Visionary Quest

ELAINE STURTEVANT'S LONG-AWAITED MOMENT IN THE SPOTLIGHT

She was the first of her kind, a conceptual artist, a visionary with the sharpest of eyes; Elaine Sturtevant's works of art are appropriations, clones, replicas challenging notions of originality and authorship. In the early 1960s she did what she does with each artist's approval—Andy Warhol gave her the screens to make her Warhol Flowers—but all too quickly the artists were threatened. "She was driven out," says filmmaker John Waters. "She did everything before anybody, and she didn't get the proper credit. This is her moment, long overdue. What she's doing is beyond Pop— it's so original, it's still alarming." Now 74 and working in Paris, where she's lived since 1990, Sturtevant says, "At the time the work was done, it was too far from any frame of reference. The Abstract Expressionists were all about emotion, and the Pop artists all surface. That got me into thinking, What's underneath?" Her exploration of the intellectual underside was fierce, radical, and terrifying for the public and the critics. "It's simple but complicated: taking an object, distancing it, elaborating on it, presenting what it is not—it is not a Stella, not a Johns," she explains. "It is a great leap from content or image to concept." This spring Sturtevant will have exhibitions at New York's Perry Rubenstein Gallery and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at M.I.T.'s List Visual Arts Center. "She is a thinking machine," says dealer Perry Rubenstein. "Courageous and brilliant, she is as important as she is provocative."

A.M. HOMES