While a lot has been written about Lee Bontecou's work and her retrospective, the artist feels that much of it fails to acknowledge her true influences and affiliations in the artistic community.
"Lee appreciates the fact that some art critics remove the artist from the art -- and discuss the work in a vacuum. They don't speak to the artist or try to determine motivation or context," explains Bontecou's husband William Giles. "What she doesn't appreciate are critics who discuss the artist and make assumptions without talking to the author. Even when these critics speak flattering of her and her work, they get facts wrong and make associations that are not correct."
A recent example includes an article written by Robert Storr that appears in the exhibition catalog. Giles says, "It is unfortunate that Storr failed to talk with her or view her recent work before drafting his article. His failure to interview her has resulted in misleading speculations, trumped up connections to artists she has no connection with, and self-serving hyperbole."
Giles adds, "The entire situation could have been avoided through proper communication. If Storr had simply interviewed Lee, she wouldn't find herself associated with unrelated artists and have her work placed out of context. If the curators had simply talked with her before publishing the article or even allowed her to review a copy before it went to press, she wouldn't find herself in this difficult position."
Bontecou has issued a statement on her true inspirations and those who have actually influenced her work

Over the years and to the present day there has been so much written about my work which has nothing to do with me that when I read it, I don't recognize anything of myself or my work in it. In the past when I tried to express my thoughts, eyelids drooped and other agendas were doled out. As a result I stopped trying and spoke only through my work. So I am writing this now during my retrospective to put all that to rest, and to express my own voice about the inaccurate and irrelevant contextualization still being disseminated.
Since my early years till now, the natural world with all its visual wonders and horrors -- man made devices with its mind boggling engineering feats and destructive abominations, the elusive human nature and its multi ramifications of the sublime to unbelievable abhorrences, to me are all one. It is in the spirit of those feelings that the primary influences on my work have occurred.
Along with those feelings, walking through the Metropolitan I would always end up looking at the Greek vases with the wonderful drawings and shapes; and then wander with awe through the African halls. At the Museum of Natural History, the fossils, bones and panoramas were and are still unbelievably exciting. At the Modern just to see a single Brancusi sculpture was enough. It is in that spirit those secondary feelings intermingled with the primary emotions and are basic to my work.
As for my contemporaries, it was my personal friends who were the other influences on my basic work; some of whom were never near an art scene. There were several. I've mentioned them elsewhere, but one such was a man named Doc Groupp -- a rough and tough New Yorker who though his main interests were electronics and aviation, painted the most delicately beautiful and sensitive Oriental landscapes on rice paper and mounted them on scrolls; and remaining true to that tradition kept them secluded until very special personal occasions arose worthy of their private display. His scrolls still haunt my imagination.
Coinciding with those personal feelings in the early years, over us all spread the most wonderful period of abstract expressionism that gave young artists a burst of energy and a desire for boundless freedom to break away individually and find new paths. On the purely tangible side of seeking new paths, there were four of us whose work was allied in the late fifties: the sculptors John Chamberlain, Tom Doyle and myself and the painter William Giles. The latter more closely parallel to me due to the need for breaking up the flat rectangular plane. We were all lucky to be working in art at such an exciting time of exploration.
It is in the spirit of all those feelings that my work was and is still being done.