mobilized during World War II. She attended Cheltenham Ladies College from 1946–1948 before studying art at Goldsmith’s College 1949–1952 and the Royal College of Art 1952–1955. After graduating from the RCA, she worked as an art teacher for children at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and the Loughborough School of Art. Between 1956 and 1958, she nursed her father, who was involved in a serious car accident, and suffered a severe breakdown as a result of the experience. Following her father’s death, she worked in a glassware shop and eventually joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency as an illustrator, where she was employed until 1962. Her earliest mature paintings from the 1950s were figurative and semi-impressionist in style, but after encountering the work of the post-impressionist painter, Georges Seurat in 1958, she began to utilize a pointillist technique, where small distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.
In 1960, Riley developed her signature abstract style, first with black and white geometric patterns that produced a disorienting effect on the eye. Riley made her first stripe paintings in 1967 and continued to make paintings in this format until the mid-1980s. Representative of Riley’s mature style, Fade, 1972, illustrates the development of Riley’s color explorations in the 1970s. Compared to her early stripe paintings from 1967–69, the overall effect of Fade is one of psychologically evocative atmospheric color. It is a transition work between her early paintings and those of the late 1970s, which were bolder and less perceptually disorienting. Today, Riley is internationally recognized as one of the most important and influential living artists, with a prolific career spanning seven decades.
Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector best known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism and her eponymous New York City gallery. From an early age, Parsons knew that she wanted to dedicate her life to the visual arts. She moved to Paris in 1919 to enroll in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where she studied with the sculptors Antoine Bourdelle and Ossip Zadkine alongside Bechtler Collection artist, Alberto Giacometti. In 1929, her family lost their wealth due to the stock market crash, known as Black Tuesday, and she returned to the United States soon, thereafter, first settling in California, where she supported herself by painting portraits and working at a liquor store. In 1936, Parsons returned to New York City and had her first solo exhibition, which was reviewed favorably. Following this exhibition, the gallery owner offered her a job, which eventually led to her opening her own gallery, The Betty Parsons Gallery, in late 1946. After Peggy Guggenheim shuttered her gallery, The Art of This Century, in 1947, Parsons became the only dealer willing to represent artists such as Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Rothko, and Robert Rauschenberg. As her gallery grew, she brought in new artists such as Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, Richard Tuttle, and many other significant artists including Lee Hall whose work is also on view in this exhibition.
Throughout her life, even during the period when she was running her gallery, Parsons never stopped making art, though she was very private about her own work from the late 1940s forward. In 1966, she moved away from easel painting and began to make painted wood sculptures such as the ones on view in this exhibition. Playful, brightly colored, and primitively assembled from driftwood washed ashore by the ocean near her weekend home in Long Island, these works defy classification and have no precedent in her practice. To create these works, Parsons would work alone in her studio, intuitively covering the found wood in bright colors and stripes. Once painted, she would lay the wood pieces on her studio floor and decide how to join them together, rearranging them until she got it “just right.” The painter Cleve Gray referred to these works as “tangible messages from an unyielding spirit.” This is the first time that the works on view in this gallery have been publicly shown.
Vera Isler-Leiner was a German artist best known for her portrait photography. Born in Berlin to a Polish father and a Hungarian mother, she was sent to Switzerland in 1936 to ensure her safety during World War II. In 1942, both of her parents were murdered during the Holocaust in the Belzec extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Their deaths would haunt her for the rest of her life. After graduating high school in 1950, she trained as a medical technician in the University Hospital in Bern. In 1953, after her first daughter, Franziska was born she found creative freedom in creating objects using composite materials. In 1963, after the birth of her second daughter, Katharina, Isler-Leiner began to publicly show her work in solo and group exhibitions. From 1963–68, she created textile objects initially made of brightly colored wool then later, in a much darker color palette. In these works, she repeated forms, layered, and glued materials such as medical cardboard waste, wood, aluminum, and concrete into geometric reliefs.
