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Sent to boarding school as a teenager “to polish the edges and prepare for college” in 1920, artist Doris Lee cut her hair to rebel against her surroundings – the “least adventurous and creative” in her life, to paint without access. This revolt was met with suspension from school and the school’s warning that “beautiful girls have long hair”.
Judging by the many remaining photographs of Lee (1905-1983), he never cut his hair again. But for the next forty years he continued to forge his own path.
A successful Depression-era figurative painter and hugely successful commercial artist during the 1940s and 50s, Lee learned at a young age that to stay in the game, he had to at least pretend to play by the rules. Farm scenes and family gatherings may evoke a Rockwell-like sensuality or the health of Granny Moses (whom she is sometimes compared to), but there’s a feminism simmering beneath the surface of her Americana.
Fearless and confident women feature in many of his works and are not limited to stereotypical female activities. We see them wrestling with horses, shooting arrows and enjoying themselves. Vladimir Nabokov even referred to one of his paintings in “Lolita”. This is a perspective that we did not see elsewhere at the time. Thomas Hart Benton’The men in the field, the smug small townspeople of Grant Wood, or the big-screen wannabes of Reginald Marsh.
Lee performed with leading galleries, sold works to major museums, and painted three paintings. Murals for WPA Life magazine has sent him around the world as an artist reporter and has produced award-winning artwork for major advertising campaigns. But like many figurative painters of the period, particularly women, Lee fell into relative obscurity when Abstract Expressionism seized the taste of the 20th century. Such artists who worked in the 1930s and ’40s were simply “marginalized by fashion,” said art dealer Deedee Wigmore, who has represented Doris Lee’s estate since 1991.
But a big new retrospective, “Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee” Traveling across the country through 2023, the artist is reintroducing it to the public with more than 70 examples of fine and commercial artworks. An accompanying show at D. Wigmore Fine Art in Manhattan through January 28 features 40 more works.
“It’s at this really interesting nexus of folk art, the American Stage, and Modernism,” said Melissa Wolfe of the Saint Louis Museum of Art, who curates the current retrospective with Barbara Jones. Westmoreland Museum of American Art In Greensburg, Pa., where you can see it through January 9. “But basically, he was seen as too frivolous to be taken seriously. Her work can be figurative, accessible and decorative, and these things were perceived as feminine and not taken seriously. I know the New York School is not monolithic, but work that was perceived as masculine—active, big, aggressive, problematic, suspicious—is what was taken seriously.”
Doris Emrick was born in Aledo, Illinois, to a banker-merchant father and a teacher mother. Lee grew up skipping piano lessons to paint on her neighbor’s porch, describing herself as a “tomboy” on her grandparents’ farms. She graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1927 and married Russell Lee, an acclaimed photographer for the Farm Security Administration.
Lee studied painting with the Cubist painter Andre L’Hote in Paris and also with the realist painter Arnold Blanch in San Francisco. In 1931, the Lees followed Blanch and his artist wife, Lucile Lundquist, to the artists’ colony in Woodstock. Lee also bought a studio on 14th Street in Manhattan. Lee left Russell for Blanch in 1939. They lived together but never married, spending the summers in Woodstock, where they were central figures on the art world’s social scene and exhibited regularly, and the winters in Florida.
Woodstock was a progressive place and Lee adapted. He attended the American Congress of Artists, which aimed to combat the rise of fascism in Europe, and clarified his views on inequality. In a speech entitled “Women as Artists” in 1951, she pointed out how “stupid” it was to teach young women to find husbands: race, class, or gender.”
If his work wasn’t overtly political, he secretly delivered some message there, often by spreading overt cultural critiques with a playful and humanistic sense of humor. In “Illinois River Town” (1937), one of the few critics to call “Bruegelian”, figures buzz on a beach as a woman pulls out her drawers to relieve herself. In “The View, Woodstock” (1946), a woman stands in front of a blue house with a pitchfork overlooking the kitchen garden while a man lazes nearby. Suspecting that Lee was slyly quoting Grant Wood, Ms. Wolfe said, “It’s usually the man who introduces us to the property.” “gothic american” (1930).
