June Leaf, spirited artist with a fantastical touch, dies at 94

The cause was gastric cancer, said her friend and agent Andrea Glimcher.

Ms. 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, Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Leaf just 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.”

Ms. 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 Ms. 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.

Ms. Leaf recalled that early in her career, while living in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, she went to the Louvre to look at works by Old Masters, seeking to refine her technique. She was copying a Goya one day when, “all of a sudden, I felt like someone had slapped my hand. I heard my voice say, ‘Go home. This is Goya’s dream. You’ll never reach across centuries like Goya. You’re just a girl from Chicago.’”

The message was terrifying, then liberating. “I didn’t sleep the whole night,” she told the art publication Hyperallergic. “I thought, ‘If I can get through this night, I can get through any night in my life.’ I woke up in the morning and I took a sketchbook, and I made drawings that were just waiting to be made.”

Looking for a new way to see the world, she turned to her imagination. One of her first pictures was of a horse with an exploding head.

The younger of two daughters, June Leaf was born in Chicago on Aug. 4, 1929.

She began exhibiting in 1948, when she was invited to participate in an annual show at the Art Institute of Chicago, according to her website. Around that same time, she developed a friendship with painter Leon Golub, who was seven years older and helped persuade Ms. Leaf’s skeptical mother that she had a future in art.

Ms. Leaf became associated with the Monster Roster, a loose collective of postwar Chicago artists — including Golub and his wife Nancy Spero — known for figurative art with a gruesome, surrealist touch. She studied briefly at the Institute of Design, formerly the New Bauhaus at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, before going to Paris in 1948, deciding that the city would offer her a better education in art.

“I spent my time with my head down, looking at textures, and patterns in the sidewalks,” she recalled. Before long, she was back home, where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art education, from Roosevelt University and the Institute of Design, respectively. She returned to Paris once more, after getting the Fulbright in 1958, and moved to New York in 1960.

Over the next decade, she became increasingly well-known for her drawings, which came to include images of flying machines, amusement park rides, a bionic “umbrella woman” and shadowy figures on operating tables. Much of her work explored traditional ideas of womanhood and femininity, and seemed to respond to an exhortation she wrote on one of her mid-1970s pictures: “Women should build a monument for themselves.”

Unlike classical monuments of gleaming white marble, her pieces were more whimsical and enigmatic. She made pipes shaped like women and, in some of her sculptures, used thumbtacks for breasts. Her artistic mission was simple, she said: “To create life out of life. That’s what I want to do.”

Ms. Leaf’s first marriage ended in divorce, as did her second, to saxophonist Joel Press. She described her first meeting with Frank, a master of documentary photography known for his 1958 book “The Americans,” as a transformative encounter: “I saw him, and I said, ‘There he is.’ And that was true.” He was married at the time, though he soon separated from his wife — Ms. Leaf’s friend Mary Frank, a fellow artist — and went on to marry Ms. Leaf.

He died in 2019. Ms. Leaf leaves no immediate survivors.

Along with her drawings and sculptures, Ms. Leaf made unusual household objects, like eyeglasses, that reflected her interest in construction and offered her another vantage on art. One of her eyeglass pairs was equipped with cone-shaped lenses designed to block a viewer’s peripheral vision.

“They are about the pleasures of focusing, and not being distracted,” she said. “Another pair of glasses has a mirror attached, like a rearview mirror, so that you only see what is behind you. It is just the most wonderful thing. Who needs to paint? Who needs to take photographs? You can just go around loving everything.”