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Doris Lee Art

1905-1983

Doris Lee, born in Aledo, Illinois, was one of the most successful artists of the depression era. Lee studied at the Kansas City Art Institute with the noted American impressionist Ernest Lawson. She also studied in Paris with the influential cubist painter Andre Lhote and at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, with Arnold Blanch, whom she later married. In 1931, Lee moved permanently to Woodstock, New York and established herself as a leader in an important artist colony. The town’s proximity to New York City guaranteed a regular flow of artists between the colony and the metropolis, keeping in touch with current development in the arts. The Art Students League of New York helped to create that flow when it established a summer school in Woodstock in 1906 that brought hundreds of art students into the town each summer. The 1930s marked the beginning of a long and productive career for Doris Lee. Her work included easel paintings, murals, prints and illustrations, as well as costume, textile and ceramic design. Lee’s work from this period was concerned with life in rural America, and in a stylistic and ideological sense, had much in common with regionalism. Lee portrayed the simple joys of American life in touching, nostalgic and sometimes fanciful ways. Lee’s work was exhibited in the first Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1931. Her earliest major career achievement came in 1935 when she was awarded the Logan Prize for her painting Thanksgiving from the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly after the Logan Prize, Lee was awarded two commissions by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for murals of the Washington, D.C. Post Office Building. An additional boost to the artist’s fame and prestige came in 1937 with the purchase of her painting ‘Catastrophe’ by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1936–39, Lee was invited to be a summer guest artist at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. The 1930s finished with a flourish when Lee was invited to exhibit in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This early support given to Lee by the museums and the art establishment was an impressive accomplishment for a young woman struggling for acceptance in the male-dominated art world of the time.

Starting in the late 1930s, Lee and her husband, Arnold Blanch, began to spend their winters in Key West, Florida. During the winters of the 1940s through the 1960s, Lee painted her unique Florida subjects: fishermen, bathers, beaches, mangrove swamps and Florida’s plant and wildlife. Lee combined the sophistication of her knowledge of pure abstraction with her love of American folk art to create her unique style. In the 1940s, Lee’s work became more stylized, more concerned with pure form and color. Her simple, flat paintings portrayed gardens, seasonal landscapes and women and children, as well as birds and other beasts. In 1943 and 1944, Lee was the guest artist at Michigan State College in Lansing, Michigan. She received many painting assignments from Life magazine during these years. She was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 1944 and was included in the 15 of the annual juried exhibition at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Lee worked in Hollywood, California and Hawaii during the winter months of 1945. She toured Central America in 1946 and went to North Africa in 1951. During the 1950s until the end of the 1960s, Lee’s dealers have Associated American Artists Gallery and World House Galleries in New York City and the Rudolf Gallery in Woodstock. She participated in both one-man and group exhibitions with these dealers. Her paintings from this period are characterized by a bold move to pure abstraction. They are richly colored and geometric in design, with realistic references still discernible. Lee produced a significant body of abstract work during the 1960s. In these paintings, she combined her knowledge of international style, her interest in American folk art and her early training with Andre Lhote in abstract painting. The works celebrate Lee’s private experience of the world and synthesize her personal and emotional response to her subject matter. To engage the viewer’s entire field of vision, Lee used broad expanses of color, often geometrically organized. During this period, Lee experimented with black and white, biomorphic shapes and calligraphic brushwork. The late work is painterly yet contains the subtle, wry humor of her earlier work. Doris Lee retired from painting at the end of the 1960s. She died in Clearwater, Florida, in 1983.

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Artist: Doris Lee
Ribbon Dance Female Figure with Blue Ball Oil on Canvas
Ribbon Dance Female Figure with Blue Ball Oil on Canvas

Ribbon Dance Female Figure with Blue Ball Oil on Canvas

By Doris Lee

Located in Miami, FL

Pioneering female American Scene painter Doris Lee depicts two figures in a "Ribbon Dance" in her later flat, semi-abstract style. This is a major museum-quality work of large scale...

Category

1960s Abstract Impressionist Doris Lee Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Boats Amongst the Mangroves, " Watercolor & Gouache on Paper signed Doris Lee
"Boats Amongst the Mangroves, " Watercolor & Gouache on Paper signed Doris Lee

"Boats Amongst the Mangroves, " Watercolor & Gouache on Paper signed Doris Lee

By Doris Lee

Located in Milwaukee, WI

"Boats Amongst the Mangroves" is an original watercolor and gouache painting on paper by Doris Lee. The artist signed the piece lower right. It depicts boats and other objects on a f...

Category

1930s American Modern Doris Lee Art

Materials

Watercolor, Gouache

THE DOVE

THE DOVE

By Doris Lee

Located in Portland, ME

Lee, Doris (American, 1905-1983). THE DOVE. Lithograph, 1952. Edition of 250 published by Associated American Artists. Signed in pencil. 11 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches...

