Dorothy Hood

Woman's Art Inc.

Dorothy HoodAuthor(s): Sylvia MooreSource: Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1980 - Winter, 1981), pp. 51-54Published by: Woman's Art Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358086 .

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Dorothy Hood

SYLVIA MOORE

Interviewer: Do you have any survival advice for younger artists? Dorothy Hood: Look to the accomplishments instead of the medals. Look to the joy of doing instead of the compensations.1

Dorothy Hood has had some of the medals. Her work has been exhibited in important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and is represented in the collections of 28 museums worldwide. She has had one- woman gallery and museum shows in New York City, Syracuse, Philadelphia, Houston, San Antonio and Mexico City. In 1973 she won the Childe Hassam purchase prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1978 one of her drawings was displayed with selected southwestern artists' works in the home of Vice-President and Mrs. Mondale. She is considered "almost a cult figure" in her home state, Texas, where her work is "eagerly collected" by local art lovers.2

Nevertheless, like many women artists, she has never received the full recognition her work merits. Despite an enviable record of artistic accomplishments and a distinguished oeuvre, she is all but invisible in the national art press and remains on the periphery of the cultural establishment.

She never wanted to be anything but an artist. "Since I was a child," says Hood, "I have known what I was going to do (and) it became more and more of a necessity as time went on."3 Born in Bryan, Texas, on August 22, 1919, to parents of Germanic descent, she grew up in a strict, conservative Episcopalian household. With stern discipline so much a part of her daily existence, it is small wonder that the child Dorothy, "a red-haired, fiery dreamer" as she described herself, should be "propelled into an independent interior life, questioning, probing."

There were no role models to guide her. However, Hood speaks of a "secret life," an underground bond between her and her mother that made a difference. Her mother, "a great beauty, with dark hair and enormous blue eyes" was a "total lady ... educated Germanically (Kinder-Kuche- Kirche)," believing implicitly in the Victorian ideals of "prudence, duty, obedience." Her intellectual interests were "submerged beneath the qualities she thought should be brought to a marriage." Yet she read Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Shaw, including his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928). The budding artist watched all of this and pondered which was her mother's "real" life.

Becoming rebellious and independent in adolescence, Dorothy disturbed her mother deeply. "She didn't think I was a lady, or ever would be." They were no longer able to communicate directly:

So we toed the line in courtesy, respected each other, but were strangers, while the hidden life in both went on. The challenge of my mother thus nurtured a more extreme inner life, always proper to an artist. What is art but what has grown up in secret recesses of the soul... by whatever roundabout paths?

The mother encouraged her daughter's ambitions without ever suggesting that being a woman might be an obstacle to a career in art. Nevertheless, the young girl was subjected to strong pressures to conform to her mother's ideals of womanly propriety. The conflict in the relationship, corrosive but ultimately strengthening, was only fully resolved in the final years of her mother's life. Perhaps something of the artist's deep and ambiguous emotions is revealed in her 1972 drawing, Portrait of My Mother (Fig. 1). Dorothy Hood will say little about this disturbing work, indicating only that it relates to the psychological bondage that ruled her mother's existence and caused her to bind others (her daughter) in the same manner. One further comment: "She appears to be on a

I

FIG. 1. Dorothy Hood, Portrait of My Mother (1972), 25%" x 19/2". Collection of the Artist.

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52 Woman's Art Journal

pedestal, but she is not." Indeed, the central woman-image (mother) is firmly implanted in a dominant vertical structure, rigid as a steel girder, while the woman at upper right (the artist?) seems to struggle to escape from cocoon- like wrappings that prevent her from moving freely.

Without Hood's knowlege, a high school art teacher entered the girl's work in a national competition, and as a result she received a four-year scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. She also studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York, but is convinced that neither experience contributed substantially to her artistic development. She considers the value of this early training to have been mainly in the "exposure to great art" and the companionship of other art students.

