Seeing by Hand

At the age of about three, the artist June Leaf was sitting under a sewing table, watching her mother’s feet on the treadle. Her mother had given her a piece of gauzy blue dotted swiss fabric that seemed to be “the starry night,” and she wrapped herself in it. Then she decided to draw her mother’s shoe. Dissatisfied with the result, she asked her mother to try: “I remember thinking, it’s wrong. She doesn’t care how the toe goes on the ground. I care.” In this moment, Leaf knew she wanted to work with her hands. “I feel my fingers have eyes,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t see anything until I touch [it]. And then all of a sudden, my fingers see—they see.”^*

Leaf, who died in 2024 at age ninety-four, made paintings, sculptures, drawings, and collages. For her, one form fed another—none was primary. “I act like [carving is] painting,” she once told the artist Joan Jonas. “When I work in my forge, I get to know the object and then I can paint it.” Treadles, cranks, and springs feature in her hand-activated metal sculptures, many of which have gently explosive elements—arms that extend, figures that fight, a man reeled in by a woman’s pole while hunting on ice. Making such objects encouraged her drawings, she said, “because if I don’t make mechanical things, my drawings don’t move.” Leaf’s need to literally feel her way through her work is also a subject of her art—perhaps the overriding subject. In the painting Figures Coming Out of Hand and Head (1976), colors, forms, and tiny beings emerge from a recumbent nude as if from a primordial stew or a newly born galaxy.

“I have discovered that thought is infinite,” she wrote on a drawing of a person’s head filled with tangles of thread. For Leaf the fact of a physical object is inseparable from our mental perception of it. Sometimes a person opens the top of their skull to reach inside; in her painting Threading the Story Through the Eye of a Needle (circa 1974), a hand pulls a line of thread through a pupil, towing two tiny people in a boat, suggesting both sight and an idea made manifest.

This is an ideal moment to dwell in Leaf’s unique vision. “Shooting from the Heart”—a traveling retrospective of more than 150 works spanning some seventy-five years of Leaf’s career—is the first major exhibition of her work since the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2016 survey of her drawings and paintings on paper. The current show and the accompanying catalog are organized thematically rather than chronologically. This approach makes sense for Leaf but isn’t without certain drawbacks. A chronological order might have undercut the overlapping and abiding nature of her interests, but because Leaf often returned to an idea decades after first giving it form, thematic categories make it hard to follow the progress of her career.

In the coming months Steidl is planning to publish several books by and about Leaf, including a facsimile edition of the sketchbook she made during her travels in Japan in 1970 (complementing Record 1974/75 Mabou Coal Mines, a 2010 facsimile of the sketchbook she kept one winter at her house in the remote former mining community of Mabou, Nova Scotia); a reissue of People (1994), a book of her small metal sculptures; and June Leaf: The Work Isn’t Finished, a tribute by her longtime friend the filmmaker Jem Cohen, who photographed her and her work over several decades. Cohen has also been working on a documentary about Leaf, as well as a tender short film called Robert and June (and all the time in the world), a dual portrait of Leaf and her husband, the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.

Leaf was born in 1929 in Chicago’s working-class Albany Park neighborhood. Her parents owned a tavern, but her father, who had a penchant for cards, left the running of it to her mother. Leaf felt unconnected to them both, especially in her teen years. “I merely had my uncontrolled inner life,” she recalled. “Nobody knew anything about what was in my mind anyway, least of all myself.”

Leaf took ballet lessons from a young age, and she and her sister attended Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. After high school, she applied to the New Bauhaus, founded in Chicago by László Moholy-Nagy and modeled after the German school, but her mother insisted she attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She lasted a semester before enrolling at the New Bauhaus instead, and though she spent only three months there, she experienced in that time what she called a “total awakening” to art and its connection to everyday life. In the coarse textures of the sidewalk she began to see the hieroglyphic marks of a Paul Klee painting or the dense patterning of a Mark Tobey canvas, and she adapted this tactile style to her own watercolor compositions.

