Doris Lee

Doris Emrick Lee (February 1, 1905 – June 16, 1983) was an American painter known for her figurative painting and printmaking. She won the Logan Medal of the Arts from the Chicago Art Institute in 1935. She is known as one of the most successful female artists of the Depression era in the United States.

Biography and career

Lee was born in Aledo, Illinois and attended Ferry Hall School, a preparatory school for girls in Lake Forest, Illinois, from 1920 to 1922. She graduated from Rockford College in 1927 and studied with the American Impressionist and Ashcan School painter Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1929. At the institute, she also met painter, Arnold Blanch whom she later married after her 1939 divorce from Russell Lee. Lee also attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1930. After her schooling, Lee moved to Woodstock, New York and established herself as an artist in that community and settled there for the remainder of her artistic career. That same year the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her 1936 painting Catastrophe for its permanent collection. Her 1935 painting "Noon", was referenced in Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita. During the 1930s and 1940s she created a number of lithographs for the Associated American Artists. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lee undertook several commissions for Life magazine, including articles and illustrations on travel to such places as North Africa, Mexico, and Cuba. During this time, her work became much more stylized with more concern to color and pure forms.

She taught at Michigan State University and was invited to attend Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center as a guest artist. and the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina. A traveling retrospective entitled "Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee", is planned for 2021-2023, and a related exhibit is at the Wigmore Fine Art Gallery in Manhattan in January 2022. Her painting offered a quaint model of domesticity that appealed to those who were tired of the complication of modern life in the 1930s.