Dorothy Hood
Black Vessel
1970-1980

About the Item

"Black Vessel" is an oil on canvas painting made by Dorothy Hood circa 1970-1980. The artwork size is 70 1/8 x 60 1/8 x 1 1/4 inches. At the core of Dorothy Hood's life and art is her time in Mexico between 1941 and 1962, when she was front and center of the cultural, political, and social crossroads. Among her friends were Surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington and native painters Rufino Tamayo and José Clemente Orozco, with whom she developed a deep friendship. When she returned to Houston to paint the epic canvases for which she will forever be best known, portals to fantastical and elusive realms opened for her. The evocative forms of Black Vessel anticipate the layering, cutting, and rearranging of material to produce the visually stimulating collages that often occupied her in the 1980s. Intentional or not, the arrangement and reciprocal patterns suggest a Burmese pagoda silhouetted against the night sky. A pagoda is primarily used as a monument for housing relics, and the tiered structure symbolizes Buddhist teachings. Provenance: Dorothy Hood Estate Dorothy Hood Estate Holdings, Art Museum of South Texas Corpus Christi, Texas, acquired from the above, 2001 McClain Gallery, Houston, Texas Exhibition: Texas, University of Houston Libraries, Dorothy Hood: The Edge of Being, August 2022 - March 2023

Creator:
Dorothy Hood (1919 - 2000, American)
Creation Year:
1970-1980
Dimensions:
Height: 70.12 in (178.11 cm)Width: 60.12 in (152.71 cm)Depth: 1.25 in (3.18 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
Abstract
Period:
Late 20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Palm Desert, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: 456091stDibs: LU9314151102
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Dorothy Hood

Dorothy Hood's oil-on-canvas paintings and works on paper combine Color Field techniques with painterly abstraction. Her use of decalcomania (a technique wherein paint pigments are allowed to flow and dry around an object which is subsequently removed, leaving a ghostly imprint on the canvas) belies her time spent with the Surrealist painters of Mexico City in the 1940s–60s.

The pictorial space and visual fissures of Hood’s large-scale paintings and works on paper recall a profound mindscape that echoes the concerns of these artists, such as José Clemente Orozco, who was her mentor. Having moved back to Houston in 1962, the impact of the Space Age and the fathoms of the cosmos influenced Hood’s paintings further. Her sense of color and deep exploration of materials is unrivaled. During her career, Hood appeared as one of the region's powerhouse female abstract painters, even though being a woman likely hindered the success she was due among her American Abstraction cohort.

Hood established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of postwar and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.

In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, and Barbara Rose, among others.

In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Hood's works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918–2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled “Kindred Spirits, Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood,” mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, “Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth.”

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(Biography provided by McClain Gallery)