Programmierung 032/70, 1970 is an excellent example of her work from this period and is composed of painted cut paper on wood. In the late 1970s, Isler-Leiner would move away from these composite constructions and create a large body of work exploring the subject of genetics and genetic research. Following a six-month stay in the United States in 1980, she began to focus almost exclusively on photography. Throughout the 1990s, Isler-Leiner developed her own style of portrait photography, creating large-scale portraits of famous artists in their own environment and published numerous books about art, artists, and architecture. From 2000 onwards, she created video works. In one titled Bits + Pieces, Isler-Leiner filmed the transformation of 42nd Street in Manhattan, crafting a thoughtful meditation on social upheaval and urban development.
Isabel Quintanilla was a Spanish Realist best known for her still life and landscape paintings. Quintanilla was born in Madrid in 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, the culmination of decades of swings of the political compass in Spain. In the Spanish Civil War, Republicans loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with communist and syndicalist anarchists, fought against a revolt by the Nationalists, an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists, led by a military group among whom, General Francisco Franco soon achieved a dominant role. During this war, her father, a Spanish Republican commandant, was murdered in the Valdenoceda prison camp by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco. In 1953, at the age of fifteen, she enrolled in the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes where she studied fine arts. Between 1960–1964, Quintanilla traveled to Rome with her future husband, the Italian artist, Francisco López, where she immersed herself in the study of Imperial Roman painting and classical sculpture. In the late 1960s, she exhibited her work in Italy and Germany to favorable reviews. Later in life, she decided to return to school and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1982. Quintanilla was known for her refined technique and ability to capture texture and light. On view in this exhibition is a drawing from 1974 depicting the Alps, a mountain range system that stretches approximately 750 miles across eight Alpine countries including France, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, and Slovenia.
Barbara Hepworth was an English artist best known for her biomorphic sculptures in bronze and stone. In 1921, Hepworth received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, where she completed her studies in 1924. The following year, she was a runner-up for the Prix-de Rome, which the sculptor and her future husband, John Skeaping, won. Together they traveled to Siena and Rome, marrying in Florence in 1925. In 1929, their son Paul was born. Two years later, Hepworth met and fell in love with the English painter, and Bechtler Collection artist, Ben Nicholson, however, both were still married at the time. After divorcing Skeaping, Hepworth gave birth to triplets in 1934 with Nicholson. She said of the experience, “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one’s mind.”
In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, Hepworth and Nicholson relocated to St. Ives with their children. While residing there, Hepworth began to make her first stringed sculptures of which she said, “the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.” On view nearby, is Curved Form Porthmeor, a painting which references Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives. In 1950, Hepworth’s work was exhibited in the British Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale and the following year, two early public commissions, Contrapuntal Forms, and Turning Forms were exhibited at the Festival of Britain. During this period, Hepworth and Nicholson divorced and her eldest son was killed in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand.
In 1958, Hepworth was commissioned by the British Council’s Lilian Somerville to create a large site-specific work for the State House in London. Created in 1958–59 and erected in 1960, Meridian is an abstract sculpture comprised of ribbons of bronze that unravel in an elongated spiral to establish a triangular outline. The ribbons curve and turn in space and coil outward at the center. Hepworth intended for the sculpture’s fluid lines to contrast with the rigidity of the building’s rectilinear architecture. A meridian is a great circle on the surface of the earth passing through the poles or the half of such a circle included between the poles. The final model for Meridian was made with an armature of expanded aluminum to which plaster was applied and cast as a unique bronze by Susse Frères in Paris. Hepworth’s Swiss dealer, Charles Lienhard, suggested casting the five-foot preliminary plaster model for Meridian as “suitable for a garden,” and Hepworth obliged, casting the work in an edition of six in bronze which were sold directly through her gallery in Zurich. The Bechtler family purchased one of the editions from Lienhard’s gallery in Zurich in 1961 and it was installed in their yard next to Germaine Richier’s La Sauterelle, grande for many decades.
