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Doris Lee Landscape Paintings

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

"Boats Amongst the Mangroves, " Watercolor & Gouache on Paper signed by 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 Landscape Paintings

Materials

Watercolor, Gouache

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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. 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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. 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By Richard Whorf

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1960s American Modern Doris Lee Landscape Paintings

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1920s American Modern Doris Lee Landscape Paintings

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1930s American Modern Doris Lee Landscape Paintings

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Doris Lee landscape paintings for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Doris Lee landscape paintings available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of landscape paintings 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 paint, gouache, oil paint 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 landscape paintings, so small editions measuring 26 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Leon Dolice, Frank Wilcox, and Eric Sloane. Doris Lee landscape paintings prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $12,000 and tops out at $47,000, while the average work can sell for $29,500.