In 1948 Leaf spent several months in Paris, where she made paintings of the cobblestone streets and was inspired by engraved walrus tusks in a show of Inuit art at the Musée de l’Homme. Back in Chicago she fell in with a group of students from the Art Institute, including Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Cosmo Campoli, and Seymour Rosofsky—artists who made up the first wave of Chicago Imagists and, with Leaf, were later dubbed the Monster Roster for their exploration of existential questions in an expressionistic figurative style.

“Shooting from the Heart” begins at this moment, with a smattering of drawings from the early 1950s that show Leaf exploring different ways to represent the female form. Some of her figures are rounded and primal, and the surfaces are rough, often collaged. The watercolor painting Woman Machine (1951) uses yellowed pages from texts such as Shakespeare’s Pericles and Joseph Addison’s collection of eighteenth-century writings as a background for a trio of headless women whose buttocks and breasts resemble wheels or gears, pitting humanity against machine bodies and a male-centered past against a female future.

In the 1950s and 1960s, she produced an array of brash women and sordid scenes. The painting Arcade Women (1956) depicts disorienting and ominous mirrored reflections of women in hats on a checkered floor. Another painting, Murder in the Bronx (circa 1967), evokes the chaos and nightmare of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death (circa 1562), but Leaf has set her scene of mayhem inside a Wunderkammer, the shelves of which have accumulated not things but people in various throes of life and death, perhaps as an attempt to sort and study them as one would a showcase of objects.

By 1958 Leaf was back in Paris on a Fulbright, copying paintings by Goya, Chardin, and old masters in the Louvre. When she returned to the States, she settled in New York and began teaching at Parsons School of Design. She also spent time studying Vermeer’s works. In the exhibition catalog, the curators Allison Kemmerer and Gordon Wilkins write that Leaf “was enchanted by the artist’s incredibly naturalistic depictions of carefully illuminated, seemingly placid domestic interiors…. The open-ended relationships between figures in these paintings fascinated Leaf.” She wanted to understand what was happening in these rooms but wasn’t satisfied with her two-dimensional renderings, so she set out to construct a three-dimensional version of Vermeer’s The Glass of Wine (circa 1661–1662), in which a man, hand on a pitcher, watches a woman drink wine, her face obscured by the glass and her bonnet. The result was Leaf’s first sculpture—an astonishing work called The Vermeer Box (1966).

The Vermeer Box is a Joseph Cornell–like construction also influenced by the shoebox-size models Leaf saw in the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. It reproduces the details of Vermeer’s painting, including the room’s table and chairs (now composed of paint-scuffed wood), the stained glass window left ajar, and the framed painting on the back wall (in Leaf’s sculpture, it is another version of The Glass of Wine). The walls and ceiling of the interior are made of mirrors—as is the view out the window—and the figures’ bodies are composed of mirror shards. The man’s watchful face is distorted into a hideous grimace, and the woman, instead of sipping a glass of wine, looks at her appearance in a hand mirror. The sculpture transforms the delicate interplay of light, shadow, and color in Vermeer’s canvas into a dazzling grotesque, sending crudely fractured reflections back on itself. It was through the process of making the sculpture that Leaf found what she called “the real secret” in the painting, about relationships between men and women:

The secret is that in this room is all the treachery that’s possible between people. He’s going to destroy her. In this safe, quiet, clean room, with all the shadows, the bookcases, and the pictures, are all the worst things that can happen: betrayal, lovelessness, falseness, and lies.

The Vermeer Box is the first instance of Leaf seeing with her fingers and cracking open one medium with another in order to get inside her subject. Her influences in the 1960s likely helped bring this about. She was drawn to the work of the painter James Ensor and the playwright Michel de Ghelderode, which led her to Jean Genet and the theater of the absurd. In 1968 Leaf’s engagement with the theater of the absurd’s unconventional approaches to expressing existential absurdities resulted in the life-size stage set Ascension of Pig Lady. The idea for it came to her in a kind of ecstatic vision when, on the way to her studio one day, she saw a bleach-blond waitress in a restaurant from the window of the Second Avenue bus. She was “remarkable looking—with the light on her,” Leaf remembered. The scene that would become Ascension appeared to her at once as a moment stolen from an imagined stage play in which a waitress is transmogrified into a pig.