One of the most significant factors in Hood's progress as an artist was a long sojourn in Mexico, which began in 1941 as a vacation trip undertaken with her school roommate. Hood felt an immediate affinity with Mexico, Mexican art, and the stimulating intellectual climate of the capitol city. For nearly 20 years thereafter, she established her home base in Mexico City and Puebla, although she also traveled extensively during this period as she has done most of her life.

The artist recalls the "grandeur," the "great humanity" of her Mexican and expatriate European mentors and companions, some of whom became of "great interest and influence" in her life over the next few years. Chief among these was the muralist and painter Jose Clemente Orozco, who became a close friend. Others in the circle of friends and aquaintances included Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Mathias Goeritz, Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Merida, and Pablo Neruda. It was there, too, that she met the Bolivian composer and conductor Velasco Maidana, whom she married and accompanied on tours that enriched her knowledge of the Indian/Hispanic heritage of Central and South America.

The esteem in which Hood was held by her associates is reflected in the prose poem written by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for her 1943 show at the Gama Gallery in Mexico City. Neruda calls the artist "an Amazon from Manhattan" who "caresses" her canvas with "soft singing fingers," and "who asks questions directed toward life's essences."4 The oils and gouaches in this, her first exhibition, bear titles such as Mother and Child and Red Horse, for Hood was still working with realist imagery. Later, she reports, she "fell in with Cuevas and that younger group and was doing textured abstracts like Tapies."5 While she often was attracted to the work of other artists, Hood has always been her own woman. She confesses to "an awful independence and arrogance" which made her "very protective" and "very careful not to become too influenced or swept away by strong personalities."6

One of the reasons she found Mexico so congenial was the freedom and lack of discrimination she experienced as a woman artist. "In 19 years," she says, "I never felt any reservation toward me as a woman, possibly because there is such an enormous respect for artists. The tradition of women paininng didn't seem at all foreign there."7

Hood formed several close friendships with other women artists in Mexico. One was the painter Remedios Varo:

Remedios and I had a parallel sympathy. Her ethos was very good, straightforward in everything. She was the wife of Benjamin Peret, one of the founders of the Surrealist group. She supported her household, a thing unheard of in those days, then became a tremendous painter after Peret was gone. But the art books speak of Peret, never Remedios.

Another good friend was playright Sophie Treadwell, then in Mexico as a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and "very much a woman's advocate."

In Mexico, Hood's drawings began to be known and sought after. During the 1940s, her subjects were often children, animals, and portraits; later the work became more surrealistic both in imagery and technique. In the United States she was little known until 1974, when her work was exhibited at Syracuse's Everson Museum, Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Museum of Southern Texas. In the catalogue essay for the Syracuse show, James Harithas called Hood's drawings "a major contribution to the art of the United States, (which) not only summarize several traditions but bring visual information to bear which ... gives recognition to a vital ancient past."8 The drawings are characterized by linear assurance, finely-tuned compositional equilibrium, and a marvelously inventive spirit that hovers between mystery and wit (Fig. 2).

By 1960, Mexico no longer seemed a stimulating environment for artistic growth. "It all seemed to go wrong," she recalls, "and I became aware that we were living in an imitation of greater times." Many of her friends were now either dispersed or dead, including some who had died at too early an age. Depressed and in ill health, she returned to her Texas roots in 1961. It was a fortunate move.

I began painting and having opportunities for one- woman shows at museums. The body of work built up and I seemed to paint better here than anywhere. As the Taoists say, "Look to the fruit and not to the

FIG. 2. Dorothy Hood, Dark Departure (1965), 20" x 26". Collection of the Artist.



Woman's Art Journal 53

flower," and in this case the fruit consisted of some energy in the locale that had nothing to do with preconceived art concepts. It seemed to nourish me and therefore I stayed.

She began to teach at the School of Art of the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. Recalling that her student years were not very satisfactory, she tried to understand and meet the needs of her students:

At school, the kind of person I was and the kind of artist I was passed by unperceived-totally. Afterwards, as a teacher, I thought that was a terrible thing and it must be corrected, even at the cost of putting out a great deal more energy into perception of the student as a human being.

