At 95, the Fabulous Lois Dodd Gets Her Place in the Sun

Long known to connoisseurs, Dodd’s sinewy, poetic landscapes and New York views get star treatment in a big, new show.

L ast week I wrote about Greenwich’s Bruce Museum, just renovated, expanded, and transformed. It’s an art-and-science museum, a quirky combo, and now that’s only one of its strengths. I don’t often see a big redo so deftly calibrated to both the enjoyment and edification of the visitors. Everything looks great, which is what the objects want. New and renovated galleries are various and elegant, making for a museum that accommodates different interests and moods. It’s an architectural success story and a great launch for a place that’s now the civic museum for Connecticut’s Gold Coast.

Now it’s the art and the programming that have to do the heavy lifting. A renovated and expanded museum draws crowds when it reopens — once, to see the architecture. The Bruce picked exactly the right temporary exhibition to debut its new look and purpose. Lois Dodd: Natural Order is the first retrospective in the New York area for one of America’s finest painters. Dodd, now 95, has been making rigorous yet luscious landscapes for 70 years, and she’s still painting and still evolving. In doing a big Dodd show, the Bruce does what every smart museum does. It surprises and delights.

Shame on the big Manhattan museums for barring Dodd from their pantheon of stars. She’s a woman, a tried-and-true explanation. Like Yvonne Jacquette, Lorraine Shemesh, Elizabeth Enders, Pat Adams, Sue Miller, and many other women of a certain time and place, Dodd is always good and inventive but never glam. She’s a representational painter in an epoch that still privileges abstraction. She’s not political, and she isn’t a fad-surfer. Her work is consistently high-quality.

There’s no quintessential Dodd. She has painted views from the window of the modest Manhattan loft in Alphabet City she’s had since 1960, snow scenes from a weekend place in Blairstown she has owned in rural New Jersey since 1976, and scenes of old farm buildings and woods in Cushing in rural Maine, where she has spent summers since 1961. She paints staircases, windows, flowers, mirrors, trees, nocturnes, and, here and there, nudes. So I can write in 2023 that Dodd likes both variety as well as constancy. Her subjects are, by and large, unpretentious.

Of the 80 or so paintings in Natural Order, I’d start a Dodd primer with Laundry Line: Red, White, Black, Pitchfork, from 1979. At 36 by 54 inches, it’s big but not panoramic, hardly resplendent but still imposing. Dodd’s paintings usually start with rectangles and squares. Even her pictures of woods in Maine start with grids of tall, vertical trees, horizontal branches, diagonal shadows, and here and there, a fallen tree. Natural Order, from 1978, gives the exhibition its name. It’s a Maine scene from the woods by her house. It starts with a grid softened by fluffy paint application. When Dodd settled that summer, she saw that a bad winter ice storm had felled some trees, creating what she called “an exciting composition,” not a disheveled, discombobulated one but one with an inner logic.

In Laundry Line, we don’t see people, but we see their presence in their laundry and farm implements stuck in the earth. Her landscapes always have a human touch.

Dodd loves color, mostly muted and heavy on green, brown, yellow, and white, but not always. For Laundry Line, she added a big red towel for a jolt. May in Vermont, from 2007, is a symphony of greens, not a riot since all greens live together in harmony. Dodd’s riot-of-red paintings, such as Red Woods, from 1977 or, nearly 40 years later, Second Street Crabapple, show that she’s not a stickler for formula.

Dodd’s subjects are mundane things like her Maine house and its outbuildings, and the woods and dilapidated barns that she finds in the countryside around Cushing. She sees these as America’s version of random ruins outside Rome or Athens. Broken Window, Maine, from 1975, and Door, Window, Ruin, from 1986, are spooky and silent, with black voids having that come-hither-to-your-doom look.

These and many other Dodd pictures twine presence and absence, the tangible and the phantasmic — this is her signature and great strength. Shadow with Easel, from 2010, which introduces Natural Order, is a spectral self-portrait. Dodd is a master of shadows. She says that August light in Maine is so sharp that shadows are dazzlingly clear, but her shadow and the easel’s look like apparitions. Reflected on her flat, green lawn, they’re dreamy abstractions. Dodd’s windows are geometry pictures, but they’re also juxtapositions of absence against presence. Self-Portrait in Greenhouse Window, from 1971, reflects the artist working outside. Other windows reflect woods and flowers, there but not there.

Dodd’s winter shadows have lives of their own. The scenes are still and silent, with a basic white and blue palette, and a painted version of film noir. Moon Shadows is a winter nocturne, as is Road and Hillside in Headlights. Both are from 1992. Dodd rarely paints the same motif over and over for years. She’ll fasten on a subject that intrigues her, experiment, and move to another subject when she finds something more appealing or feels she’s addressed the challenges the subject presented. Constants are geometric form, light, and the eerie, uncanny coupling of what’s concrete and what’s immaterial.

Men’s Shelter and Small Cityscape, both from 1968, are both a view from Dodd’s Manhattan studio of what was once a cemetery and was, by 1968, a small, empty field with the names of the dead on the wall surrounding it. Dodd painted the view many times — same setting but, over months, always different as light and seasons changed. Leafless trees, their branches spindly, suggest skeletons. It’s barren and a place for the dead but vital as nature marches on.

I wouldn’t call Dodd’s work Spartan, though she does sleep on the floor on a mat. I’d call it open-hearted and forthright, with a spiritual simplicity that’s very attractive.

What’s Dodd’s background? What’s her aesthetic lineage? She was born in 1927 in Montclair in New Jersey. Her parents both died in 1941, her mother from cancer and her father a few months later. He was a Merchant Marine captain whose ship was torpedoed by a German sub while escorting Lend-Lease materials from Newcastle to Murmansk, Russia. Children who lose their parents probably never lose a feeling for their presence even in their absence. Dodd was raised by her three older sisters. She studied textile design at Cooper Union and married the artist William King.

