Dorothy Hood Study with James Glisson, Curator of Contemporary Art (video 6″)

Dorothy Hood
American, 1919-2000

Sea Elegy II, 1972
oil on canvas
70 × 90 × 1 in.

SBMA, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meredith J. Long
1974.33



Undated photo of Dorothy Hood

“I think that I went into abstract because I believe that one can express one’s inner life so much more clearly in abstract. You’re looking at the outside of things when you’re doing representational, but you’re looking at the inside of things when you’re doing abstract.” - Dorothy Hood, in the 1986 documentary “The Color of Life.”

"Now what the people, or the public, feels in my work may well be that in each brushstroke, the color and mood, the stock, the readable signs of struggle, discipline and truthfulness in the beginnings of the form and the statement is honest."
- Dorothy Hood

RESEARCH PAPER

Dorothy Hood’s 1972 oil on canvas, “Sea Elegy II”, is a large-scale non-representational painting that uses color, line and form to express and evoke mood. The painting is reminiscent of a gray, stormy sky, and the steely sea beneath such a sky. Hood’s use of “elegy” in the title suggests that she meant to evoke death, passage, and memories. Perhaps viewers would experience melancholy, or perceive melancholy on the part of Hood. The picture plane is almost completely flat. A small, triangular area at the upper center, where Hood overpainted the gray with white and three shades of blue, appears to be farther away. If the overall painting is seen as a stormy sky, absorbing rather than emitting light, this triangle would be a break in the clouds, through which blue sky and sunlight can be seen. The lines dividing the color fields are sharp, mostly straight but with some segments having curvature. Hood has enhanced some of the lines using paint in contrasting colors, making them perhaps like lightning bolts against the clouds. If the painting has a focal point, it is the dividing line, shaped like a backward L, between the black and gray fields. To create a firm focal point would not have been a top priority for Hood. To her, “the traditional criteria of wholeness and balance have meaning only as qualities at work in the face of opposite forces—fragmentation, collapse, chaos” (Kalil, 2016, p. 106).

Hood’s handling of paint is masterful. Actual texture is at a minimum. The only visible brushstrokes are in the three white fields at lower left. Part of the main black field, lower and to the right, is thicker and appears to have been poured, with small-scale puckering of the paint. Commentator Catherine Anspon describes some of Hood’s paintings as representing “cavernous oceans seen from above, rendered in pooling pigment.” Across the canvas, Hood has layered and striated the paint in such a way that the canvas appears to be made up of multiple pieces stitched together, and in places rippled. The effect of rippling is particularly pronounced in the dark gray field at left. However, looking closely and angling one’s head to take advantage of the gallery lighting’s sheen on the painting, one sees that the canvas is in fact smooth. The optical illusion is striking. Hood used transparent washes to create the rippled effect (Glentzer). The lower left corner of the painting brings together small areas of blue and burgundy, as well as black and white, in a terrazzo effect. Again, this is implied as opposed to actual texture. Alison di Lima Greene, curator of modern art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, said “Dorothy would fling elements of composition against each other. You get a sense of rupture, of dynamic, of discomfort. There’s a sense of space not being stable.” (Gray, 2000)

Hood based her “Sea Elegy” series of paintings on her nighttime sailing excursions in Galveston Bay, Texas (Kalil, 2016, p. 115). In the words of art historian Susie Kalil, “the series is about the infinite and the uncontained” (Ibid). The paintings allude to looking down into the sea, as from a boat. “The sea is a metaphor for creative flux: something is moving, rising, swelling, swirling, flowing. Its depth is also an abyss, a chasm, evoking both the primal purifying and regenerative source, and the dark, turgid waters of death.” (Ibid) The paintings are about atmosphere as well as water; Kalil refers to “patches of blue sky.” (Ibid)

Hood was born in Bryan, Texas on August 22, 1918 (Kalil, 2016, p. 10), grew up in Houston, and lived the latter four decades of her life in that city. She was the only child of parents who, beginning in her early adolescence, were largely absent from her life (Gray, 2000). Following the divorce of Hood’s parents, her father remarried and paid her little if any attention. Her mother was in poor health both physically and mentally, and consequently was also largely unavailable. Some of the time, she was in a sanitarium for tuberculosis (Vine). A maid was responsible for a large part of Hood’s upbringing (Farb, 1986). Of her early life, Hood said, “there was a great loneliness, because I had no one to whom I could really express myself” (ibid).

Hood lived in Mexico (Mexico City and Puebla) for most of the time between 1941 and 1962. During that time she enjoyed the social life that she had wanted as a child, making numerous friends in artistic and intellectual circles (AMST). Among her acquaintances were Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo (Gray, 2013). She became known quickly. Pablo Neruda, the poet, arranged for her first show, in 1943, at the Galeria de Arte Maria Asunsolo (GAMA) in Mexico City, and wrote a prose poem for the catalog (Gray, 2000). Around the same time Neruda facilitated a meeting between Hood and muralist Jose Orozco. Orozco provided the young Hood with studio space and daily lunch (Gray, 2000). They became close friends, and Orozco became a mentor or muse to Hood. Hood wrote in her journal: “As Orozco said to me in moral tones of integrity ‘tell the truth, Dorothy, no matter what the cost.’ So the truth was myself, recognizing myself should the results be beautiful or ugly, dark or light, assertive or peaceful” (Kalil, 2013).

In 1945 she married Jose Maria Velasco Maidana, a Bolivian composer and conductor (Kalil, 2016, pp. 3,41). In 1962 they moved to Houston, where Velasco Maidana could get the proper medical care for his advancing Parkinson’s disease, and where Hood could support the two of them with her artistic career (Ibid, pp. 67, 71-72). Hood came to love Houston, and sometimes said that the large scale of her paintings was inspired by the vast Texas sky (Gray, 2000). In 1986 Hood said “I feel the space that’s in Texas. The space of Texas and the plains and the sky and everything frees me. It connects me with the sky, it connects me with the Earth.” (Farb, 1986) During her Mexico period, Hood took note of the large scale of Orozco’s paintings; such may be another factor in her gravitation to large format (Kalil, 2016, pp. 26-7).

Meredith Long, the Houston gallerist who donated this painting to SBMA, began in 1962 to mount solo shows of Hood’s work (Gray, 2000). Our 1972 painting comes from the period in which Hood’s painting and career came into their own. It was around that time that her work began entering museum collections (Gray, 2000). Susie Kalil (2013) cites “Sea Elegy II” as being one of Hood’s “important works” of the period.

In 1980 Hood published an article titled “Sighting the Invisible Frontiers.” In it, she speaks of the Void and of the psyche. The Void is the “silent space of the mind’s eye” and “is related to the nonverbal state of painting.” The truest knowledge and memory are found within the Void. To Hood, “the Void in painting . . . is beyond mythology, beyond sociology and politics, beyond dogma, credos and formal religion. It is not the eye that sees. It is the brain that sees.” (Ibid) The psyche enters and interrupts the Void (Gray, 2000, interpreting Hood). Our painting includes large gray or black fields, geometric in shape, evoking the void. The dividing lines between the fields, especially those Hood enhanced with contrasting colors, and the small areas of color, may be said to represent the psyche, dividing the void (Kalil, 2016, pp. 84-85, discussing “Homage to Gorky”, a painting that has design commonalities with “Sea Elegy II”). Hood described her work as being “landscapes of my psyche” (Farb, 2013 and Gray, 2000, both quoting Hood) and her aim as being to “make viewers feel what she felt” (Gray, 2013). To Hood, the word “disturbing” was not a pejorative in reference to a painting. On the contrary, it was “a compliment in a way.” If a painting disturbs a viewer, it can “stir their imagination a bit” (Farb, 1986).

Bibliography

Anspon, Catherine D. “Texas’ Greatest 20th-Century Artist Finally Gets Her Due.” December 7, 2016. Web.
http://www.papercitymag.com/arts/dorthy-hood

Art Museum of South Texas. “Have You Seen Dorothy?” Web.
www.haveyouseendorothy.org

Farb, Carolyn (producer). “Dorothy Hood: The Color of Life.” Film, 1986. 28 minutes, 55 seconds. This is an essential primary source. Hood narrates the film, and there is substantial footage of her working in her studio.

Farb, Carolyn. “On a Mission” in “Fine Art Magazine,” Spring 2013, page 24.

Glentzer, Molly. “The Enigmatic Legacy of Dorothy Hood” in “Houston Chronicle”, November 23, 2016.

Gray, Lisa. “Carolyn Farb Seeks to Resurrect Dorothy Hood” in “Houston Chronicle”, February 23, 2013.

Gray, Lisa. “Life in the Abstract” in “Houston Press”, December 21, 2000.

Hood, Dorothy. “Sighting the Invisible Frontiers” in “Art Journal” volume 39 no. 4, Summer 1980, pages 268-269. Print.

Kalil, Susie. “Dorothy Hood Revisited” in “Fine Art Magazine”, Spring 2013, pages 21-23.

Kalil, Susie. “The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood,1918-2000.” College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2016. Print. “Sea Elegy II” is reproduced at page 119. Kalil based the volume on research done using Hood’s personal archive, housed at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. As of this writing, Kalil is the sole monograph on Hood.

Vine, Katy. “Fame in the Abstract” in “Texas Monthly,” September 2016.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by David Reichert, November 2017.

POSTSCRIPT

“During the summer of 1972, Hood began to sail in the bay off Galveston. ‘We have taken up sailing—at night—on a 20ft. boat with cabin,’ she wrote. ‘And we leave at dusk—into these great Ryder like mystic experiences.’ The new pastime seems to have moved Hood to loosen conscious control—a goal perhaps inspired by the Buddhism that she followed. Her navigation resulted in an important series of at least seven works titled Sea Elegy. From painting to painting, Hood melds lyrical pictorial incident into a warm, fleeting moment that seems, paradoxically, as if it could last forever. In the process, she reminds us that painting is an individual encounter with the self, the observed, and one’s métier. These paintings are deeply absorbed in questions of color and the appearance of things, of sensation and experience. The touch of Hood’s hand is everywhere apparent in these works. We see it in the expanse of paint laid down in gestures so subtly inflected as to suggest a psychic turbulence.

“While the series is about the infinite and the uncontained, every painting in it effects the sublime through containment. In the initial works, Sea Elegy, Sea Elegy II, and Sea Elegy III, the paint spreads and seeps, and the structures can be solid, watery, or like ghostly furls. They all allude to the dizzying effect of looking down on the churning waves. The sea is a metaphor for creative flux: something is moving, rising, swelling, swirling, flowing. Its depth is also an abyss, a chasm, evoking both the primal purifying and regenerative source, and the dark, turgid waters of death. The individual works—two of them horizontal paintings—elicit an experience that might be called the visual equivalent of hearing music. Each painting resolves itself differently, tuning proportion, hue, internal velocity, and light to determine optical frequency. Forms intersect or climb over one another, curved and angled planes defined by a variety of straight, arching, and organic contours wriggle and twist in space. Although the paintings seem nocturnal, patches of blue sky, as well as seepages of deep burgundy, emerge from the foggy atmosphere. The refractions and shadows are quietly hypnotic, so that as we stand before them we feel ourselves wafting through the waters, letting our minds and bodies simply drift.

“Hood seems enraptured by the half-seen, the evanescent. In moody vistas like Sea Elegy and Sea Elegy II (both 1972), forms preserve the last vestiges of themselves—perhaps a boat or a sail mast of aqua- blue tracery, a wavelet or a curling patch of foam—before they are lost in the gray ether. The squally hybrid forms are like parts of a self in pursuit of the circuitous path of intuition, and thereby seeking its own center of gravity, its own inner and outer limitations. As Hood would have it, this experience, this passage through the maze of inner life, composes our journey. In Sea Elegy V (1978), gravity-defying shafts of blue water crash and collide, aligning along oblique faults of pent-up energy. The world outside falls away in the presence of this painting. We are able to remember experiences we have lost touch with. We no longer feel bound to physical or material reality and begin to feel expansive, as if there are new dimensions to be experienced. As an evocation of light breaking through the darkness, the painting recalls the Romantic fascination with light as metaphor for truth and spirit. Everything seems potentially weightless and on the verge of dissolving into the luminous sfumato of the atmosphere. Here, the light exuding through the diaphanous surface suggests that change is imminent.” [p. 115]

Bibliography
Kalil, Susie. The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood, 1918-2000. With a contribution by William G. Otton. And a foreword by Barbara Rose. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2016.

COMMENTS

I first stumbled upon the paintings of Dorothy Hood about five years ago, in the home of collector and artist Dora Dillistone. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I was completely blown away. These are large, emphatically lyrical works, with broad swaths of limpid color broken up by jagged lines and collage-like shapes and patches. They reminded me a little of aerial views of the planet’s surface, and also of the canvases from the 1950s and ‘60s of Helen Frankenthaler and other Color Field painters.

“Who,” I asked Dora, “painted those?”

“Oh, that’s Dorothy Hood,” said Dora, who spent many years in Houston. “She’s from Texas too.”

And that was my introduction to the works of this remarkable artist who, like so many, fell between the cracks of art history, this time with not one but two strikes against her: she was female, and she matured far from the mainstream buzz and star-making opportunities of the New York art world in the heyday of AbEx and Greenbergian formalism.

But now if you’re lucky enough to get to the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi for “The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: Dorothy Hood (1918-2000),” between September 30 and January 8, 2017, you can check out 160 of her works gathered from museum and private collections around the world.

Hood’s early childhood in no way presaged the sort of tumult and ambition that lay ahead. She was raised in Houston, the only child of a prosperous banker and his fragile wife, but her parents separated when she was eleven and her health deteriorated as she suffered from anemia and pneumonia. By the time she was in her teens, however, both her ripe blonde beauty and her talents as an artist were obvious. Through the efforts of a supportive high-school art teacher, she won a four-year scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design.

After graduating from RISD, where her forte seems to have been making miniature ceramic figures, she headed for New York, working as a fashion model to support herself and pay for classes at the Art Students League. In 1941, on a whim, Hood and two friends drove to Mexico City. And what she found there changed her life. “The Mexican Revolution was only twenty years over—its fires and illusions and memories were still alive in the air. It was an era of action for artists and intellectuals,” she recalled.

What was supposed to be a two-week vacation turned into a 22-year love affair with the country and its artists. “In the early 1940s Mexico was as culturally adventurous as any place on earth, with experimental artists taking the bare bones of European modernism and shaping distinctive new anatomies from it,” notes the show’s curator, Susie Kalil, in her catalogue essay about the artist.

Hood became friendly with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the surrealist painters Leonora Carrington and Remedios Vara, poet Pablo Neruda, and especially with José Clemente Orozco, the great Mexican muralist whose intense depictions of war and revolution helped inform her own early and haunted visions of waiflike children, women huddled in dark corners, and stampeding horses. By the time she was 25, a resident of the city for only two years, she had her first solo show at a prestigious Mexico City gallery.

Hood left Mexico briefly in the middle of the decade, spending time in Houston and New York, where she developed important relationships with the influential Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller and the director of the esteemed Willard Gallery, Marian Willard. She was “exposed to the front lines and demands of the art world, and she understood it,” writes Kalil of the artist’s encounter with the seductive Chilean painter Roberto Matta. “With her striking beauty she could have lived as a muse in that world, but she was not content to do that.”

After little more than a year on the East Coast, however, she returned to Houston and “worked in the shipyards as part of the war effort, earning four hundred dollars for travel and expenses back to Mexico,” according to Kalil. There she met and fell in love with José Maria Velasco Maidana, a handsome and charismatic composer and musician 22 years her senior. “When he walked through the streets of Mexico, some say, children would follow him and give him flowers,” noted the writer Katy Vine in Texas Monthly. “Harlequin bodice-ripper authors could not have invented a more romantic partner.”