Lee first rose with the American Stage painters – during the Depression, when artists like Wood and Benton abandoned European modernism to develop their own art forms, everything they imagined was what made America American – its lands, its traditions, ideals, desires. Lee also brought in folk art, which he collected with Blanch and which MoMA recognized as a distinctively American art form. And he never forgot his European education.
Lee’s job wasn’t for everyone. (However, he reported that he received “lots of fan letters, long letters that tell it all,” from people in prisons and mental institutions.) Public criticism blasted him onto the national stage when he painted the “Thanksgiving” painting. – He won the prestigious $500 Logan Purchase Award at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935. If Lee’s cartoon-like figures give direction to German Dada artist George Grosz, his focus—the intensity of female labor—seems much more realistic. The idyllic Thanksgiving painting is more life-like than the more typical depictions of the era.
Donor of the award, Josephine Hancock Logan, publicly called Lee’s work “something dreadful” and subsequently founded the Sanity in Art movement to purge the “modernist grotesques” of Surrealism and Dada from American art. The Art Institute of Chicago responded by purchasing the piece. . Meanwhile, Lee told the Washington Post “it wasn’t my intention to make pretty pictures” and if some faces look “cartoon-like” as Time Magazine and others suggest, “some people do too.”
That same year, Fortune magazine wrote that he “particularly dislikes the last word about his painting being ‘optimism'” and said that what he actually felt was “a kind of violence”. Life magazine later interpreted her comment as “a funny sense of violence”, but Wolfe thinks otherwise.
“Most of his early work seems to be about this kind of inner turmoil or a desire for physical freedom,” the curator said, referring to works like “The Runaway.” (1935), showing a woman on horseback speeding away from a farm.
Lee’s relative privilege helped him survive as an artist during the Depression, as did Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. As cultural historian John Fagg, who contributed to the “Simple Pleasures” catalog notes, the renegade heiress founded the Whitney Studio Club, where artists like Lee could showcase and sell their work. (Lee was included in the first Whitney Biennale in 1932.)
It soon caught the attention of art directors and editors. Lee’s style had become livelier and flatter, with large areas of watery, distinct color that made it easy to reproduce. (He also paid attention to design details such as furniture, architecture, plant life, technology, jewellery, which lends itself well to illustrations.)
In 1941 he joined Associated American Artists, the vibrant gallery of entrepreneur Reeves Lewenthal, who aimed to make money by bringing the fine arts to the masses. As the age of consumerism and advertising exploded, he produced prints of her and took jobs at companies such as American Tobacco and General Mills, as well as having him design fabrics and ceramics and acquire illustrations for books including the Rogers & Hart Songbook. “He was very stubborn,” Jones said. “She went after everything. She was usually the only woman who worked with these boy bands, and she really could take care of herself.”
His first assignment for Life in 1939 was to commemorate the musical “Showboat.” It was the first Broadway production to feature a racially integrated cast, in which he portrayed rehearsals. Life then commissioned her to paint African American women “as fashion inspiration” in South Carolina for a 1941 issue. He then reworked one of the nine fashion plates and turned it into “Siesta” (1944), a vaguely eroticized painting of a Black woman from Dionysos that won third prize at the Carnegie Institution show. This was followed by missions in North Africa, Mexico, Cuba and Hollywood.
Lee did not make much of a distinction between fine and commercial art. A common thread is his persistent portrayal of women on the farm or in Hollywood as happy and confident. “She’s not apologizing for her women and their joy, I think it shows that it’s a big liberation,” said Emily Lenz, director and partner of D. Wigmore.
His work became more fluid and abstract in the 1950s and 60s. Lee and Blanch were close with Milton Avery and his wife, Sally Michael, and some claim he was under their influence. (Wolfe argues this is mutual.) Lee was spending more time in Florida, and his paintings reflect the sunny, marine environment.
In 1968 Lee was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He died in Clearwater, Fla., in 1983. He had no children, and in a 1951 speech he discussed how this angered people. “I remember a woman saying, ‘The greatest thing a woman can create is her family and home, and you never know that feeling,'” she said. Her rebuttal: “And you’ll never know what it feels like to be an artist.”
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