Lamar Dodd: Paintings and Drawings

Lamar Dodd: Paintings and Drawings July 2 – August 28, 2011 Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia

Georgia Museum of Art University of Georgia 90 Carlton Street Athens, Georgia 30602-6719 tel 706.542.GMOA georgiamuseum.org

front cover: Between Classes, 1940 Oil on canvas 23 3/4 x 45 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1975.34 F

back cover: Study for View of Athens, ca. 1939 Ink and graphite on paper 9 7/8 x 14 3/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of Dr. Roy Ward, Watkinsville GMOA 1983.2

Download a full checklist of this exhibition at www.georgiamuseum.org Partial support for the exhibitions and programs at the Georgia Museum of Art is provided by the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation, the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The Council is a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Individuals, foundations, and corporations provide additional support through their gifts to the University of Georgia Foundation.

Lamar Dodd: Paintings and Drawings Lamar Dodd—teacher, arts administrator, advocate, and artist— rebuilt and revitalized the University of Georgia’s art department beginning in 1937. The most recognized artist of his generation from the state of Georgia, he is considered the “godfather” of the Georgia Museum of Art due to his work with museum founder Alfred Heber Holbrook. Reared in LaGrange, Dodd (1909–1996) was an impassioned exponent of the local scene movement, and his works of the 1930s and 1940s featured southern landscapes, history, people, and industry. He also served as an “ambassador of culture” for the U.S. State Department, as two-term president of the College Art Association, and as a participant in the art program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Believing that drawing was the “mother of the arts,” Dodd utilized the practice even as he moved from realism in the 1930s to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and 1950s and later into a mature style. Featuring one hundred images, this special exhibition during the museum’s reopening year celebrates Dodd’s career and juxtaposes his drawings with many of his related watercolors and paintings. Ranging from the late 1920s, when he was at the Art Students League in New York, to the 1990s, the exhibition also includes the first large-scale display of images from Dodd’s sketchbooks.

The exhibition is generously sponsored by Helen C. Griffith, Clementi L-B Holder, C. L. Morehead Jr., Dorothy Alexander Roush, the W. Newton Morris Charitable Foundation, and the Friends of the Georgia Museum of Art. —Paul Manoguerra Chief curator and curator of American art

NEW YOR K Dodd went to the Georgia Institute of Technology to study architecture in 1926 but disliked it, returned home to LaGrange, and taught art in nearby Five Points, Alabama. In 1928, Dodd moved to New York, where he enrolled in George Bridgman’s drawing course at the Art Students League. With fellow artist Phil Dike, later a color director at Walt Disney Studios, he also took independent classes from painter George Luks. During his two years at the League, Dodd studied with Boardman Robinson, Richard Lahey, and John Steuart Curry and sketched in the city as well as in the classroom. In 1930, he came home to marry his high school sweetheart, Mary Ridley Lehmann, then returned to New York. In 1932, Ferargil Galleries mounted a solo exhibition of his work featuring images of both New York and the South.

A L A BA M A Offered a position in an art supply store in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1933, Dodd returned to the South. In 1936, he sent The Railroad Cut (right), a painting of a slag dump outside Wylam, Alabama, to the Art Institute of Chicago for its forty-seventh annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture. The painting won the Norman Wait Harris Prize—with a silver medal and a $500 award. Dodd and Anne Goldthwaite were the only artists living in Alabama to have work chosen for the First National Exhibition of American Art in the International Building of Rockefeller Center in 1936. Interested in the southern landscape (in works like Alabama Landscape [right]), or in the everyday life of the southern city (in images like Bargain Basement, which pictures the bottom floor of Pizitz Department Store in Birmingham), Dodd became regarded nationally as a leading exponent of a distinctly southern American Scene style of painting.

above, left to right: Urban Landscape (Manhattan: Buildings and the “L”), ca. 1932 Conté crayon on paper, 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.152.1F Manhattan, 1932 Watercolor on paper, 13 7/8 x 18 1/4 inches Collection of C. L. Morehead Jr. opposite, top: Central Park, 1931 Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 39 5/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1975.2 F opposite, bottom, left to right: The Railroad Cut, 1936 Oil on canvas, 37 11/16 x 49 5/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1974.2 F Alabama Landscape, 1937 Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 29 3/4 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1975.17F

THE SOU THE A ST, GEORGI A , A ND ATHENS In 1937, Dodd accepted a position as faculty in the University of Georgia’s art department. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, as he developed a national reputation as a “symbol of the growing prominence of Southern art,” he created images of the university, students, Athens, and the surrounding region (Art Digest, March 1940). The cotton fields, hills, peach orchards, and river shoals of the Athens area provided Dodd with plentiful subjects. Coastline pictures, beginning in the late 1930s, of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and the Georgia coast focus on the windswept dunes, sea grasses, and waves along the beaches of the Atlantic.

