When the artist Yto Barrada stepped through the door of room 503 at New York's Chelsea Hotel, she was overwhelmed by what she saw. Every inch of the walls was plastered with Xeroxed word art, graphic reproductions of geometric sculptures, hundreds of photographs of passersby, and collections of leaves laid out in grids. Piles of cardboard boxes and crates, full of yet more artworks, prints, books, and maquettes, created teetering canyons through which Barrada had to turn sideways to navigate. Every visible surface was covered with sculptural forms in brass, marble, and wood. In the midst of it all, on a small daybed surrounded by this aggregation of 40 years of fervent work, was Bettina, as the resident artist of the famous New York landmark was simply known.
“One sees Bettina and understands that some disaster has taken place, long ago,” writes Barrada in Bettina, the book she edited with designer Gregor Huber, published by Aperture in 2022. Barrada was one of only a handful of people the reclusive artist had permitted to enter 503 since she moved into the Chelsea in 1972. Despite the bohemian buzz around the hotel, with neighbours including Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, and many of Andy Warhol’s entourage, Bettina chose to lock herself away, devoting her life to conceptual works that seemed to flow unstoppably from deep within, a creative impulse she likened to a divine energy.
A Lifetime of Obsessive Creation
As the artworks accumulated, Bettina became increasingly estranged from her family and friends, and progressively suspicious of outside interest. For years, when she had to leave the hotel for groceries, she would take her latest works and portfolios with her in a shopping trolley, fearing burglary. She slept in her hallway on a lawn chair, as her prolific output eventually colonised every room in the apartment. In 2015, when Barrada got to know Bettina and eventually came to visit her, she thought Bettina lived in a parallel world entirely of her own making.
Sculpture, photographs, and films by the artist have just gone on show in an exhibition called Bettina: Finite Structures, part of Glasgow International festival of contemporary art. Alongside industrially cut marble sculptures, a newly digitised 8mm animation is on view for the first time. Titled Penetration of Four Equal Constants by Eight Elements of Progressive Displacement (1975-76), it was made with the assistance of physicist Robert W Weinberg and was programmed on a computer-controlled cathode-ray oscilloscope. Photographic works, also from the 1970s, and developed and printed in Bettina’s bathroom, include Phenomenological New York, which depicts distorted reflections in the glass and steel skyscrapers that had come to typify the architecture of finance capitalism on Wall Street. A series of self-portraits from the same era, titled Rencontres Psychic, draws connections between those wavering, wobbly distortions and the contours of the female body.
From Betty to Bettina: An Artist's Journey
The creator of all these works was born Bettina Grossman into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1927 and, growing up, was known as Betty. She studied commercial art in high school, and was soon supporting herself as a textile designer and stylist. In the late 1950s, aged 30, she travelled to Paris, intending to spend a year exploring Europe. She would go on to spend the next eight years traversing the continent, maintaining her textiles work while collecting a host of new skills in glass, sculpture, silversmithing, and photography. She explored the marble quarries of Carrara, designed silverware in Stockholm, and was instructed in the production of stained glass by master artisans in Chartres, France. During this period, she shrugged off her erstwhile nickname and became known as Bettina.
She returned to New York in 1966 and moved into a live-work studio in Brooklyn Heights. Still known primarily as a commercial designer, Bettina began to see the parallels between the types of work she had been developing in Europe and the systemic painting and geometric abstraction that was becoming popular in New York’s contemporary art world. She found a new confidence in the play of form and perspective, developing a conceptual framework around flatness, space, pattern, and their relationship to the individual.
Devastating Fire and Rebirth
But this optimism was not to last. Just months after establishing her life back in New York, a devastating fire destroyed her studio building, which overlooked New York harbour. She lost everything in the fire, all her work until that date, all her possessions, and her cat. This included everything she had produced during her time in Europe, and any record of those formative years and the complex ideas that were emerging.
Left with nothing, Bettina abandoned her career in commercial design and committed to life as an artist. She returned briefly to Europe, having won a grant to study marble sculpting techniques in Italy, and set about recreating all the work she had lost, as well as a new series of marble sculptures of eggs, signifying rebirth and reproduction. Having originally worked primarily with textiles and paper, she sought materials that were harder, more resilient, with a solid presence.
“After the fire – when I had to start all over again – I found, psychologically, that two dimensions weren’t sufficient,” she wrote. Her work became increasingly theoretical, diagrammatic, and expansive, with contours that bled into the mystical. She became convinced she could see things others could not: an invisible web of relations she called a fourth dimension, following the lead of the esoteric Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky.
Bettina worked obsessively to conjure into being that which she believed existed beyond the realm of human perception. Foreclosing her social life, Bettina moved into the Chelsea Hotel, and, in reference to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, pinned a sign to the front door saying: “The Institute for Noumenological Research.”
Long-Overdue Recognition
When Bettina died in 2021, aged 94, she had begun to receive some long-overdue recognition. Word had spread among New York’s younger artistic community about this enigmatic artist and the extraordinary output she lived cloistered within at the Chelsea Hotel. Film-maker Corinne van der Borch made Girl with Black Balloons about Bettina. This led to Barrada discovering her work, and insisting that museum curators take notice.
Two months before she died, Bettina saw a selection of her pieces go on display at MoMA PS1, an offshoot of MoMA. And yet we have only just begun to scratch the surface of Bettina’s story. Now the executor of Bettina’s estate, Barrada and a team of assistants are still working through the unboxing, documentation, and cataloguing of Bettina’s unprecedented archive. Room 503 has yet to give up all its secrets.