Dodd started painting in the early ’50s, never working in an Abstract Expressionist style but making flat and colorful figure pictures reflecting her training in textiles. Three pivotal events molded her in the ’50s.

First, she met Alex Katz. Katz introduced Dodd to Maine. The two evolved on a realist, colorist path, sometimes a parallel one, sometimes an overlapping one. Second, Dodd, King, and a few other artists started Tanager Gallery in 1951.

This was Manhattan’s first post-1945 art co-op and a means for up-and-coming artists to market and sell their work. Through the ’50s, Tanager showed over a hundred special exhibitions. Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and Tom Wesselmann were in the co-op with Dodd. Tanager and its milieu on East 10th Street, a neighborhood thick with artists, gave Dodd advanced training, a forum to find her style, and lots of contacts. Dodd needed this experience to fortify her inner strength. Over decades, she stood apart from Abstract Expressionism — the default style of the ’50s —  and also from Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and the Pictures Generation.

Third, King left Dodd for another woman. Single, though with a young son, Dodd was freed from the stifling role of artist’s wife. She was liberated to find and develop her own vision.

I can’t say that Dodd is part of the circle of the very famous Alex Katz. She’s as good an artist if not better since she experiments, invents, and evolves while Katz recycles. Katz is a social commentator, too, which Dodd isn’t. She’s not in the circle of Fairfield Porter, either. Dodd, unlike Porter, doesn’t seem especially intellectual, or thoughtful about art history. She’s instinctive.

In the late ’90s, she started to paint giant pictures of single flowers or small bunches of flowers, not fancy flowers but weedy, prosaic flowers such as Queen Anne’s lace and cow parsnips. Cow Parsnip, from 1996, is an example, and at 38 by 80 inches it’s arresting. This and a few other flower pictures are in the middle of Natural Order. After so much geometry, they’re a shock. Georgia O’Keeffe painted magnified-flower pictures, but her blooms are sinuous, like odalisques. Dodd’s shake, rattle, and roll. It’s the difference between David’s Madam Recamier, languid and sinuous, and Annie Oakley, ready to take no prisoners. It’s a salve to see her Queen Anne’s lace pictures. They’re northern New England’s ubiquitous roadside wildflowers. Dodd invests them with the sass and flair they deserve.

There are pictures in the show that left me thinking of Birchfield and Bluemner for mystery, Porter for color, and Sheeler, Hopper, and even Cézanne for geometry, but Dodd is very much her own thing. The landscape and ethos of Maine figure powerfully in her work. Rugged, independent, simple, and raw, Maine has cast a unique spell on artists from the time of Winslow Homer to today.

The exhibition is organized by subjects — woods, windows, winter, nocturnes, for example — and isn’t chronological. Dodd is still moving among subjects. Natural Order displays some nudes, mostly figure studies, and lovely, striking paintings of Queen Anne’s lace, all from the 2010s. For all I know, 95 might be the new 65. Dodd still paints. No big New York museum owned a Dodd painting until the sculptor Robert Gober bought one for MoMA in 2018. That’s scandalous, and it shows how blinkered and faddish these big places can be.

The Hall Art Foundation was essential in organizing the Dodd show. It’s a fascinating outfit based on a superb private collection of contemporary art that the Halls lend to museums. The foundation also organizes shows at its art spaces in Germany and in Reading, a small town in east-central Vermont near Woodstock. The foundation is a major but by no means exclusive lender. The catalogue is very good. It’s heavy on quotes from the artist. Every art history Ph.D. student should read it to understand how artists approach their work, which usually has nothing to do with the motivations that art historians attribute to them.

Dodd says, “I was just intrigued by the way the light hit” and “some of the trees fell down, which made for an exciting composition” and “all those lovely rectangles.” There’s lots more happening in a Dodd painting, obviously, but I learned when I had artists in my art-history classes that what drives artists is often irreconcilable with the spurious, faddish motives invented by academics.

I want to write a bit about Penguins Past and Present, a nature exhibition also on view at the Bruce. Flightless, flippered to swim, the most durable and rugged of waddlers, and very cute, penguins are a big draw and perfect for the new Bruce’s launch. We like paradoxes. The exhibition has immersive dioramas, a video, taxidermy specimens, eggs, and feathers, teaching both 60 million years of penguin development, the perils that baby penguins face, and the penguin’s expertise in living on land and swimming underwater with the grace and stealth of a submarine.

The Bruce has a great roster of upcoming exhibitions, including a Mark Dionysus/Alexis Rockman show this summer and, in the fall, what sounds like a timely, eye-popping show — Mermaids and Monsters: Natural History’s Greatest Hoaxes. We live in an age of scams like the Russia hoax, the climate con game, the weapons-of-mass-destruction filmflam, the men-can-have-babies movement, and then there’s Covid, the bug that launched a thousand canards. Even if you believed in any of these, don’t expect to hug a unicorn, griffin, satyr, or sphinx. Mermaids and Monsters is purely educational though surely fun.

The upcoming arms -and-armor exhibition will link armadillos and turtles to knights and crusaders, and, in 2024, the Bruce will have what I think will be a landmark exhibition on Modernist artists in Connecticut. The Land of Steady Habits isn’t known as an avant-garde hub, but Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, Maurice Sendak, Calder, Cleve Gray, Paul Rudolph, Katherine Dreier, Josef and Anni Albers, and many others are part of Connecticut’s rich cultural fabric.

The Bruce is right off I-95 in Greenwich, so this new jewel in America’s culture crown is easy to visit. I commend the two directors and the trustees and donors who made it happen.