Exhibited at Ferargil Galleries, Sand, Sea, and Sky was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1951, Dodd’s drawings of scenes in Savannah illustrated the book The Savannah, by Thomas L. Stokes, in the Rivers of America series. He also provided illustrations for a book on the Santee River published in 1968.

above: Untitled (Sanford Stadium), 1960s Oil and charcoal on canvas 30 x 46 5/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of C. L. Morehead Jr. GMOA 1997.92

above: Early Morning, Copperhill, 1940 Ink wash and graphite on paper 8 1/2 x 14 3/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1975.35 F right: Oconee River, ca. 1938 Ink and compressed charcoal on paper, 11 x 17 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.88 F

MONHEG A N In 1947, as the result of a Carnegie Foundation grant-in-aid, Dodd first visited the small island of Monhegan off the coast of Maine. Artists like Robert Henri, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Rockwell Kent, plus Dodd’s friends and acquaintances including Joseph De Martini and Ferdinand Warren, had been attracted by the island’s rocky coastline and forested interior. Dodd made trips to Monhegan many, many times throughout his life, and images of the jagged cliffs, fishermen and their equipment, trees, and boats fill his oeuvre.

The Georgia A. Hearn Fund purchased his Monhegan Theme in 1951 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

clockwise from top left: Fisherman and His Catch, 1949 Ink on paper, 10 x 8 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.381F Fisherman’s Equipment (Monhegan), n.d.

Gouache and ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 13 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.624 F Captain Pierce, 1949 Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of Mary and Lamar Dodd GMOA 1975.47F

TR AV EL S IN THE UNITED STATE S A ND A BROA D clockwise from top left: Skyward, 1944 Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 39 5/8 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Partial gift of C. L. Morehead Jr. GMOA 1998.66 Study for Skyward, 1944 Ink on paper, 6 1/2 x 8 inches Collection of C. L. Morehead Jr. In Venice, 1956 Oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches Collection of C. L. Morehead Jr. Piazza San Marco, Venice, ca. 1953 Graphite on paper, 5 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.476 F

Whether in the American West in the 1930s and 1940s, or at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state in the 1970s, Dodd sketched the local landscape and scenery and translated the imagery to finished oil paintings. In May 1952, Dodd earned a special grant of $10,000 from the General Education Board in New York to visit art centers in Europe and the United States. From November 1953 to July 1954, Dodd and his family traveled to Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Holland, England, and Scotland. He would return to Europe later and created drawings and painting of European sights and scenes into the 1990s. The U.S. State Department appointed Dodd to its Advisory Committee on the Arts and sent him as well to Turkey, Belgium, Denmark, the Soviet Union, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Japan.

NA SA A ND THE COSMOS James E. Webb, the administrator of NASA, initiated a program in 1961 to involve visual artists in the documentation and exploration of space. Lester Cooke of the National Gallery of Art and James Dean of NASA’s Media Development Division invited artists, including Dodd, to observe every aspect of the U.S. space program. Dodd witnessed the Apollo 11 launch in Florida and was at mission control in Houston when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon in 1969. As a result of these experiences, Dodd not only created documentary imagery of the program, but also fashioned a series of visionary drawings and paintings featuring imagined, abstract cosmological “landscapes” and forms.

below, left to right: Sketch for Crucified Sun, ca. 1972 Ink on paper, 9 x 6 1/2 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Extended loan from the University of Georgia Foundation, gift of the Lamar Dodd Estate GMOA 1997.712 F Crucified Sun, 1972 Oil with gold and oxidized silver leaf on canvas 57 3/4 x 45 7/8 inches (framed) Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Partial gift of C. L. Morehead Jr. GMOA 1999.47

HEART Mary Dodd was hospitalized at Emory University Hospital in 1977 for a serious heart condition, and Lamar began to investigate surgery, medical technology, and the operating room as subject matter for art.

Eventually, Dodd would witness twenty-five operations and was allowed to work anywhere except in the area where the chief surgeon was performing his tasks. The Heart series exists as an aesthetic exploration of the basic mysteries of life and death and serves as a lasting memorial to Mary, who died in 1986.

above: Study for Open Heart Surgery, 1980 Drawing, 52 x 32 inches Collection of C. L. Morehead Jr.