Doris Lee's "The Fisherman's Wife" in the Figge Art Museum's “Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee" -- through May 8.

Saturday, February 5, through Sunday, May 8

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

A gifted painter and Aledo, Illinois, native known for her beautiful and evocative figurative painting and printmaking will be celebrated in a new exhibit at the Figge Art Museum, with the Davenport venue, through May 8, housing Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, the first major critical assessment of Lee’s superlative works.

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 places as North Africa, Mexico, and Cuba. During this time, her work became much more stylized with more concern to color and pure forms.

The Figge's new 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, will also be included. Meanwhile, a richly illustrated, full-color catalog with four essays accompanies the exhibition and will be available in the museum store.

Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee will be on display through May 8, with regular museum hours 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays (10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursdays) and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Museum admission is $4-10, and more information on the installation is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.

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