<\/p>\n
Transferred to boarding school as a teenager in the 1920’s to “polish the edges and prepare for college,” artist Doris Lee cuts her hair to rebel against her surroundings\u2014the “least adventurous and creative” of her life, with no access to drawing. This act of rebellion was met with comment and an alert to the school that “nice girls have long hair”.<\/p>\n
Judging from several surviving photos of Lee (1905-1983), she never cut her hair again. But she continued to forge her own path over the next four decades.<\/p>\n
An accomplished Depression-era graphic artist and phenomenally successful commercial artist during the 1940s and 1950s, Lee learned at an early age that to stay in the game she had to at least pretend to play by the rules. Scenes of her farm and family gatherings may invoke a Rockwellian affection or the grace of Grandma Moses (to which it is sometimes compared), but beneath the surface of her Americana is a smoldering feminism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Bold and confident women star in most of her work, and it’s not just about stereotypical feminine activities. We see them fighting with horses, shooting arrows and having fun. Vladimir Nabokov even referred to one of her paintings in “Lolita”. It’s a perspective we don’t see anywhere else at the time\u2014not in Thomas Hart Benton’s men in the fields, the good little-towners of Grant Wood, or the silver screen wannabes of Reginald Marsh.<\/p>\n
Lee exhibited with notable galleries, sold works to major museums and painted three murals for WPA Life that sent her around the world as an artist reporter and produced award-winning art for major advertising campaigns. But like many figurative painters of the era, especially women, Lee fell into relative obscurity when Abstract Expressionism took on a taste of the twentieth century. Art dealer Diddy Wigmore, who has represented the Doris Lee estate since 1991, said those artists who worked in the 1930s and 1940s were simply “marginalized by fashion”.<\/p>\n
But a major new retrospective exhibition, Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, traveling nationally through 2023, reintroduces her to the public with more than 70 examples of her remarkable and commercial artworks. An accompanying show at D. Wigmore Fine Art in Manhattan, through January 28, presents 40 more works.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
“She’s in this really interesting intersection between folk art and the American landscape and modernity,” said Melissa Wolff of the St. Louis Museum of Art, who organized the current retrospective with Barbara Jones of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. On show until January 9th’ but basically, she was seen as too unserious to take her seriously. Her work is figurative, accessible, and can be ornamental, and these were seen as feminine and not taken for granted. Seriously. I know New York school wasn’t homogeneous but work that was seen as masculine\u2014active, big, aggressive, restless, full of skepticism\u2014that was taken very seriously.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Born in Alido, Illinois, to a merchant banker father and a teacher mother, Lee “Tomboy” grew up on her grandparents’ farms, skipping piano lessons to paint on her neighbor’s balcony. She graduated with a BA in Philosophy in 1927 and married Russell Lee, who became a famous photographer for the Farm Security Administration.<\/p>\n
Lee studied painting in Paris with Andre L’Hote, a Cubist painter, as well as in San Francisco with Realist painter Arnold Blanch. In 1931 he followed Lees Blanch and his wife, artist Lucile Lundquist, to the artists’ colony in Woodstock. Lee also took a studio at 14th Street in Manhattan. Lee Russell left for Blanche in 1939. They lived together but never married, spending summers in Woodstock, where they were pivotal figures in the art world’s social scene and exhibiting regularly, and winters in Florida.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Woodstock was a progressive place, and mine was a fit for it. She joined the Congress of American Artists, which aims to combat the rise of fascism in Europe, and articulated her views on inequality. In a talk in 1951 entitled “Women as Artists,” she noted how “stupid” it was in teaching young women to find husbands, telling the audience, “We cannot afford to neglect or discourage any talent because of artificial barriers of race, class, or gender.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
If her work was not overtly political, some messages have crept in there, often posting any frank cultural criticism with a playful and humane sense of humor. In “Illinois Rivertown” (1937), one of several critics called “Bruegelian,” figures circle the shore as a woman lifts her stairs to relieve herself. In The View, Woodstock (1946), a woman stands in front of a blue house tending her kitchen garden with a pitchfork while a man is lazing nearby. \u201cUsually, he is the man who introduces us to the estate,\u201d said Mrs. Wolf, who suspects Lee cunningly quotes Grant Wood\u2019s \u201cAmerican Gothic\u201d (1930).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Lee first rose with the American Landscape Painters\u2014a movement that flourished during the Depression, when artists like Wood and Benton abandoned European Modernism to develop their own art form, recording everything they imagined that made America American\u2014its land, customs, ideals and aspirations. She also brought me folk art, which she and Blanche combined, which MoMA recognized as a distinctly American art form. And she never forgot her European education.<\/p>\n