Cornelia Forster was a Swiss artist best known for her surrealist paintings and illustrations. She was born in Zollikon, a municipality in the canton of Zurich, to an Italian father and a Swiss mother who were both passionate about art and music. In 1922, Forster enrolled in the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich where she studied interior architecture with Wilhelm Kienzle, a well-known Swiss interior designer. A Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) was a vocational arts school that existed in German-speaking countries from the mid-nineteenth century. In 1926, Forster enrolled in the Academy of the Grande Chaumière in Paris where she studied with the French cubist painter, André Lhote, and the Swiss sculptor, Karl Geiser. Around 1935, Forster returned to Zurich and devoted her time to handicrafts such as weaving and embroidery to support her family during World War II. After the war, Forster formally studied weaving at André Lurçat’s Atelier in Saint-Céré, France, and began to publicly exhibit her work in Switzerland. In 1955, she relocated to Ticino, an Italian-speaking region in southern Switzerland, where she resided until her death in 1990.
On view, to the right, are two groupings of prints by Forster, based on sketches she made in 1933–1934, depicting various subjects, including her children, Rosine and Cornelius, female goddess figures from Greek and Roman mythology, and magic. Many of the prints on view explore surrealistic subject matter and are closely related to Forster’s paintings of the 1930s. Also on view nearby, are two paintings from the private collection of Vivi Bechtler-Smith, daughter of the Bechtler Museum’s founder, Andreas Bechtler, and granddaughter of Hans and Bessie Bechtler. Cornelia Forster was a close friend of the Bechtler family, who first met the artist in the early 1950s in Zurich. In the archive of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, there are numerous letters between Hans Bechtler and Cornelia Forster from the 1950s. In one letter, dated August 5, 1955, Hans Bechtler writes to Forster, “I am happy to hear you have decided to build yourself a little house. It proves that you are starting over and have courage for the future.” In this letter, he writes that he and Bessie would like to purchase something of use for her new home. This letter, which has never been publicly displayed, demonstrates the generosity of spirit exemplified by the Bechtler family
Audrey Flack is an American artist best known for her Photorealist paintings and monumental public sculptures that engage with explicitly feminist subject matter and themes. Alongside Mary Cassatt, Flack is one of the first women to be included in the important art history survey text, Janson’s History of Art. Born in Manhattan, she attended New York’s High School of Music and Art before studying at Cooper Union and later, at the invitation of Bechtler Collection artist, Josef Albers, at Yale University where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1952. Flack’s early work in the 1950s was painted in the abstract expressionist style, but gradually during the 1960s, Flack began to develop the Photorealist style for which she is best known. Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing, and other graphic media, in which an artist works from a photograph and attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium.
Flack has spoken publicly about the challenges of being an artist and having children, especially a child with autism. She said of her experience as an artist with children, “if you had a child, you just were totally dismissed. Then you were just a woman. A mother.” So, she never mentioned her children and quietly struggled and persevered for decades, often working late at night when her children were asleep. In the early 1980s, she began to make sculptures, accepting numerous public commissions throughout the United States. For her subject matter, she almost exclusively chose powerful female figures from history and mythology. Flack is currently in the process of forming a namesake foundation that will, as part of its mission, offer support to visual artists challenged by the demands of caring for children with disabilities.
In 1988, the Rock Hill Economic Development Corporation commissioned Flack to create a civic monument for the city of Rock Hill. Flack was selected for her realistic style and ability to combine personal artistic skills in a collaborative way with the architect and the community at large. Designed by the architect Michael Gallis, Gateway to Rock Hill was created to commemorate a community-wide planning process called “Empowering the Vision.” For the Gateway, Flack created four sculptures of the goddess, Civitas, to flank the four corners of the intersection. Former (and first female) Mayor of Rock Hill, Betty Jo Rhea stated, “[Flack’s monument] is dedicated to the civic spirit of all citizens past and present who labored to make Rock Hill a better place.” On view in this exhibition is Model for Civitas, a polychromed plaster model of the head of the final sculptures at Rock Hill. Flack intended for the features of the face to connote strength, character, and beauty, coupled with blend of southern tranquility and gentleness. The hair, headdress, ribbons, medallions, and rose are all cultural symbols of civility and a sense of positive well-being.
