June Leaf , whose idiosyncratic oeuvre was shaped by a desire to find new ways of seeing the world, died of gastric cancer on July 1 at her Manhattan home. She was ninety-four. Through poetic paintings, intimate drawings, and trembling kinetic sculptures, Leaf maintained a constantly evolving practice whose eternal freshness guaranteed its longevity and allowed her to stay outside the long shadow cast by her husband, Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.
Possessed of a vivid imagination, Leaf sought to bring its products to life. “It’s a search,” she told WWD ’s Rosemary Feitelberg in 2016. “You can see that I’m searching.
I realize that I don’t see that often in paintings. You see it in writing. Or maybe sometimes in the [choreography] in a dance where the dancers are portraying some evolution of their souls.
I thought if all else fails this person is searching.” June Leaf was born August 4, 1929, in Chicago. Her parents owned a liquor store, though her father was an inveterate gambler, and Leaf would later acknowledge her mother as the source of her own tireless work ethic.
Having gained an interest in making art herself at the age of three, when her mother could not render a high-heeled shoe exactly as Leaf had asked her to, she entered László Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus) at the age of eighteen. After studying under Swiss abstractionist Hugo Weber for a few months, she dropped out. “I decided I wasn’t .
