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When artist Yto Barrada entered the door of room 503, above the fifth floor of Chelsea Hotel in New Yorkhe was very surprised by what he saw. Every centimeter of the walls was plastered with Xeroxed word art, pictures of geometric art, hundreds of photographs of passers-by on the street below and pages of text laid out in groups. Piles of cardboard and cardboard boxes, filled with artwork, prints, books and maquettes, formed the plains that Barrada had to turn sideways to walk. Every visible space was covered with bronze, marble and wood sculptures. In the midst of all this, on a small island surrounded by 40 years of active work, there was Bettina, as the artist living in the famous New York area was known.
“One sees Bettina and understands that another tragedy has happened, a long time ago,” writes Barrada in Bettina, a book edited by the artist Gregor Huber, published by Aperture in 2022. Barrada was one of the few people that the artist allowed to enter 503 since he moved to Chelsea in 1972 near the Smith hotel, including boshem Smith, and Pat Smith. Bob Dylan and the band of Andy Warhol in general, Bettina chose to shut herself up, devoting her life to mental works that seemed to flow unceasingly from within, a creative passion that she compared to divine power.
As the art grew, Bettina became estranged from her family and friends, and gradually became suspicious of outside interests. For years, when he left the hotel to go shopping, he took his new jobs and belongings in a shopping cart, fearing theft. He sleeps in his chair on the lawn, because of the best exit from every room in the house. In 2015, when Barrada got to know Bettina and finally saw her, he thought that Bettina lived in a parallel world that he had created for himself.
The artist’s paintings, photographs and films have just started an exhibition called Bettina: Finite Structures, part of Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art. Along with the marble cut sculptures, the newly filmed 8mm films are on display for the first time. Titled Penetration of Four Equal Constants by Eight Elements of Progressive Displacement (1975-76), it was developed with the help of physicist Robert W Weinberg and was programmed on a computer-controlled cathode-ray oscilloscope. The works of photography, dating back to the 1970s, created and printed in Bettina’s bathroom, include Phenomenological New York, which shows distorted reflections on glass and steel stairs that came to symbolize the architecture of financial capitalism on Wall Street. Several paintings from the same period, called Rencontres Psychic, draw a connection between the vibration, the static distortion and the shape of the female body.
The creator of all these works was born Bettina Grossman in an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1927 and, growing up, she was known as Betty. She learned business skills in high school, and was soon self-supporting as a fabric designer and stylist. In the late 1950s, at the age of 30, he went to Paris, intending to spend a year exploring Europe. She would spend the next eight years traveling the continent, tending to her textile work while gathering new skills in glass, sculpture, silver and painting. He researched Carrara marble, worked with silver in Stockholm and was instructed in the production of stained glass by artisans in Chartres, France. At this time, she dropped her old name and became known as Bettina.
He returned to New York in 1966 and moved into a working studio in Brooklyn Heights. Also known as a commercial artist, Bettina began to see parallels between the types of work she had been producing in Europe and the modern paintings and geometric designs that were popular in the modern world of New York. He found new confidence in the play of form and perspective, creating a conceptual framework around smoothness, space, pattern and their relationship to the person.
But this hope did not last long. A few months after establishing his life in New York, a devastating fire destroyed his recording studio, which was located overlooking the New York harbor. He lost everything in the fire, all his work until that day, all his possessions and his cat. This included everything he produced during his time in Europe, and any records of the developmental years and critical thinking that was emerging.
Left with nothing, Bettina quit her job as a commercial designer and devoted herself to becoming an artist. He returned to Europe briefly, after winning a scholarship to learn the art of marble carving in Italy, and began to restore all his lost works, as well as new sculptures of marble eggs, symbolizing rebirth and reproduction. Since he used to work with cloth and paper, he wanted materials that were strong, very strong, and durable.
“After the fire – when I started again – I found, mentally, that two measures were not enough,” he wrote. His work became abstract, sketchy and expansive, with contours that penetrated the mystery. He was convinced that he could see things that others could not: an invisible web of relationships that he called the fourth dimension, following the guidance of the Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky.
Bettina worked hard to make it into what she believed was more than what people saw. Knowing about her life, Bettina moved to the Chelsea Hotel, and, referring to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, hung a sign on the front door that read: “Institute for Noumenological Research.”
When Bettina died in 2021, aged 94, she had long been recognized. Word spread among young artists in New York about this amazing artist and the amazing work he was doing at the Chelsea Hotel. Filmmaker Corinne van der Borch created The Girl with the Black Balloons for Bettina. This led to Barrada’s recognition of his work, and insisted that the curators of the museum recognize it.
Two months before her death, Bettina saw several of her pieces exhibited at MoMA PS1, an offshoot of MoMA. And we have only just begun to tell Bettina’s story. Now the curator of Bettina’s estate, Barrada and a team of assistants are still working on documenting, documenting and documenting Bettina’s never-before-seen archive. Room 503 has not given up all its secrets.
