Her death was announced this month by her sons, Christophe and David Lanzenberg. No cause was given. She had moved to Los Angeles 18 months ago to be near her family, having lived for many years in New York City, mostly at the Chelsea Hotel.
Although well known in Europe in the 1960s and ‘70s, Nicola L — she was born Nicola Leuthe — did not have her first institutional survey until 2017, when the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens, mounted a show of about 50 of her works dating from 1968 to the present.
That relative obscurity over the years could be attributed in part to her spreading herself thin as she moved frequently among different media, including performance, film and painting; and in part to her tendency to exhibit in the nearly mutually exclusive worlds of art and furniture design galleries.
But her visibility rose with a widespread reconsideration of pop art; after 2000, what had been treated as a mostly male and American or British phenomenon began to be seen as an international style with numerous female participants.
That sea change was largely accomplished by revisionist exhibitions like “The World Goes Pop” (which included Nicola L’s work) at the Tate Modern in London, and “International Pop” (which did not) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, both in 2015.
A 1969 work of hers in the Tate show exemplified her boldness of form and commentary. The work, “Little TV Woman: I Am the Last Woman Object,” consists of a nearly life-size doll-like figure of a nude woman, made of white vinyl and wood, seated cross-legged with a Sony portable television for a midriff. On the screen, a text warns: “I am the last woman object. You can take my lips, touch my breasts, caress my stomach, my sex. But I repeat it. It is the last time.”
Nicola L specialized in conflating women’s bodies and domestic objects, as if parodying the social stereotype of the female caregiver — so ubiquitous as to be part of the furniture.
Other efforts from this period include a wood-veneer bureau, titled “La Femme Commode,” with a head, womanly curves and strategically placed drawers and knobs; a coffee table with a similarly schematized female form cut from wood and resting on a clear Plexiglas base; and a white vinyl sofa in the shape of a long, slim foot.
In the counterculture-infused art of the 1960s, Nicola L was hardly alone in flaunting the naked female body as an artistic statement; fellow travelers included performance artists like Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama and Valie Export, and painters like Dorothy Iannone, Joan Semmel and Martha Edelheit. But the underlying geometry of her forms also evokes Marisol’s blocky carved-wood figures.
Other usable forms included a plywood wardrobe with two human heads and four feet titled “The Lovers,” as well as lamps shaped like red lips or distinctly female eyes.
A more gender-neutral motif was a spare human head featured in silhouette in lamps, tables, a small aquarium and a large bookcase, as well as in the Planet Head paintings in the late 1980s.
Nicola Leuthe was born around 1935 — she was always circumspect about her birth year — in Mazagan, Morocco, the middle child of Suzanne and Jean Leuthe. Her father was an officer in the French army. Nicola grew up speaking Arabic as well as French, and she began making art at an early age.
The family returned to Europe after World War II, when her father was assigned to Germany; they later returned to France. In 1954, Nicola went to Paris to study art, first at the École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Académie Julian, where she stopped using her surname. (She added the L about a dozen years ago.)
During this period she became friends with one of her teachers, art critic Pierre Restany, and met Alfred Lanzenberg, known as Fred, whom she married in 1956. He opened an art gallery in Brussels in 1966, and his early efforts included collaborating with the powerful art dealer Ileana Sonnabend, who was based in Paris at the time (she was long prominent in Manhattan), on exhibitions of American pop art.
Nicola L and Lanzenberg divorced in 1982. In addition to her sons, she is survived by three grandsons.
Nicola L began her career as an abstract painter, but through Restany she met the French nouveau realists, artists who were shaking up Paris at the time. (Restany and artist Yves Klein had come up with the name.) She was immediately impressed by their position that art should comment on consumer society using existing objects and materials.
She was also close to the proto-conceptual Argentine artist Alberto Greco, who repeatedly questioned her pursuit of painting. Giving up paint, she began making her “Pénétrables,” rectangles of stretched canvas with canvas attachments into which viewers could insert their arms, legs or heads, becoming literally at one with art.
In 1967 she made “The Cylinder,” or “Container for 3,” a wearable piece in translucent pink plastic. It was activated onstage that year by three naked people during a performance by the experimental English rock band Soft Machine at the Paris Biennale. After seeing “The Cylinder,” Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York, invited Nicola L to bring the piece to La MaMa, precipitating her first trip to the city.
Nicola L’s best-known communal garment is “The Red Coat” (1969), sometimes known as “Red Coat Same Skin for Everyone.” The piece resembles a series of hooded, zippered red raincoats with sleeves that culminated in big mittens; these garments are all attached to a single horizontal expanse of the same fabric. It accommodates 11 people.
“The Red Coat” made its first public appearance onstage during a concert by Brazilian musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso as part of the historic 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival. It was subsequently activated — sometimes by passing strangers — in street performances in European capitals as well as New York.
“Blue Cape,” a similar 11-person piece, was used in performances in Cuba (in 2001 and 2010), on the Great Wall of China with Chinese art students (2005), and at the 2016 Venice Biennale. “The Red Coat” was most recently performed in the streets of London for a short film to accompany that communal garment when it was displayed in 2015 as part of “The World Goes Pop” at the Tate Modern.
Nicola L’s first trip to New York was formative: She was captivated by the city’s creative energy and saw more pop art, formed a lifelong friendship with Schneemann, and discovered vinyl, which would be a signature material of hers. She took to visiting the city regularly.
Back in Paris, she began making usable furniture; one of the earliest works was the vinyl “White Sofa Foot” (1968), which also came in black and red. She had her first solo shows at Galerie Veranneman in Brussels (1968) and Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris (1969). Her first solo show in New York was at the Waddell Gallery in 1973.
Nicola L moved to New York in 1979, settling at the Chelsea Hotel in an apartment furnished with her art. For a while she concentrated on film, making a short documentary that captured the punk-rock band Bad Brains at the Lower East Side nightclub CBGB, and another about Abbie Hoffman, which was shown on PBS. Her last film was “Doors Ajar at the Chelsea Hotel” (2013).
In New York, she exhibited her usable sculpture at Art et Industrie, at the SoHo design store Moss and at Ingrao Gallery. In the teens, broader selections of her work were seen at the Broadway 1602 and Elga Wimmer galleries.
Nicola L’s feminism flowed into a series of collages on wood that were inspired by the poems of Dorothy Parker, shown at the Rempire Gallery in SoHo in 1991, and her nine “Femme Fatale” paintings from 1995, exhibited that year at the Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, also in SoHo.
These paintings honor women who had died tragic or violent deaths, among them Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday and Ulrike Meinhof, the radical West German leftist and co-founder of the Red Army Faction. Each work is a suggestive monochrome involving painted bed sheets on a large panel along with images and texts concerning the woman and her name, writ large.
Nicola L’s artistic fluidity was noted by curator Ruba Katrib in an essay for the catalog to the Sculpture Center’s 2017 exhibition. “Nicola,” she wrote, “has always worked between the borders of artistic movements, nationalities, decades, art and design, never fully entering one camp or another.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.