The Figge Art Museum presents “Explore the Archives: Doris Lee" -- March 10.

Thursday, March 10, 6:30 p.m.

Presented by the Figge Art Museum

A fascinating program held in conjunction with the Figge Art Museum's current exhibition Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, the March 10 virtual presentation Explore the Archives: Doris Lee will find Emily Moore – former archival assistant at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) – exploring the gifted Midwestern artist's career and works in the Doris Lee Archive housed in the NMWA Library and Research Center.

Born in Aledo in 1905, Lee 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, and she 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, settling there for the remainder of her artistic career.

During the 1930s, Lee was commissioned to create several murals by the United States Treasury Department in Washington, DC, and in 1937, she painted two murals in the Main Post Office in Washington, DC, and another in the post office in Summerville, Georgia. That same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her 1936 painting Catastrophe for its permanent collection, and her 1935 painting Noon was later referenced in Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita. During the 1930s and '40s, Lee created a number of lithographs for the Associated American Artists, after which she undertook several commissions for Life magazine, including articles and illustrations on travel to such locales as North Africa, Mexico, and Cuba. During this time, her work became much more stylized with more concern to color and pure forms.

In the Figge's exhibition of her body of work, Simple Pleasures reveals Lee's remarkable ability to merge abstraction with the appeal of the everyday, offering a distinctive visual identity that successfully bridged various artistic “camps” that arose in the post–World War II era. Simple Pleasures presents the first major critical assessment of Lee’s works and includes more than 70 works by the artist spanning the 1930s through the 1960s from both public and private collections. The exhibition features paintings, drawings, prints, and commercial designs in fabric and pottery, and a selection of ephemera, such as product advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee, are also included. Meanwhile, a richly illustrated, full-color catalog with four essays accompanies the exhibition and is currently available in the museum store.

Emily Moore's Explore the Archives: Doris Lee presentation will begin at 6:30 p.m. on March 10, with online registrants receiving a Zoom link two hours before the program begins. Participation is free, the exhibit Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee will be on display through May 8, and more information on the event is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.

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