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Dorr Hodgson Bothwell

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Dorr Hodgson Bothwell (1902 - 2000) was active/lived in California.  Dorr Bothwell is known for Modernist painting, symbolism, teaching.

Dorr Bothwell   1902–2000
 
 
Dorris Hodgson Bothwell, known as Dorr, was born in San Francisco, California, on May 3, 1902. The Bothwell family moved to San Diego in 1911, where they became friends and neighbors with the artists Anna and Albert Valentien. Dorr began her art studies with Anna in 1916 at the age of 14. In the early 1920s, Dorr returned to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts, then studied at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, which was founded in San Francisco, 1926.
 
After receiving a modest inheritance, Dorr traveled to American Samoa in 1928, where she remained for two years and produced many works of art in a wide variety of mediums. Some of these were successfully shown at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego and the Beaux Gallery in San Francisco, allowing her to spend time in England, France, and Germany.

Returning to San Diego in 1931, Dorr became   ...  [Displaying 1000 of 7972 characters.]  Artist bio

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Facts about Dorr Hodgson Bothwell

   Dorr Hodgson Bothwell  Born:  1902 - San Francisco, California
Died:   2000 - Fort Bragg, California
Known for:  Modernist painting, symbolism, teaching
Name variants:  Doris Bothwell

Biography from the Archives of askART

Dorr Bothwell   1902–2000
 
 
Dorris Hodgson Bothwell, known as Dorr, was born in San Francisco, California, on May 3, 1902. The Bothwell family moved to San Diego in 1911, where they became friends and neighbors with the artists Anna and Albert Valentien. Dorr began her art studies with Anna in 1916 at the age of 14. In the early 1920s, Dorr returned to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts, then studied at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, which was founded in San Francisco, 1926.
 
After receiving a modest inheritance, Dorr traveled to American Samoa in 1928, where she remained for two years and produced many works of art in a wide variety of mediums. Some of these were successfully shown at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego and the Beaux Gallery in San Francisco, allowing her to spend time in England, France, and Germany.

Returning to San Diego in 1931, Dorr became involved, once more, with the San Diego art community and exhibited with the San Diego Moderns and the San Diego Art Guild, winning the Leisser-Farnham prize in 1932. Also in 1932, she married fellow artist and sculptor Donal Hord. They divorced in 1934 but remained friends.
 
In 1934, Dorr was in Los Angeles; there she joined the postsurrealist  circle of Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, finding some parallels between their post-surrealist concepts and her own work. She attended classes conducted by Feitelson as part of the Public Works of Art Project (1933–34) and eventually joined the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project as a painter in the mural division. She produced several murals for the WPAin Los Angeles and Riverside, California, and another for a coffee company in San Francisco in 1939. During the same period, she also designed pottery for the Gladding, McBean & Co., Glendale, California. In the 1940s and 50s she taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
 
Some of her many exhibitions included San Francisco Art Association 1925–1957; Modern Art Gallery, San Francisco, 1927; San Diego Art Guild, 1927, 1933; San Francisco Women Artists, 1929, 1942; Oakland Art Gallery later Oakland Museum of California), 1932; Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939; Riverside Art Association 1941; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1948–1964; and in 1958, a solo exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco.
 
Dorr traveled and studied widely in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia, and her work is represented in major museums all over the world. The last years of her life, she lived and continued to teach in Mendocino, California.

Dorr Bothwell passed away on September 24, 2000, in California.
 
 
Biography submitted by Maurine St. Gaudens

Source:
Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California,1860-1960, Maurine St. Gaudens, Editor, 2016.
 
 
 
 


Biography from Carlson Gallery

Born in San Francisco, Dorr Bothwell became a modernist and symbolist painter, continually exploring new styles and themes. She was much influenced throughout her life by her parents' Quaker and Christian Science beliefs.

At age 19, Bothwell entered the California School of Fine Arts and there worked with teachers Rudolf Schaeffer and Gottardo Piazzoni. For many years she was a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute and was especially focused on theories of color.

In 1979, she earned the San Francisco Women in the Arts Award, and in 1998-2000, she earned two Pollock-Krasner Awards.

Solo Exhibitions: M. H. de Young Museum, 1958.

Selected Group Exhibitions:
61st Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1941;
62nd Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1942;
65th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1945;
Second Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of The Legion of Honor 1948;
67th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1948;
Third Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of The Legion of Honor 1949;
68th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949;
70th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1951;
Fifth Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, California Palace of The Legion of Honor 1952;
72nd Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1953;
PACIFIC COAST ART, IIIrd Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1955;
Contemporary American Painters, 1950-1955, Stanford Art Gallery 1956;
75th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1956;
The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association, 1958, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66; Winter Invitational, California Palace of The Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1963,1964;
The Oakland Museum, California. A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950; 1973.

Public Collections:
San Diego Museum; Los Angeles County Museum; San Francisco Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum; Santa Barbara Museum; Crocker Art Museum; Whitney Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; California Palace of the Legion of Honor; New York Museum of Modern Art.

Literature:
Bruce Kamerling, San Diego Historical Society; Who Was Who in American Art; Who's Who on the Pacific Coast; Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980; Nancy Moure, California Art, 450 Years of Painting & Other Media; Pacific Dreams, Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934-1957. San Francisco Art Association (Institute) Catalog of the Art Bank.

Source:
David J Carlson, Carlson Gallery, California.  Carlson's specialty is Post-World War II California artists, and he is preparing a catalogue for a 2004 traveling exhibition of these artists to several California museums.


Biography from Annex Galleries

Dorr Bothwell (1902 - 2000)

At the age of four, Dorr Bothwell determined her future as an artist. She began her art career at the California School of Fine Arts in 1921, under the tutelage of Gottardo Piazzoni. Painting, teaching, traveling and marriage to sculptor Donal Hord dominated the years between 1926 and 1933.

Separating from Hord, she moved to Los Angeles in 1934, joining Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg in post-surrealist imagery and participating in the mural division of the Federal Arts Project. She returned to San Francisco in 1942, and included screenprinting with painting and teaching in her art career. 

In 1968 she co-wrote the book Notan, which encompasses the principles developed in her teaching; it contrasts the interaction of positive and negative space in design. This book is still widely used today and has been translated into many languages.

Her extensive traveling, even living and working in the 1920s with a tribe in Samoa, is revealed in many of her earlier works while the later paintings and prints reflect her love of the Pacific Northwest in the United States. A thread of surreality and abstraction is observed in her paintings of the late 1920s through the early 1950s, overtaken by her irrepressible gusto for life and nature.

Source:
tobeymossgallery.com


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