A job for me wasn’t right for everyone. (But she has stated that she has received “a lot of fan letters from people in prisons and asylums, long letters that tell everyone.”) Public criticism propelled her to the National Theater, when she painted “Thanksgiving.” – <\/em>A busy kitchen scene of multi-generational women\u2014she won the prestigious $500 Logan Purchase Award at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935. If Lee’s cartoon-like characters convey German Dada artist Georg Gross, her focus\u2014the intensity of women’s work\u2014seems truer to life than From typical drawings of the era to the idyllic Thanksgiving table.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The award’s donor, Josephine Hancock Logan, publicly described Lee’s work as “a shocking thing” and then founded the Mind in Art movement to purge American art of the “modern instincts” of surrealism and Dada. The Art Institute of Chicago responded by purchasing the work. Meanwhile, Lee told The Washington Post that “drawing pretty pictures wasn’t my goal” and that if some faces “look like caricatures,” as Time and others have suggested, “so do some people.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That same year, Fortune magazine wrote that she “didn’t like the last word in her drawings to be ‘optimism,'” and quoted her as saying that what she actually felt was “a kind of violence.” Life magazine later interpreted her comment as a “comic sense of violence.” ‘, but Wolf thinks otherwise.<\/p>\n \u201cIt seems that many of her early works are about this kind of inner turmoil or desire for physical freedom,\u201d said the curator, referring to works such as \u201cThe Runaway.\u201d <\/em>(1935), which shows a woman on horseback moving away from a farm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The relative privilege helped Lee survive as an artist during the Depression, as did Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. As noted by cultural historian John Fagg, who contributed to the “Simple Pleasures” catalog, the renegade heiress created the Whitney Studio Club, where artists like Lee could showcase and sell their work. (Lee was included in the first Whitney Biennale, in 1932.)<\/p>\n It soon caught the attention of art directors and editors as well. Lee’s style became more crisp and flatter, with large areas of succulent defined color, which made the breeding process easier. (She also had a look at design details\u2014furniture, architecture, plant life, technology, jewelry\u2014that lend themselves well to the illustrations.)<\/p>\n In 1941 she joined Associated American Artists, the bustling exhibition of entrepreneur Reeves Lowenthal, whose goal was to make money by bringing fine art to the masses. With the explosion of consumerism and the advertising age, he produced her prints and landed her jobs at companies such as American Tobacco and General Mills, as well as designing fabrics, ceramics, and illustration books, including the Rogers and Hart Songbook. “She was very stubborn,” Jones said. \u201cShe went after everything. She was often the only woman working with these groups of men, and she really could have kept herself alone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her first assignment for Life, in 1939, was to commemorate the musical “Showboat”. This was the first Broadway production with a racially integrated cast, which she filmed while rehearsing. Live then commissioned her to paint African-American women in South Carolina as “fashion inspiration” for the 1941 issue. She later recast one of the nine fashion paintings into “Siesta” (1944)\u2014a vaguely erogenous painting of a Dionysian black woman\u2014which She won third prize at the Carnegie Institution exhibit. This was followed by assignments in North Africa, Mexico, Cuba and Hollywood.<\/p>\n Lee made little distinction between her high art and commercial art. One common thread is her consistent portrayal of women as happy and confident, both on the farm and in Hollywood. “She makes no apologies for her women and their joy, which I think shows a great deal of liberation,” said Emily Lenz, principal and partner at De Wigmore.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Her work became simpler and more abstract in the 1950s and 1960s. Lee and Blanche were close to Milton Avery and his wife Sally Michael, and some argue that she was under their influence. (Wolf argues that it was mutual.) Lee has been spending more time in Florida, and her paintings reflect the sunny marine environment.<\/p>\n In 1968 Lee was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She died in 1983 in Clearwater, Florida, and had no children and discussed in a 1951 talk how that angered people. “I remember hearing a woman say, ‘The most beautiful thing a woman can create is her family and her home and you will never know how it feels,'” she says. “And you will never know what it feels like to be an artist.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Transferred to boarding school as a teenager in the 1920’s to “polish the edges and prepare for college,” artist Doris…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2557,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-garden","no-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wijhha.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}