Warja Lavater was a Swiss artist and illustrator best known for her accordion-fold books that retell classic fairy tales with symbols rather than words. Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland during World War I. Her mother, Mary LavaterSloman, was a prolific author who published over twenty books, primarily in the genres of biography and history. Lavater spent her childhood in Moscow and Athens before returning to Zurich to attend the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich where she studied graphic design. After completing her studies in 1937, Lavater opened her own design studio with her future husband and Bechtler Collection artist, Gottfried Honneger. Her most well-known design from this period is the three keys logo of Schweizerischen Bankverein (Swiss Bank Corporation), which is now used by its successor, Swiss global financial services company UBS Group AG. After marrying Honegger in 1940, they had two daughters, Bettina (1943) and Cornelia (1944). From 1944 to 1958, Lavater worked for the young person’s magazine, Jeunesse, designing the covers and supplying illustrations.
In 1958, Lavater and Honneger moved to New York City with their children where she designed scientific illustrations for Dell Publishing Visual series. During this period, she was greatly influenced by American street advertising and began to utilize pictograms as graphic representations of linguistic elements in her work. Further inspired by the prefabricated accordion-fold books used by calligraphers in New York City’s Chinatown, she began to construct the folded illustrated books for which she is now best known. These experimental and playful stories caught the attention of the publications department of the Museum of Modern Art and in 1962 MoMA, published her interpretation of William Tell. As a result of the success of this publication, she would go on to publish dozens of books with publishers around the world, including Basilius Press and Editions Maeght.
Lavater often referred to herself as a Bildstellerin, or “picture writer,” rather than an artist. She described her pictorial language as a need to express certain attitudes and actions not through illustration but through pictograms. In 1995, at the age of eighty-two, she translated her compiled inventory of pictograms into a series of six digital animation films set to music by French composer, Pierre Charvet. On view in this exhibition are a selection of her “Imageries” the term she used to describe her accordion-fold artists’ books.
Elizabeth R. Turk is a contemporary American artist best known for her elaborate marble sculptures. Currently, she splits her time between a studio in Santa Ana, California, and New York City. Turk is a MacArthur Fellow, an Annalee & Barnett Newman Foundation recipient, and a Smithsonian Fellow. She received her Bachelor of Arts in 1983 from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and her Master of Fine Arts in 1994 from the Maryland Institute of College of Art, Rinehart School of Sculpture. She views her practice as a meditation and a search for the boundaries of paradox. Inspired by the natural world, her sculptures reference its myriad of organic structures.
The untitled figurative bronzes on view in this exhibition are from her 2002–2003 series Poppyfields which references World War I (1914–1918) and its significant toll on humanity. During World War I, over a period of four years, 8.5 million soldiers died and the landscape of Western Europe, where most of the fighting took place, was devastated. Following the war, out of the ravaged landscape, grew the poppy flower. This powerful symbol of regeneration inspired a soldier named John McCrae to write a poem titled “In Flanders Field,” where he channeled the voice of the fallen soldiers buried under the poppy fields. This poem became one of the most famous works of art to emerge from World War I, and soon after it was published, poppies became a sign of faith and remembrance of the sacrifices of the war. In this work, Turk combines these two stories of death and rebirth, suggesting an enduring hope.
Also on view is a small pink marble sculpture of a belly button. This work references the significance that many cultures and religions place on the navel. The Ancient Greeks saw mountains and volcanoes as the navels of the earth. Buddhists believe that the navel is the seat of the mind. Hindus see the navel as the source of life and creativity.
Lee Hall was an American artist, educator, and writer born in Lexington, North Carolina. Hall received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) in 1955, where she was classmates with Maud Gatewood whose work is also on view in this exhibition. As a student in Greensboro, Hall became fascinated with the New York gallery scene, which she was exposed to through her professor and mentor, John Opper. In 1957, Hall moved to New York City where she maintained a studio while pursuing both her M.A. and Ph.D. at New York University. In 1965, she received her doctorate after successfully defending her dissertation titled, “RealityConcepts Expressed in American Abstract Painting, 1945-1960.”