Category

1950s Doris Lee Art

Materials

Lithograph

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Located in New York, NY

NYC Cityscape American Scene WPA Modern Realism Mid 20th Century Architectural Ernest Fiene (1894-1965) Cityscape 36 x 30 inches Oil on canvas Signed and dated 1930. lower right Provenance Estate of the artist. ACA Galleries, New York Exhibited New York, Frank Rehn Gallery, Changing Old New York, 1931. New York, ACA Galleries, Ernest Fiene: Art of the City, 1925-1955, May 2-23, 1981, n.p., no. 5. BIO Ernest Fiene was born in Elberfeld, Germany in 1894. As a teenager, Fiene immigrated to the United States in 1912. He studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1914 to 1918, taking day classes with Thomas Maynard and evening classes with Leon Kroll. Fiene continued his studies at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York from 1916 to 1918, adding classes in printmaking at the Art Students League in 1923. Fiene began his career as an artist in 1919 with his first exhibition of watercolors at the MacDowell Club arranged by his mentor Robert Henri. In 1923 the Whitney Studio Club mounted a large exhibition of his works. The following year he had an exhibition at the New Gallery in New York, which completely sold out all fifty-two works, including paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings. With the proceeds of sales from the New Gallery exhibition, Ernest Fiene and his younger brother Paul, a sculptor, built studios in Woodstock, New York in 1925. In the early Twenties Ernest Fiene painted mostly landscapes of Woodstock and both the Ramapo and Hudson River Valleys. The first monograph from the Younger Artists Series was published on Fiene in 1922. Published in Woodstock, the series went on to include Alexander Brook, Peggy Bacon, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The book reproduced 1 illustration in color and another 27 reproductions in black and white. Around 1925 Fiene became fascinated with the intensity, excitement, and opportunities for color harmonies New York City offered as a subject. His paintings shifted to urban and industrial themes with architecture, industry, and transportation becoming his subjects. By 1926 Fiene had attracted the dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who gave him a one-man exhibition that year, which travelled to the Boston Arts Club. C.W. Kraushaar Galleries gave Fiene a one-man exhibition of urban, landscape, portrait, and still life paintings in 1927. Julianna Force, the director of the Whitney Studio Club and first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, included two of Fiene’s paintings in a fall exhibition in 1928. The Whitney Studio Club showed Fiene’s paintings in a two-man exhibition with Glenn O. Coleman that year and acquired three of Fiene’s paintings. Also in 1928 Fiene became affiliated with Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery where he had an exhibition of 20 lithographs in the spring. Fiene sold his house in Woodstock in 1928 to spend more of his time in New York City. With so many successful exhibitions, Fiene returned to Paris in 1928-29 where he rented Jules Pascin's studio and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In France, Fiene painted both landscape and urban subjects developed from ideas influenced by Cubist geometry and the use of flat areas of broad color. Upon returning to New York in 1930, Fiene used this new approach to continue to paint New York skyscraper and waterfront subjects, as well as to begin a series of paintings on changing old New York based on the excavations for Radio City Music Hall and the construction of the Empire State Building. Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries exhibited this series, titled “Changing Old New York,” in 1931. Fiene also has solo exhibitions at Rehn Galleries in 1930 and 1932. Fiene’s oil paintings are exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1930 as well. Fiene was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans in December of 1931. Visiting New York, Henri Matisse saw the exhibition and called Fiene’s Razing Buildings, West 49th Street the finest painting he had seen in New York. Fiene had two mural studies from his Mechanical Progress series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers in 1932. Fiene sent View from my Window which depicts Fiene working on a lithograph stone while looking out his window to the newly completed Empire State Building to the Carnegie International in 1931. In 1932 Fiene participated in the first Biennial of American Painting at the Whitney Museum and his prints were included in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery and the Wehye Gallery. In the same year, Fiene was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to further study mural painting in Florence, Italy. On his return from Italy in 1933 Fiene re-engaged himself in New York City life and won several public and private mural projects. Fiene resumed his active exhibition schedule, participating in two group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and a one-man exhibition of recent paintings at the Downtown Gallery in January 1934. In 1933 he purchased a farm in Southbury, Connecticut, which added Connecticut scenes to his landscape subjects. This was also the year Fiene began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine, where he painted seascapes, harbor scenes, and still lifes. Fiene’s landscape paintings attracted numerous commissions as part of the American Scene movement. Through the fall and winter of 1935-36, Fiene took an extended sketching trip through the urban, industrial, and farming areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Most of the twenty-four Pennsylvania urban and rural paintings...

