Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
A talented dancer and actress, Dorothy Dehner studied modern dance at University of California, Los Angeles. She left school to become an actress in New York, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Art and performing in off-Broadway shows. While traveling abroad, she was intent on meeting notable playwright and critic, George Bernard Shaw. The trip helped to shift Dehner’s aspirations to becoming a visual artist instead.
While in Europe, Dehner received an introduction to Art Deco at the l’Exposition International des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts). She was mesmerized by European avant-garde works by the Cubists and Fauves, especially Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Subsequently, Dehner enrolled in classes at the Art Students League in New York. Her intention was to be a sculptor. She studied with Robert Laurent and William Zorach but found their work and approach too conventional and stylized. Dehner made a deeper connection with modernist painter Jan Matulka, who encouraged her to experiment with abstraction. She continued to study with Matulka even after he left the Art Students League.
While living in the same boarding houses, Dehner met David Smith, who later became her husband for twenty-five years and a pioneer in welded metal sculpture. In the fall of 1935, the couple visited Europe. During this trip they met Stanley William Hayter who founded Atelier 17 in Paris, the experimental printmaking workshop, and the Surrealist community through their friend John Graham. Smith studied with Hayter, but Dehner, feeling hesitant, did not.
Her marriage to Smith yielded a bountiful dialogue of ideas. A vivid example is Dehner’s Star Cage, an ink and watercolor drawing of 1948-49, which was seemingly the inspiration for Smith’s painted steel sculpture also named Star Cage from 1950.i Smith replaced the large linear stars with small rectangular tabs in this drawing in space.
Dehner worked tirelessly to maintain their farm in Bolton’s Landing in upstate New York. Her career was largely secondary to her husband’s. For instance, while Smith worked as a technical supervisor for the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project, it was not permissible for a spouse to participate in the program.
Lacking a studio, a table in their living room functioned as her workspace that was mainly conducive to making small work. Although today she is best known for her metal abstract sculpture, throughout the 1930s and 1950s, drawing was her primary medium. These fluctuated between figurative depictions of farm life and emotionally charged themes that some historians believe reflect the turmoil in the artist’s personal life.
In 1948, Skidmore College exhibited Dehner’s drawings and gouaches. The FWMoA’s untitled drawing of the same year is characteristic of works from this period. It has subtle horizontal bands in gray, green, and brown tones that create an atmospheric background. Vertically oriented organic forms float in space. White contour lines encircle them to define and isolate. Interestingly, Dehner laid down her colors first and later added these loose outlines, contrary to the traditional drawing process. While sometimes resembling elemental seed pods, the motifs are nonspecific and feel primordial and totemic.
Dehner’s biomorphic abstraction shares an affinity with artists, such as Joan Miró and her friend Mark Rothko. Preceding his signature color field paintings, Rothko’s early drawings were populated by cellular shapes set against washes of gouache and watercolor. Many of Dehner’s contemporaries were influenced by psychiatrist/psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. Inspired to create their own pictorial language, Jung’s theory encouraged them to seek out archetypal forms, primal symbols, and universal themes found in other cultures, time periods, and mythology.
The naturalist illustrations of plant and animal life in Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature, 1909) by German zoologist Erich Haeckel impacted Dehner. Dubbed the “Darwin of Germany,” Haeckel discovered and identified marine and microscopic organisms from which he made precise renderings with subtle modeling. These were translated into lithographs for the publication. Among his illustrations, the single-celled phaeodarea bears a striking resemblance to Dehner’s abstract figures in shape.
After her separation from Smith, Dehner earned her degree from Skidmore College in 1951. The following year, Dehner accepted Peter Grippe’s invitation to work at Atelier 17 that had relocated to New York from 1940 to 1955. Welcoming to women, the print studio’s environment encouraged collegiality; Dehner met several female artists including Worden Day, Doris Seidler, and her lifelong friend Louise Nevelson.
Dehner printed the earliest versions of her engraving and etching Bird Machine at Atelier 17. This composition preoccupied the artist from around 1952 to 1957. She created at least four variations, turning elements upside down and changing the forms around. In FWMoA’s Bird Machine 3 Dehner’s lines build dynamic movement through and back into space. They converge at different points, creating trapezoids and triangles. Two years before, the ink drawing, Bird of Peace (1946) demonstrates her interest in simplifying nature, in this case into repeated triangles seen in the jagged hilly peaks, the bird’s beak, arched wings, and legs.
Dehner’s time at Atelier 17 reawakened her passion to become a sculptor, so many years after her first classes at the Art Students League. She stated, “Digging into the plate with a burin was a marvelous experience for me and it brought back all my feelings for working three-dimensionally.”ii She even kept her engraved copper plates and valued them as sculptures. Dehner began working in cast bronze, followed by sculpture in wood in the 1970s, and experimentations with Cor-ten steel in the early 1980s.
Make an appointment or stop by the Print & Drawing Study Center, Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm to see more of our works on paper!