In 1960, Hall embarked on a successful career as an educator, but continued to paint and exhibit her work, most notably at the Betty Parsons Gallery. After teaching at various colleges on the East Coast, she joined the faculty of Drew University in New Jersey. In 1974, Hall was appointed to the Presidency of Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, a position she held from 1974–1983. In addition to working as an educator, Hall was also the author of numerous books, including Betty Parsons: Artist Dealer Collector (1991), Common Threads: A Parade of American Clothing (1992), Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage (1993), Olmstead’s America: An Unpractical Man and His Vision of Civilization (1995), and Athena: A Biography (1997).
Like Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, Hall was one of a small minority of women who worked and exhibited alongside the lionized male artists of the post-war period. She is best known for her large abstract landscape paintings, which she regularly showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1970s to favorable reviews. In the September 1975 issue of ARTnews magazine, Margaret Betz wrote, “meditation is essential to the appreciation of Lee Hall’s large canvases. These complex works belie the elementary nature of their purely formal components – the shapes of triangle and rectangle, and the colors of the earth and mineral – for there is a representational landscape image here which repeats itself in all the paintings to become almost a devotional image.” Over time, Hall became disillusioned with the art world’s celebrity culture and stopped exhibiting her work in the final decades of her life before leaving her estate to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.
On view in this gallery are a series of drawings and paintings by Hall ca. 1958–1982. The earliest works on view are a series of drawings created by Hall during a trip to Ocracoke Island when she was twenty-four years old and a four-part, painting titled Four Saints in One Act, 1959 which references an opera by the American composer Virgil Thompson (featuring a libretto by Gertrude Stein) titled Four Saints in Three Acts. Written in 1927-28, Four Saints in Three Acts premiered in 1934 with an all-Black cast, with singers directed by Eva Jessye, a prominent black choral director. Hall most likely heard the opera during a radio broadcast in 1942 or 1947 and perhaps attended a performance when it was revived on Broadway in 1952. Hall’s homage to their opera was created when she was pursuing her Ph.D. at New York University and is influenced by Abstract Expressionism, the dominant style of the period and the subject of her dissertation. Most of the works in this gallery are paintings on linen or duck created between 1960–1982. These paintings represent the works that Hall was best known for during her lifetime and many of the works on view were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1970s.
Alicia Penalba was an Argentinian sculptor, tapestry designer, and textile artist born in San Pedro, Buenos Aires. Penalba’s childhood was defined by abuse and neglect and she escaped by enrolling at the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and later securing a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, Penalba also studied with the Belarusian sculptor, Ossip Zadkine, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In the early 1950s, Penalba began creating the large totemic bronze abstract sculptures for which she is best known. In 1959, her work was included in Documenta II in Kassel, an important regularly occurring exhibition for modern and contemporary art. Two years later, she was awarded the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial, and in 1968, her work was included in a major exhibition of work by Latin American artists at the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which led to a major retrospective of her work there in 1977. In the 1970s, Penalba began making smaller editioned works to reach a broader audience. Sadly, her life was cut short in 1982 when she and her life partner, the French photographer, Michel Chilo, were tragically killed in an automobile accident.
Materials in the archive of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, including letters and photographs, demonstrate a close relationship between Penalba and Bechtler family. In addition to purchasing Incantatoire, 1961, a significant early bronze wall sculpture, the family also purchased a number of smaller works intended to be worn as jewelry and two works on paper. Correspondence and photographs in the Bechtler Museum’s archive indicate that the family was actively pursuing additional acquisitions of her work before her death.
Support for Twentieth Century Women is generously provided by Truist, Bellecapital, Flagship Healthcare Properties, Classica Homes, and Brighthouse Financial. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is supported, in part, with funding from the Arts and Science Council, and the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural & Cultural Resources.
Artwork credit:
- Germaine Richier, La Sauterelle, 1946, sculpture © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
- Katharina Sallenbach, Relief 1961, 1961, sculpture Copyright for this work may be controlled by the artist, the artist's estate, or other rights holders. See our Terms page at Bechtler.org for more information.