The work mimics a theater, with a painted canvas backdrop, rough proscenium arch, and shallow boardwalk stage. Some of the “actors” are painted on the backdrop, and others appear as hand-sewn, stuffed three-dimensional figures, both on the stage and above the arch—as though the riotous scene of Murder in the Bronx had broken its confines. The illusion is punctured by a rope-and-pulley mechanism attached to the waitress and by two figures leaning over the arch to assist in her ascension. It reflects what the playwright Tony Kushner called theater’s ability to bring the audience to “the edge of belief and disbelief” as a way of peeking into the infrastructure and seeing “how the magic effect is produced.”

Ascension of Pig Lady appeared in Leaf’s first solo show, “Street Dreams,” at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York in 1968. Populated by carnivalesque drawings and cutout figures inspired by Leaf’s Chicago years, the exhibition summoned what she called the city’s “beautiful honky-tonk quality.” It also seems to have instilled in her a new confidence in her own vision. “For a while, I’d been thinking that I learned from painting,” she told the arts reporter Grace Glueck. “I’d forgotten it was life I learned from.”

In the late 1960s, Leaf met Robert Frank. She initially thought he was sloppy and arrogant, but in hindsight she felt they were destined to be together. Frank wanted to leave New York, so in 1970 they moved to a fishing cottage in the village of Mabou, on the west coast of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Leaf struggled with the quiet and the desolation of the landscape, so contrary to the parade of city life. She received a microbiology textbook from a friend and bought two microscopes, which helped focus her attention; the examination of the small helped her keep the imposing landscape at bay.

In several paintings from the mid-1970s, her studio is her subject—depictions of works on a table and hung from the wall, often with objects and smaller works set on the windowsill, blocking and reframing the view of the world beyond. Leaf added herself to some of these compositions, as collaged photographs or as painted figures. In the collage painting The Mabou Giant (circa 1975), a piece of mirror set on the window sash reflects her face back at her, both putting her in the landscape behind it and warding the landscape off. The titular “giant,” a twenty-seven-inch-tall creature Leaf had stitched and welded together from tin cans a few years before, stands ready to protect (a bit like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still). Frank makes appearances, too: explicitly in collage paintings such as Robert Enters the Room (1973) and implicitly in Don’t Watch/Don’t Bother Me (1973), in which a photographed Leaf looks out from the painting with a raised hand of warning.

During the winter of 1974, she began keeping the sketchbook that was later published as Record 1974/75 Mabou Coal Mines. “I’ve come to a dead stop,” she writes early on. “Where’s the inspiration?” At book’s end, she writes of defeat: “This place is no longer a picture to me. It is a graveyard.” Despite Leaf’s frustration, the sketchbook contains significant insights. A lengthy sequence details a blind woman’s journey within a cave. Her male companion can see light beyond the mouth of the cave, but she remains inside, transfixed by what she feels with her hands. Leaf devotes pages to intimate drawings of her face and eyes, which seem to see beyond the physical realm—and then to a series of frenetic, abstractly rendered demons producing flames. A couple of days later, she reflects on this sequence: “What I could do is start by rendering the objects that I work with—they, like the thread, lead the way from the ‘real’ world to the world ‘beneath.’”

A clue to these thoughts comes a few pages on, where Leaf writes, “I dreamed I entered a cave which was my mind.” It’s tempting to read this sequence as a reverse of Plato’s allegory of the cave: rather than proceed from underground to the real world above, Leaf finds value in plumbing things dimly seen. A painting from 1976 titled Mine and Mind (see illustration on page 14) depicts a figure, like the one in her sketchbook, stumbling through a cave amid tumultuous applications of color. If the cave is Leaf’s mind, the title plays on an artist’s mining of her interior world for subject matter. From this time on, Leaf’s work seems to pull increasingly from this interior, favoring perception and thought over more concrete subjects.

