Untitled- Red and Blue Abstract Painting

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Dorothy Hood
Untitled- Red and Blue Abstract Painting
1950s

About the Item

Very early Dorothy Hood Painting with bold reds, blues, and purples. One of her first in this series that became coveted. Was given by the artist directly to the previous owner. The paint has been stabilized because there is some crackling to the left side which was common for her very early works. Can hang vertical or horizontal. Artist Biography: Abstract Surrealist painter Dorothy Hood, was born in Bryan, Texas in 1918, and her life and work embraced much of the 20th Century in Mexico and the United States where she was regarded as a pioneer because of her exceptional use of color and daring techniques. She was a prolific painter who created many large-scale canvases washed with intense colors. Other mediums for her were ink drawing, printing and collages. Hood traveled to Mexico in 1941 after studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, and Art Students League, New York City, where, in her early to mid-twenties, she became part of the circle of leading artists and writers of Europe and Mexico. She married Bolivian composer Velasco Maidana, a Bolivian conductor and composer, and spent the next nineteen years in Mexico, but also traveled widely including in Central, South and North America. Hood was in New York studying during most of 1945. There she was influenced by James Thrall Soby's book, After Picasso, and produced some drawings, one of which was shown by a friend of hers to Soby, an important curatorial figure at the Museum of Modern Art. He liked her work and this meant that Dorothy Hood was twenty-seven years old, and exhibiting with Picasso and Matisse in an exhibition sponsored by a major American museum. In 1950 at age thirty two, Hood had a solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery at a time when it was difficult for women to gain exhibitions. She was back in Texas with her husband in 1961, and she became a prominent teacher at the Houston School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts. The couple found the city exciting as their first years there were years of much fascination with the first man landing on the moon. Hood was profoundly affected by the American space program and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and later said they inspired her to turn her brushes and paints toward the vastness of the universe. From 1962, she began exhibiting her work at a major gallery in Houston, and had five one-person exhibitions at major Texas museums since 1971. A poet as well as a painter, Dorothy Hood has had two films made about her: From the Heart, 1982, and Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life, 1985. She died on November 3, 2000, at the age of 82.

Creator:
Dorothy Hood (1919 - 2000, American)
Creation Year:
1950s
Dimensions:
Height: 70 in (177.8 cm)Width: 60.5 in (153.67 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
Medium:
Acrylic
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
1950-1959
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Houston, TX
Reference Number:
Seller: AL0000.3351stDibs: LU55131988643

Shop All Dorothy Hood

Dorothy Hood

Dorothy Hood's oil-on-canvas paintings and works on paper combine Color Field techniques with painterly abstraction. Her use of decalcomania (a technique wherein paint pigments are allowed to flow and dry around an object which is subsequently removed, leaving a ghostly imprint on the canvas) belies her time spent with the Surrealist painters of Mexico City in the 1940s–60s.

The pictorial space and visual fissures of Hood’s large-scale paintings and works on paper recall a profound mindscape that echoes the concerns of these artists, such as José Clemente Orozco, who was her mentor. Having moved back to Houston in 1962, the impact of the Space Age and the fathoms of the cosmos influenced Hood’s paintings further. Her sense of color and deep exploration of materials is unrivaled. During her career, Hood appeared as one of the region's powerhouse female abstract painters, even though being a woman likely hindered the success she was due among her American Abstraction cohort.

Hood established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of postwar and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.

In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, among others.

In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Hood's works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918–2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled “Kindred Spirits, Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood,” mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, “Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth.”

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(Biography provided by McClain Gallery)