The Westmoreland Museum of American Art Greensburg, PA ( -
Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA (February 5 – May 8, 2022),
Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL (June 5 – September 18, 2022),
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN (October 30, 2022 – January 15, 2023).
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An undated image provided by the estate of Doris Lee shows “Thanksgiving,” 1935, a painting by the artist. A major new retrospective, “Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee,” traveling nationally through 2023, is reintroducing the painter and illustrator at the nexus of folk art and Modernism to the public. Estate of Doris Lee, via D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. via The New York Times.
Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee presents the first major critical assessment of works by the artist Doris Lee (1904 – 1983). Lee was one of the most recognized artists in the country during the 1930s and 40s and a leading figure in the Woodstock Artist’s Colony. In response to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the decades after World War II, Lee deftly absorbed these innovations into a continuation of her own visual style. Lee’s body of work reveals a remarkable ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday and offers a coherent visual identity that successfully bridged various artistic “camps” that arose in the post-World War II era.
Co-curated by Barbara L. Jones and Melissa Wolfe, Curator of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Simple Pleasures will include over 70 works by the artist spanning from the 1930s through the 1960s from both public and private collections and be comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, and commissioned commercial designs in fabric and pottery. There will also be a small group of ephemera, such as advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee.
Doris Lee joined one of America’s leading art colonies located in Woodstock, New York in 1931. Artists were newly focusing on social scenes of everyday life, both on the farm and in the city, as expressions of the shared history and support for Americans at a time of national instability. A rural landscape of this type by Lee titled Early Spring Landscape is in our exhibition. It was accepted for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s First Biennial Exhibition in 1932 and requested for the 1933 Annual Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. We are also showing Landscape with Hunter, which was exhibited in the 1937 Corcoran Biennial Exhibition and reproduced in the 1945 American Artists Group monograph on Lee. Landscape with Hunter is rich in both autumn color and game as the hunter is provided with a choice of a fox or a stag. In 1936 Lee had a solo exhibition at the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, Washington, DC and Maynard Walker Galleries became her dealer. With a museum exhibition and a leading New York dealer, Doris Lee at the age of 32 was now a prominent American artist.
In the Woodstock art colony, stylistic and ideological differences were accepted as vital to moving art forward. While surrounded by farms, mountains, and lakes, Woodstock was close enough to New York City that artists could keep a studio in the city and be in Woodstock during the summer. This proximity allowed Doris Lee to visit art galleries and museums and be known to dealers and curators. Each summer in Woodstock, Lee connected with other artists and they shared what they saw as important. In New York three major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s had an impact on Lee and other artists. The exhibitions were: The Art of the Common Man in America: 1750-1900 in 1932; Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936; and Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America in 1938. One result of these exhibitions was artists began to consider folk art as a way into modernism. Lee and her husband Arnold Blanch became collectors of early Americana, as did their Woodstock artists friends Konrad Cramer and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. These exhibitions also helped Lee shift her focus in the 1940s to subjects that were part of her everyday life of friends, community, gardening, sewing, games, and travel. A painting in our exhibition that shows the transition Lee made from American Scene painting’s tighter realism to Americana appears in Vase of Flowers, a portrait of a country vase filled with colorful simple flowers placed on a floral patterned cloth executed around 1940. As Lee continued to paint still life, she focused on the abstract structure of a subject to flatten space and play with perspective.
This exhibition includes several still lifes, such as Flower Box Still Life, Magnifying Glass with Sunflower Seeds, Summer Souvenirs, and Lilacs. They are offered to show Doris Lee’s continued stylistic evolution. In subjects such as Carolers, Memorial Day, and Cottage Country, Lee uses memory as a tool to clarify some elements and eliminate others. These paintings are each simplified stories told from a woman’s point of view with decoration and figuration that embrace pattern.
From 1941 on, Doris Lee was represented by Associated American Artists, led by Reeves Lewenthal, a dealer who negotiated commissions between his artists and corporations. This arrangement created more opportunities for Lee to travel nationally and internationally. Lee remained busy through the 1950s with exhibitions and commissions. For instance in the period 1950-1951, Lee’s schedule included: a solo exhibition at Associated American Artists Galleries, New York; an artist-in-residence at the Maitland Research Studio, Florida over the winter; a panel at the Third Woodstock Art Conference; inclusion in the major exhibition American Painting Today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Also in 1950-1951, Lee received prizes for both her Abbott Laboratories advertisement and Seventeen magazine illustrations and received commissions to illustrate The Rogers and Hart Song Book, design ceramics for Stonelain, and travel for two months through North Africa for Life magazine.
Young Harpist is the cover of the exhibition catalogue as it was shown in Lee’s 1950 solo exhibition of 22 oil paintings and 5 gouaches at Associated American Artists Galleries. In Young Harpist, a Doris Lee-like figure plays a musical composition for the viewer. A window with a country view behind the harpist suggests a fuller story is being told. Further works in our exhibition that deserve mention are Country Schoolhouse which was part of an 8 painting commission Lee received from J. L. Hudson Co. on contemporary life in Michigan and High Flying Picnic which received the award of merit at the Art Directors Club in 1950, submitted for consideration by art director of Seventeen magazine Cipe Pineles. Two further examples of Lee’s storytelling feature fun happenings in Woodstock are Dark Pool with an evening picnic and skinny dip and The Archer representing the women’s archery club to speak of the skills and strengths of women.