In 1975 Frank taught filmmaking at the University of California, Davis, for two months, and Leaf went with him (they married in Reno on the way). While there, she took a course on engine mechanics so that she would know how to fix the car if it broke down. She said that this time coincided with her being asked to join a feminist collective, and she began to think that women ought to make a monument to themselves that was so large “that when people come from outer space, they could see it and would say, Oh, it’s the women that did everything here.”

She started making studies for just such a sculpture, to be called Woman Monument. One of her drawings for this never-realized work shows a standing figure whose perforated head and neck double as a fountain. The spray appears as a cluster of lines shooting in every direction, as if the figure’s thoughts and emotions were erupting. To the art fabricator Donald Lippincott, Leaf specified that the heart in the ten-foot-tall woman would turn in its chest by a series of gears and a hand crank, and a multifaceted, multicolored head would spin on an axis inside the larger head, the back of which would emit sparks. In a letter to her mother-in-law from that time, Leaf situates her “Woman of the 20th Century” in a strange science-fiction landscape:

There is a great activity around the machine-like woman, who is being nurtured or, rather, constructed with the enthusiasm of ants by the hordes of humans…. Sometimes I think she should be able to move because she exhausts possibilities, but that depends on the resourcefulness of the creatures who guide her future, their future…. Am I not like the woman and the man? She protecting her delicate creative organs under her hoop skirt, and he moving forward, sometimes weighted down by his ingenuity, and yet always hopeful—the two connected as they are.

When fabricating the full monument became too complicated, Leaf opted to make just a head, which Lippincott’s studio helped produce in aluminum and stainless steel (a rare instance of Leaf not hand-making her own work). A crank activates a bellows, which in turn pushes air into the head and makes metal irises move back and forth in her eyes and a tongue flick in her open mouth. The mechanism inside is visible through a hole where an ear might be—giving a view onto the workings of the mind—and is accessible by separating the top half of the cranium from the bottom. The horizontal line formed at the meeting of the two halves recalls a realization Leaf had in Mabou: “I thought the mind is infinite and I knew that the water and the horizon line had taught me that. I love the idea that the horizon line sliced my head open.”

The horizon line recurs in Leaf’s sculptures in the latter half of her career, often as a stage for her figures to act upon, though just as often it morphs into a tightrope or a spiral or curves into a circle around which they can move. The painting Walking to the Moon (2020–2021) depicts a person tentatively making their way along a tightrope that bridges an impossible distance against a background of smears and drips. For the sculpture The Wheel (2022), Leaf attached a wire hoop to an arch mounted on the base of a treadle sewing machine. Two small tin people occupy the hoop: one reclines; the other, across the circle, runs along the perimeter. The treadle suggests that if it were to be rocked, the circle would spin, but no matter how much the “wheel” turned, the runner would never catch up to the other. And yet the charcoal composition Drawings in Movement (2020) provides a solution: Leaf added a tightrope across the diameter of the circle, over which the runner passes to reach the sleeper. “The secret is not drawing,” she writes at the top, “but DANCE.”

Sometimes the line is inseparable from the figure itself. In Figure with a Horn (2023), sections of wire are molded together to form a narrow platform for a small tin musician to walk along, while a thinner wire tethers the musician in place, leading up one side of the body to the shoulders and looping back down the other side, like a nervous system. The horn resembles a medieval buisine, a long, slender trumpet. Instead of originating at the musician’s mouth, Leaf’s trumpet starts an inch or so behind the head, as though the sound it might emit had traveled first through the skull before pouring out of the bell. The ends of this wire are left unwound and appear to flow forward while the musician’s hair blows backward and their chest is thrust out to give breath to the song.