- Lisbeth Bissier, Untitled Textile, ca. 1940
- Isabel Quintanilla, Untitled Drawing of the Alps, 1974, Drawing © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid
- Méret Oppenheim, The Parapapillonneries Portfolio, Print 1975, © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zürich
- Barbara Hepworth, Garden Sculpture (Model for Meridian), 1958, Sculpture © Bowness, Hepworth Estate
- Maja Godlewska, The Language, 1998, painting
- Hedda Sterne, Untitled (Nude portrait of Betty Parsons)
- Betty Parsons
- Bridget Riley, Fade, 1972, painting © Bridget Riley 2021. All Rights reserved.
- Niki de Saint Phalle, Vive moi “Long Live Me”, 1968, sculpture © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation. All Rights Reserved / ARS, NY / ADAGP, Paris
- Vera Isler-Leiner, Programmierung 032/70, 1970, collage © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich
- Maud Gatewood, Absolution: Victims Becoming a Monument, 1989
- Cornelia Forster © 2021 Estate of Cornelia Forster
- Elizabeth R. Turk, “Untitled (from Poppyfields)” and “Belly button”
- Warja Lavator © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zürich
- Audrey Flack , Civitas (Model for Rock Hill), 1990
- Alicia Penalba, Incantatoire, 1961, sculpture © 2021 Archive of Alicia Penalba (AAP), Argentina
- Lee Hall
Artist Image credit:
Cornelia Forster, 1933, Courtesy Vincenzo Altepost
Lee Hall, circa 1975, Courtesy The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art
Photograph of Barbara Hepworth with Model for Meridian, 1960, Photograph by R.W. Kolchalski. Courtesy Sophie Bowness, Hepworth Estate © Bowness, Hepworth Estate
Twentieth Century Women is the first significant exhibition in the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art’s eleven-year history to focus on the artistic achievements of women in the collections of the Bechtler museum and the Bechtler family. Featuring over one hundred artworks by twenty-two artists, this exhibition explores a century of artistic production and the ways that women fit into, challenge, and redefine the narrative of modern art. Alongside paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, prints, and artists’ books, biographical information, and material from the Bechtler’s library and archive are featured.
Maud Gatewood was an American painter from Yanceyville, North Carolina. She is considered to be one of North Carolina’s most acclaimed painters. Gatewood attended the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), where she was classmates with Lee Hall whose work is also on view in this exhibition. Gatewood later received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Ohio State University. In 1963, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study art in Austria under the renowned Expressionist painter and Bechtler Collection artist, Oskar Kokoschka. After returning to North Carolina, she taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte until 1973, when she left her position to dedicate her time to painting. During her lifetime, Gatewood exhibited her work nationally and received numerous awards, including an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972. Over the course of her career, Gatewood experimented with a range of styles, including realism and abstraction in various media. A feminist who organized around health, gender, and socioeconomic issues, Gatewood’s subject matter frequently explored challenging, and often controversial for their time, social issues.
In Absolution: Victims Becoming a Monument, Gatewood depicted people of different races, sexes, and ages dead and dying, isolated in a concrete cell – a striking visual comment on the ongoing AIDS epidemic and the toll it had on human life. The AIDS epidemic had a disproportionate impact on certain populations, specifically gay and bisexual men, and racial and ethnic minorities. In 1989, the number of reported AIDS cases in the United States reached 100,000, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), pushed to expand the prescription of the antiretroviral treatment AZT, which had been approved by the FDA in 1987 but was prohibitively expensive and not yet widely available. Absolution: Victims Becoming a Monument is a rare example of a response to the AIDS crisis created by a lesbian woman. In January 1988, Cosmopolitan magazine featured an article that claimed that women did not have to worry about contracting HIV and as a result, women members from ACT UP, the largest AIDS activist organization in the United States, organized a demonstration in front of the magazine’s offices. This demonstration gave way to a new type of social movement around women’s health of which Gatewood was a vocal part.
