bothwell

Dorr Bothwell (American, 1902-2000)

Dorr Bothwell created spare and elegant works characterized by exquisite lines, stylized, weightless forms, and bold, simplified imagery that reveal a delight in subject matter, a keen sense of humor, and an idiosyncratic style based on the artist’s intuitive relationship to her surroundings. Actively working from the early 1920s up until the time of her death, she was able to successfully integrate into her regular studio practice an avid engagement with world cultures while also balancing the duties of professional teaching. During these years, her work was presented in numerous exhibitions that were well-received by critics, art historians, and especially her peers.

Born in 1902, Bothwell went to art school and began her career as an artist in San Francisco, studying at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1920 to 1925; the Schaffer School of Design; and then attending the University of Oregon. After study and travel abroad in the late 20s to early 30s in England, France, Germany, and Samoa, she moved to San Diego and married sculptor Donald Hord. In 1935 Bothwell moved to Los Angeles, where she met Feitelson and Lundeberg and worked on murals for the Federal Art Project (WPA). After moving back to the Bay Area in 1940, Bothwell continued to paint and make screen prints. From 1946 to 1955, she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute alongside such prominent and influential artists as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Clay Spohn, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Mark Rothko. Her most compelling courses at the art institute were in precision drawing, life drawing, textile design, serigraphy, and color control, which she sometimes co-taught with Clyfford Still. Throughout the 1960s through the early 1980s, Bothwell continued to teach (at the Mendocino Art Center) and travel (to Nigeria, Tunisia, England, France, Holland, Bali, Java, Sumatra, China, and Japan). In the early 1990s, Bothwell retired to Arizona and in 1998, at the age of 96; the artist received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award.

Bothwell’s major solo exhibitions included the San Diego Fine Arts Museum (1929) and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (1958 and 1963). Distinctive group exhibitions included The Serigraph, Smithsonian Institution (1952); The Carnegie International Exhibition, The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh (1952 and 1958); Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, UCLA Hammer Museum (traveled) (1995); Made in California at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2000); and Vital Forms: American Art in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960, Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY (traveled) (2001-2003), among others. Her work was also featured in the book Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945 by Patricia Trenton published by UC Press in 1995.