Leaf’s horizon lines appear to continue far beyond the edges of the artwork—as do the spiral staircases leading up and up to nowhere that she made over the last twenty-five years of her life. These read to me like vertical versions of those infinite horizons; Leaf said they have to do with the passage of time. The most affecting example in the retrospective is To the Sky (2022), in which another small tin figure makes its way up a seemingly endless vertical coil of wire-wrapped steel that rises seven and a half feet from the ground; with minimal stagecraft, and lacking any comforting illusions, the figure’s journey is as absurd and hopeful as the tightrope walker’s balancing act to the moon.

In 2001 Leaf made the nearly eight-foot-tall sculpture Two Women on a Jack, in which a pair of tin figures stand on a wire stage and hold wooden mallets, as if to strike the upright hoop that separates them. Their stage rests on a jack that Leaf would ratchet up by hand and then let loose, so that it descended with a loud rhythmic clacking, mimicking the sound of drumming. Fourteen years later she made a painting of the sculpture in a moody palette of black and grays—except that only the shadow of the sculpture is depicted, cast onto the wall of her studio. The woman on the left is partially obscured by a desk lamp and other objects, and a landscape painting hangs above the woman on the right. Both the landscape and the view out a nearby window are rendered hazily, as if all existed in memory.

In his short film Robert and June (and all the time in the world), Jem Cohen shows Leaf and Frank puttering around their Mabou cottage and captures Leaf at work in her studio on Bleecker Street in New York (where they began dividing their time in 1975). Mabou is a green, solitary landscape, and the rush of wind through the leaves and the creak of the house are the primary soundtrack. In New York the swoosh of traffic replaces the wind, and the focus is often on Leaf’s hands as she manipulates bits of wire in one of her sculptures or activates the crank of another. Eventually the two very different locations came together for her, as Cohen observes in the film: “The house in Mabou sits high above the sea. Inside it I had a feeling I recognized from the elevated F train.”

Some of Leaf’s sculptures from these later years involve a scrim of translucent fabric stretched around two rollers in an endless loop activated by a hand crank or attached to the base of a treadle sewing machine. When White Scroll with Dancing Figures (2008) is turned, the frieze of dancers painted on fabric comes alive. “I love to dance,” Leaf said, evoking her childhood lessons, “and I think that I’m dancing all the time when I draw. I feel that I’m dancing, turning, everything.”

I met June Leaf once. I went through intermediaries—friends of hers advised me how I might write to her to persuade her to give me an audience. She agreed, and I spent an afternoon in her tiny kitchen in the apartment she and Frank shared on Bleecker Street. She was wary at first but soon became friendly and expansive. We sat at her table and talked, and then talked more as we walked to the grocery store and to the drugstore for hearing aid batteries. She stopped once to face me with one foot on the sidewalk and the other in the street, as though arrested by thought, because the point she wanted to make couldn’t be properly done while walking side by side.

Listening to Leaf talk was like hearing a long story told from memory: a bit dreamlike and eternal. I had come to see her because I wanted to make a book with her, one that consisted of conversation, but only her part of it, covering her early life and artmaking. Leaf was straightforward, down to earth, and unconcerned with the glitz of the art world. When Frank had asked her to move from New York to Mabou, she agreed because, she said, “I certainly would never choose to stay in New York and not be with him. I mean, there was no question in my mind.” At the time of my visit, in 2019, she spent her days working in her studio and caring for Frank. She wasn’t interested in much else.

About two thirds of the way through Cohen’s film, he recalls an instance when he tried to photograph Frank but missed the moment. “You gotta be fast,” Frank told him. “I wasn’t fast,” Cohen observes in a plaintive coda. “First Robert was gone…. And now so is June.” Frank died in September 2019, and Leaf in the summer of 2024. Though Cohen suggests he wasn’t quick enough to capture them, his film provides the essentials of Leaf at least: movement, the city, the landscape, light, Robert, the roar of the subway, the wind in the trees, and artmaking.