Lisbeth Bissier was a German textile artist best known for her one-of-a-kind wool, linen, and damask tapestries and carpets created between 1929 and 1960. Born Lisbeth Hofschneider in Freiberg, Germany, she first met her future husband, Bechtler Collection artist, Julius Bissier, when she was his student in 1920. Hofschneider and Bissier would marry in 1922 and have two children, Dorothee (1926) and Uli (1928). In 1929, Lisbeth Bissier set up her own textile workshop in her husband’s former studio while studying weaving at the Textile and Fashion School in Berlin thanks to the financial support from the wife of the influential German psychiatrist and art historian Hanz Prinzhorn, both of whom had become close family friends of the couple.
When the Nazis condemned Julius Bissier’s work in 1933 for being “degenerate” and he fell into an unshakable depression, worsened by two subsequent studio fires and the death of their son Uli in 1934, Lisbeth Bissier decided to move the family and her workshop to Bodensee, a small town on the border of Germany and Switzerland. There, she opened a textile factory and financially supported her family during World War II. In 1960, she closed her factory and moved with Julius to Ascona, Switzerland where they would count among their neighbors, the Bechtler family. In Ascona, she devoted herself almost entirely to managing the career and archive of her husband until her death in 1989.
The untitled orange tapestry on view in this exhibition is from the private collection of Andreas Bechtler and has never been on public view. New research indicates that it was most likely created in the early 1940s and potentially based on drawing found in the Bissier Archive in Ascona, Switzerland. To date, there has been little scholarship on Lisbeth Bissier’s work in sharp contrast to the significant attention her husband has posthumously received, due in part to her management of his career in the final decades of her life.
Katharina Sallenbach was a Swiss sculptor best known for her work in stone, metal, and terracotta. Born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1920, she studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris from 1938–39 before working in the studios of Alfons Magg in Zurich from 1939–42 and Bechtler Collection artist, Germaine Richier, in 1944. Working closely with Richier had a significant impact on her artistic development. Sallenbach’s early works were primarily carved in stone and figurative in subject matter; however, she quickly began to distort form, moving toward a more abstract language featuring exclusively geometric shapes. Later in her career, she began to work with woven metal and rods creating sculptures that combined her interests in both figuration and abstraction. Sallenbach’s works are permeated with a belief in primordial powers and she often said that her works contained a spiritual or sacred essence.
Méret Oppenheim was a German-born Swiss surrealist artist, photographer, and poet. Born in 1913, Oppenheim was named after Meretlein, a wild child who lived in the woods, from the novel Green Henry by Gottfried Keller. When her father, a German-Jewish doctor, was conscripted into the army during World War I, Oppenheim moved with her mother and siblings to Switzerland. Oppenheim’s maternal grandmother, a well-known Swiss author, and illustrator encouraged and supported her interest in the visual arts. In 1928, Oppenheim was introduced to the writings of Carl Jung and became interested in dreams and the unconscious. When Oppenheim was eighteen, she traveled to Paris where she met the surrealist circle around the French writer and poet, André Breton. At Breton’s suggestion, she took part in the regular surrealist meetings at the Café de la Place Blanche and became friends with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst. In 1934, she embarked on a passionate affair with Ernst, which lasted just under a year.
The surrealists soon invited her to participate in their group shows and she began to exhibit her works in the Salon des Surindépendants and contribute to major Surrealist group exhibitions in Copenhagen (1935), Paris (1935, 1936), London (1936), and New York (1936). Oppenheim’s best-known artwork is Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936, a teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in the fur from a Chinese gazelle. Originally inspired by a conversation that Oppenheim had with Pablo Picasso and his lover Dora Maar in the café Deux Magots about a fur bracelet that Maar was wearing, Oppenheim created Object to liberate the teacup from its function as a consumer object. It was purchased in 1936, soon after its creation by Alfred Barr, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for MoMA’s permanent collection. Between 1933–36, she posed for the American photographer, Man Ray, in a series of now-famous nude portraits, which contributed to Oppenheim being negatively stereotyped and led to a period of depression that lasted until the mid-1950s. In 1937, disillusioned with the art world, Oppenheim returned to Basel, where she would reside for the rest of her life working as an art conservator and quietly making art.
