Doris Emrick Lee

(American, 1905–1983)

Florida Sunset, c. 1950

gouache on board

signed Doris Lee (lower right)

19 3/4 x 29 3/4 inches.

This lot is located in Chicago.

Provenance:

World House Galleries, New York (label verso)

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

Irving Galleries, Palm Beach, Florida

Purchased from the above, 1998

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.

Framed: 25 1/4 x 35 1/4 inches.
Minor deposits of surface dirt and dust; thin lines of frame abrasion along all edges; one diagonal abrasion in upper left corner, approximately 2 inches in length, only visible in raking light. Under UV, no apparent inpainting is visible. Additional images available upon request.

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As the head of Hindman’s Fine Art Department, Mr. Stanfield is instrumental in bringing in major consignments from private collectors, estates, dealers and institutions. He has led the department to dozens of auction records, with a particular focus on Chicago Modernism. Mr. Stanfield has played an integral role in the development of the American & European and Post War & Contemporary Art categories, with the most successful year for the department in company history coming in 2021. He also oversaw a house record for total sales for a week of Fine Art auctions in May 2022. Mr. Stanfield is also the lead auctioneer for the Fine Art sales at Hindman. Prior to returning to Hindman in 2019, he was at Toomey & Co. for eight years, where he oversaw important collections including the estate of Candice B. Groot, the collection of Governor Jim Thompson, and the estate of Robert E. Beck. Mr. Stanfield earned a BA from the University of Kansas where he studied Art History.

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Please email [email protected] for any additional information or questions you may have regarding this lot.

American & European Art

Florida Sunset, c. 1950

American & European Art

Florida Sunset, c. 1950

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