American painter Dorothy Iannone’s pet name — the Lioness, given to her by her onetime lover, the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth — is now the title for two contained but hardly modest shows running concurrently at the New Museum and Anton Kern gallery, which feature seventeen big, bright, mirthfully erotic paintings, a sculpture, and a series of wooden cutouts. Iannone, as her wide body of work suggests, is a sort of sex goddess, a matriarch, and a contrarian. (In 1961, she was a catalyst for the U.S. government’s release of Henry Miller’s books from the blacklist.) She has painted herself having intercourse — often with a hirsute Roth — since the sixties, incorporating cultural elements she absorbed traveling through Europe and the Middle East. And yet, for all her influence, this, at 75, is Iannone’s first solo show in an American museum. Expect a Freudian bonanza of barely covered sex organs and myriad climactic gestures — no longer censored, as she frequently was in those swinging sixties.
