Doris Emrick Lee

(American, 1905–1983)

Spring Lakes, c. 1950

oil on canvas

signed Doris Lee (lower right); signed and titled (stretcher)

34 1/4 x 44 1/4 inches.

This lot is located in Chicago.

Provenance:

D. Wigmore Fine Arts, New York (label verso)

Irving Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida

Purchased from the above, 1998

Lot note:

Doris Lee was a constant presence in American art for the majority of the twentieth century. Emerging among the American Scene painters and alongside Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, her early work cast an eye to quintessential subjects of American identity: life in the home, in the city, and in the countryside. Spring Lakes and Florida Sunset are both vibrant examples of the artist’s later work. In both, Lee uses fields of pure color and a flattening of figure and form to describe the landscape. These paintings also reveal the central struggle of the artist’s career: Lee found herself in the crosshairs between Realism and abstraction. She graduated from Rockford College in 1927 in her home state of Illinois, and then went on to study throughout the United States and Europe. She spent considerable time in Paris – training with cubist artists such as André Lhote – as well as in Munich, Kansas City, and San Francisco. As a result, Lee was well exposed to not only American art and the old masters, but she was also fluent in the abstract language of the European avant-garde. Upon her return to the United States, despite the conservatism of Regionalist art, Lee would combine aspects of naturalism and European modernism into her work.

Beginning in the 1930s, attracted by its beauty and idyllic weather, Lee and her husband Arnold Blanch wintered in Florida. There Lee became close with artists Sally Michel and Milton Avery. With their support and influence, Lee moved confidently into a period of stylization and abstraction in her landscapes. Florida Sunset, for example, presents a subject that the artist returned to on multiple occasions, that of silhouettes of the Gulf Coast. As Barbara Jones, Chief Curator of The Westmoreland, wrote of such landscapes, “Lee’s intense and deeply felt response to the natural world has engulfed this simplified composition in saturated color.” (30 Minutes with Doris Lee, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art website, November 17, 2021). The gouache is dominated by orange, out of which emerges the dark forms of bare coastline trees and a floating buoy with a bird perched atop. In the distance, a handful of dark islands divide the sky from the ocean at the horizon.

Spring Lakes takes a similar approach to flattened form and pure, vibrant color, yet ties thematically to the pastoral images of her early career. Indeed, looking at this canvas it is easy to imagine that Lee had in mind the landscapes and figures of Grandma Moses. In a composition constructed of fields of blue and teal, divided by a forest green line, rounded forms of clouds, trees, and lakes appear to hover in between figures of white cows. To the left, a faint path leads to a gray house, its windows mirroring the round forms of the lakes and the square shape of the house itself. Playing further with the tension between flatness and perspective, a gray dove, the same color as the clouds, appears massive in comparison with the cows, suggesting that the viewer is likewise looking down on the landscape from high above.

Because of her unapologetically positive worldview and her gender, Doris Lee was often cast aside by critics and curators. In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism became the new leading idiom of American art. The movement was perceived to be masculine and largely eschewed figuration – which was seemingly antithetical to Lee’s vision – and therefore her work was dismissed as essentially feminine and sentimental. In more recent years, however, her work is being reevaluated and appreciated. A major retrospective of her work was staged at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in 2022,

and traveled to the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA, the Vero Beach Museum of Art, FL, and finally the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN where it will remain on view until January 15th, 2023.

Spring Lakes, c. 1950