The Parapapillonneries Portfolio on view in this exhibition references the French word for butterfly, papillon. Butterflies were a frequent motif in Oppenheim’s visual art and poetry — she was fascinated by transformation and the stages of metamorphosis. Oppenheim often said that her later work, created in the last ten years of her life, was meant to explore the human capacity for hope, change, and action.
Barbara Hepworth was an English artist best known for her biomorphic sculptures in bronze and stone. In 1921, Hepworth received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, where she completed her studies in 1924. The following year, she was a runner-up for the Prix-de Rome, which the sculptor and her future husband, John Skeaping, won. Together they traveled to Siena and Rome, marrying in Florence in 1925. In 1929, their son Paul was born. Two years later, Hepworth met and fell in love with the English painter, and Bechtler Collection artist, Ben Nicholson, however, both were still married at the time. After divorcing Skeaping, Hepworth gave birth to triplets in 1934 with Nicholson. She said of the experience, “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one’s mind.”
In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, Hepworth and Nicholson relocated to St. Ives with their children. While residing there, Hepworth began to make her first stringed sculptures of which she said, “the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.” On view nearby, is Curved Form Porthmeor, a painting which references Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives. In 1950, Hepworth’s work was exhibited in the British Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale and the following year, two early public commissions, Contrapuntal Forms, and Turning Forms were exhibited at the Festival of Britain. During this period, Hepworth and Nicholson divorced and her eldest son was killed in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand.
In 1958, Hepworth was commissioned by the British Council’s Lilian Somerville to create a large site-specific work for the State House in London. Created in 1958–59 and erected in 1960, Meridian is an abstract sculpture comprised of ribbons of bronze that unravel in an elongated spiral to establish a triangular outline. The ribbons curve and turn in space and coil outward at the center. Hepworth intended for the sculpture’s fluid lines to contrast with the rigidity of the building’s rectilinear architecture. A meridian is a great circle on the surface of the earth passing through the poles or the half of such a circle included between the poles. The final model for Meridian was made with an armature of expanded aluminum to which plaster was applied and cast as a unique bronze by Susse Frères in Paris. Hepworth’s Swiss dealer, Charles Lienhard, suggested casting the five-foot preliminary plaster model for Meridian as “suitable for a garden,” and Hepworth obliged, casting the work in an edition of six in bronze which were sold directly through her gallery in Zurich. The Bechtler family purchased one of the editions from Lienhard’s gallery in Zurich in 1961 and it was installed in their yard next to Germaine Richier’s La Sauterelle, grande for many decades.
Isabel Quintanilla was a Spanish Realist best known for her still life and landscape paintings. Quintanilla was born in Madrid in 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, the culmination of decades of swings of the political compass in Spain. In the Spanish Civil War, Republicans loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic, in alliance with communist and syndicalist anarchists, fought against a revolt by the Nationalists, an alliance of Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists, led by a military group among whom, General Francisco Franco soon achieved a dominant role. During this war, her father, a Spanish Republican commandant, was murdered in the Valdenoceda prison camp by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco. In 1953, at the age of fifteen, she enrolled in the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes where she studied fine arts. Between 1960–1964, Quintanilla traveled to Rome with her future husband, the Italian artist, Francisco López, where she immersed herself in the study of Imperial Roman painting and classical sculpture. In the late 1960s, she exhibited her work in Italy and Germany to favorable reviews. Later in life, she decided to return to school and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1982. Quintanilla was known for her refined technique and ability to capture texture and light. On view in this exhibition is a drawing from 1974 depicting the Alps, a mountain range system that stretches approximately 750 miles across eight Alpine countries including France, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, and Slovenia.
Prominently displayed in the museum’s soaring multi-story foyer and visible from the street is Wall Drawing 995, 2001 by the American artist Sol LeWitt (1928 - 2007). This large-scale vibrantly colored work measuring 23 feet by 5 inches tall by 27 feet and 5 inches wide, was installed at the Bechtler Musuem in October 2009 and is on long-term loan courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt.