Doris Lee
An American painter known for her figurative painting and printmaking. She won the Logan Medal of the Arts from the Chicago Art Institute in 1935. She is known as one of the most successful female artists of the Depression era in the United States.
She was born in Aledo, Illinois and attended Ferry Hall School, a preparatory school for girls in Lake Forest, Illinois, from 1920-22. She graduated from Rockford College in 1927 and studied with the American Impressionist Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1929. And in 1930 she attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
Her career took off in 1935 when her painting “Thanksgiving Dinner” won the Logan Prize in the annual show at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a Works Progress Administration artist during the 1930s, she was commissioned to create several murals by the United States Treasury Department in Washington, DC. In 1937, Lee painted two murals in the Main Post Office in Washington, DC, and another in the Summerville, Georgia Post Office. That same year the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her 1936 painting Catastrophe for its permanent collection. During the 1930s and 1940s she created a number of lithographs for the Associated American Artists. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lee undertook several commissions for Life magazine, including articles and illustrations on travel to such places as North Africa, Mexico, and Cuba. Doris Lee’s bustling scene of women preparing a Thanksgiving feast became the object of national headlines when it was first exhibited at the Art Institute in 1935 and won the prestigious Logan Purchase Prize. The themes of Thanksgiving, rural customs, and family life, which Lee painted in a deliberately folksy manner, would have had great appeal to a country still in the midst of the Depression. Yet Josephine Logan, the donor of the prize, condemned the work’s broad, exaggerated style, founding the conservative “Sanity in Art” movement in response. This controversy only brought Lee fame, and Thanksgiving has been recognized as one of the most popular nostalgic views of this American ritual since that time.
She taught at Michigan State University and Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, and she also worked as a magazine and book illustrator. She was married to photographer Russell Lee. Later, in 1939, she married the artist and teacher Arnold Blanch, and for many years they lived and worked in Woodstock, NY. For a while she maintained a studio in New York City.