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"Danger" - Original Modernist Oil Painting on Canvas
"Danger" - Original Modernist Oil Painting on Canvas

Jean Hyson"Danger" - Original Modernist Oil Painting on Canvas, 1966

$920Sale Price|20% Off

H 20.5 in W 24.5 in D 1 in

"Danger" - Original Modernist Oil Painting on Canvas

Located in Soquel, CA

"Danger" - Original Modernist Oil Painting on Canvas Striking modernist painting by Bay Area artist Jean Hyson (American, 1928-2023). Hard edge oil on canvas depicting a black square to the left of the canvas with a lit up cinema projector. A mans face can be seen appearing in the light coming from the projector. An orange square is seen parallel to the projector, with a yellow circle inside. The number "13" can be seen in the lower right of the orange square. Purple and light blue take up the background. Signed "Hyson" lower right in black square. Titled, signed and dated "Jean Hyson" "Danger 1966" verso. Presented in a purple wooden frame. Frame: 20 1/2"H x 24 1/2"W Image: 19 3/4"H x 24"W Born in Texas, Jean Hyson (American, 1928-2023) is best known for her modernist, sharp edge, paintings. Hyson attended the Art Student League in New York with George Grosz, Yaso Kumiyoshi and William Baziotes and Beaux Artes, Paris, France from 1954-59. She was an Artist in Residence and Instructor at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland from 1970-1974. Her work is held in the Oakland Art Museum, Oakland California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California and the California Container Corp. of America, Chicago, Illinois. Jean Hyson and her then-husband Jacques Fabert (who typically painted under the name “Jean Faber Himbert”) were an important force within the midcentury San Francisco art scene. Her work has been featured in countless Bay Area gallery and museum exhibitions—including SFMOMA, the de Young, and the Legion of Honor—and is in numerous public and private collections. In a fantastic in-depth interview with Hilda Pertha...

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1960s Abstract Impressionist Doris Lee Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

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Turner B. Messick 1938 Colorado Winter Landscape Watercolor, American Modern

Turner B. Messick 1938 Colorado Winter Landscape Watercolor, American Modern

Located in Denver, CO

A beautifully atmospheric 1938 watercolor by noted American Modernist Turner B. Messick (1878–1952) depicting a serene winter landscape in Colorado. A graceful leafless tree anchors ...

Category

1930s American Modern Doris Lee Art

Materials

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Delightful 1950s Cubist Harbor Scene by Woman Artist Rita Duis (Astley-Bell)
Delightful 1950s Cubist Harbor Scene by Woman Artist Rita Duis (Astley-Bell)

Delightful 1950s Cubist Harbor Scene by Woman Artist Rita Duis (Astley-Bell)

Located in Chicago, IL

A Mid-Century Modern, 1950s Cubist watercolor of a brightly-colored dock scene by Chicago and New York artist Rita Duis (Astley-Bell). Signed "Duis", lower left. Artwork size: 8 1/...

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1950s American Modern Doris Lee Art

Materials

Watercolor, Paper

Previously Available Items
"Michigan Farmyard" Doris Lee, Modernist American Landscape, Red Barn, Farmland
"Michigan Farmyard" Doris Lee, Modernist American Landscape, Red Barn, Farmland

"Michigan Farmyard" Doris Lee, Modernist American Landscape, Red Barn, Farmland

By Doris Lee

Located in New York, NY

Doris Lee Michigan Farmyard, 1946 Signed lower right Gouache on paper 13 1/2 x 17 inches Provenance The artist The J.L. Hudson Company Collection, Detroit, Michigan A Public Institu...

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1940s American Modern Doris Lee Art

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1961 Modernist FOLK ART Original Pencil Lithograph “Along the Waterway”
1961 Modernist FOLK ART Original Pencil Lithograph “Along the Waterway”

1961 Modernist FOLK ART Original Pencil Lithograph “Along the Waterway”

By Doris Lee

Located in New York, NY

Doris Lee Lithograph “Along the Waterway” 1961 Image Size: 10 1/16 x 14 in inches Sheet Size: 12 7/8 x 16 5/16inches Signed lower left Condition: Good Provenance: ASA Doris Emrick Lee...

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1960s Folk Art Doris Lee Art

Materials

Lithograph, Archival Pigment

"Floral & Teacup, " Doris Lee Still Life, Spring Pink Still Life, Woodstock
"Floral & Teacup, " Doris Lee Still Life, Spring Pink Still Life, Woodstock

"Floral & Teacup, " Doris Lee Still Life, Spring Pink Still Life, Woodstock

By Doris Lee

Located in New York, NY

Doris Lee (1904 - 1983) Floral & Teacup Oil on canvas 18 x 20 inches Signed lower right An American Scene painter of realistic subjects in a style that combined Realism and Modernis...

Category

Mid-20th Century American Modern Doris Lee Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Doris Lee art for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Doris Lee art available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of art to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by Doris Lee in lithograph, paint, gouache and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the modern style. Not every interior allows for large Doris Lee art, so small editions measuring 12 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Cecil Crosley Bell, Charles Quest, and Luigi Lucioni. Doris Lee art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $750 and tops out at $47,000, while the average work can sell for $8,200.

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