Dorothy Dehner

Chess Set

conceived 1957, cast in 1993-4

Dorothy Dehner was one of the important women artists in the United States in the mid-century American abstraction movement (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has more than a dozen of her works in its collection). Unfortunately, she has been overshadowed by the titanic presence of David Smith (the most important sculptor of the Abstract Expressionist period), whom she married when they were both young artists experimenting with abstraction in the 30s. Though she, too, devoted an amount of time making sculpture, she was the more talented painter of the two (they separated in the 40s, allegedly due to Smith's feelings of competition with Dehner). Her pen and ink and watercolor works are the most moving, expressive and original of her creations. When the Museum of Modern Art decided to buy one of her works for its permanent collection in 1953, it was one of these watercolors it chose. The Jewish Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art have held major retrospectives of Dehner's work. In 1993, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of Dehner's watercolors from this same period. Her work is also in the British Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, Phillips Collection (Washington D. C.), Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of American Art, among others.