They married in 1946 and spent the next few years traveling back and forth between Mexico, Houston, New York, and Central America so that Maidana could pursue his conducting career. Hood’s direction as an artist meanwhile was moving toward ever greater abstraction, and in 1950 she landed a solo show at the Willard Gallery, a rare feat for a woman at that time. Hood’s life throughout the ‘50s was peripatetic, as she and her husband spent time in Puebla, a town southeast of Mexico City, and then in Mt. Vernon, NY, where they became involved in a medallion jewelry business. And then it was back to Mexico for a few years, until she began to worry that she was perceived as an interloper, a foreigner in a culture that she had known and loved for decades.

In 1962 the couple moved to Houston for the long run. “The city’s art scene,” says Kalil, was “intimate and self-supporting in the 1960s. It was formed by a small nucleus of artists who were attracted to the sense of romance, opportunity, isolation, and open space that Houston offered. Hood stepped into this milieu—a turf vigorously dominated by male artists—when she made Houston her permanent home.”

As an older artist, and a woman, Hood felt somewhat isolated from her peers, but respect for her work was immediate. She found avid support from Meredith Long, an important dealer in town, and by the end of the decade, “she had uncovered what she needed to use as an artist, pushing form, structure and color, as well as the imagination…and the sensual to their very edges,” notes Kalil. Thanks to a benefactor and friend who was the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, she soon had a small building to use as a studio and the size of her paintings began to grow, so that she was working on ten-by-eight-foot canvases that, says one critic, “did not sit quietly on the wall.”

As her work gained in size and sophistication and confidence, her personal life went into a tailspin. Maidana, already afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, was soon suffering from senile dementia. Hood continued to dote on him, even as he required constant attention, but in 1973, “while visiting Europe on a travel grant, she met Baron Krister Kuylenstierna, a tall, dignified man with thick eyebrows and an intense face who counted among his friends Frank Lloyd Wright, Carl Jung, and Aldous Huxley,” writes Vine. “She quickly developed a daily correspondence that continued until his death, in 1987, interspersed with passionate rendezvous around the world.”

The 1970s, when Hood was in her fifties, marked a sea change in her fortunes as an artist. She had solo shows at the contemporary museum in Houston, at Rice University, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. She won awards and placed work in important collections. A solo show of drawings traveled the country. “All she needed was a major show at a New York gallery that would transform her from a regional painter into a significant American artist,” writes Vine. “Hood was on the verge of stardom. She could feel it.”

But the New York art world seemed closed to her, even if by then there were more women on the scene. As an example, Kalil found a letter to Hood from a gallery that represented Joan Mitchell at the time, which said, in essence, “We like your work but we already show Joan Mitchell, and she wouldn’t want another woman in the gallery.”

After both Maidana and Kuylenstierna died in the 1980s, Hood seemed to lose her bearings and some of her earlier bravado. She became involved with a handsome geneticist, Krishna Dronamraju 17 years her junior, with whom she traveled to India, and she began to inject intimations of mortality and spirituality into her work, especially the collages she was making during her later years.

Though he was able to find homes for her work to prestigious collections, Long’s relationship with Hood grew ever more strained, with the artist complaining that he was not putting enough effort into promoting her, and the dealer claiming she was doing too many sales out of her studio. In 1996, they severed ties, and at the age of 77 Hood was without a gallery. A short time later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She managed to set up a foundation that would care for her legacy, but increasingly Dronamraju controlled access to her and to her work, an off-putting situation for dealers who had an interest in representing her. She died in 2000, leaving Dronamraju as the sole heir to her estate.

Regrettably, because of internal politics and the costs of crating and shipping Hood’s enormous paintings, the show at the Art Museum of South Texas will not travel. But perhaps it will spark renewed interest in this enormously gifted artist, whose works deserve a wider audience in this country and abroad.

Ann Landi

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

This painting comes out of a time when the artist and her husband frequently sailed at night on Galveston Bay near their home in Houston, Texas. The push and pull between center and edges, up-down and side-to-side rocking evoke the sensation of a sailboat bobbing on the sea, endlessly pursuing a center a gravity atop a perpetually swelling ocean. While not well-known outside of Texas, Hood was a particularly accomplished abstract artist, who studied with Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and befriended the poet Pablo Neruda.

- Contemporary Gallery Opening, 2021