Occasionally, she participated in local art projects. One, sponsored by the Houston National Bank, was called The Larger Canvas. One of five artists (and the only woman) commissioned to design 14' x 48' billboards, which were placed in various locations around the city, her feelings about the results of the project are mixed:

Since someone else did it by mechanical means after my designs were made, I didn't get the elixir of being inside it and really doing it. If I had a chance to do things of that size in which I were more directly involved, that would be an ecstasy. I'm now doing a 15' x 9' painting commission and I find this a totally exciting experience. Mainly, it's the challenge, the risk.

Here, perhaps, is the core of Dorothy Hood's steady growth and confident survival as an artist: She is always willing to accept the challenge, to take the risk. As an example, during her Mexican years she began to paint abstractly, although "in Mexico, the tradition is not at all abstract." Her initial experiments were "terribly blocked, because art movements seemed to evolve there out of sociological needs." Gradually, after many trials, she found the path she wished to follow. The resultant style has been called "Abstract Surrealism," a term she considers fairly appropriate as labels go, although she rightly insists she is not an "orthodox" Surrealist.

Hood calls herself "an abstract thinker." An abiding interest in metaphysical theories has led her to study Taoism, the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, and comparative religions. The personal philosophy resulting from this inner search has contributed to her choice of abstract art as a vehicle for expression. As Pablo Neruda said, she "asks questions directed toward life's essences."

Vehemently opposed to decorative abstraction, which is "only about painting itself," for Hood, abstract art must have a framework of deeper meaning if it is to have validity. Yet she says she does not strive for artistic communication, "except indirectly":

If I say things out of my life experience or psychic experience that ring true, then I don't have to worry about communication. I concentrate on psychic landscapes.9

Psychic landscapes they are indeed. There is a synthesis of the sensuous, where juicy flecks of resonant

color accent flowing textured planes, and the spiritual, where mysterious crystalline or opaque masses are tautly balanced. If one is not alert, it is easy to overlook the practical difficulties of simply making pictures on a huge scale-the process which she finds so challenging-when contemplating the grandeur of a visison that can scarcely be contained within the amplitude of her canvas. When standing before one of Hood's powerful abstractions (Fig. 3), it is difficult to concentrate on rational analysis; one becomes submerged in the symbolic stream of the collective unconscious or rockets through some yet undiscovered solar system outside time's measure. To evoke such sensations, means and meaning must be in harmony.

The clay of many cultures has contributed to these psychic spaces. The southwestern United States where she was born and to which she ultimately returned, the Northeast where she lived for a time, the spiritual home that Mexico was for nearly two decades, the South American ambiente that she came to know well as she traveled with her musician husband, Europe where she has traveled often in recent years for workshops and study, and the Far East, source of guideposts for her inner quest- all of these places have been at one time or another a focus for the artist's insatiable expldrations. Africa, too, has been evoked with great intensity in a series of vivid paintings that strangely "seemed like a possession" to the artist who confessed she "never knew why they happened."10 No locale is foreign to the open, enthusiastic and liberal outlook of Dorothy Hood.

She admits it is not always easy to persevere:

In the risky journey of an artist (which) some, or many, are unwilling to take, sometimes life becomes too rough (and) I must rest, at which time there invariably comes some critic who will say the work is slacking off, when really I am guarding it, resting it until further chance for life.

It is typical of Hood that she thinks of resting herself in terms of guarding and refreshing her art. She must survive so that her art will survive.

Frequently it is necesary for the artist to "make do with various kinds of adjustments." She prefers to paint large, but at times she has lacked a proper studio and has had to work in spare corners. But she has never allowed cramped space to curb the magnitude of her aspirations. In this regard, she cites Clyfford Still, who "tested his paintings by working in the smallest rooms under the worst light to see if they stood up."

As a Houston resident, Hood found the 1977 women's conference in that city "a revelation":

I couldn't imagine it possible for human beings to help each other in that way and to speak so naturally of sisterhood and to do something about it. It was one of the most marvelous things I have witnessed since my first years in Mexico, when people were cooperating with each other and dreaming of humanity being otherwise than it is."



54 Woman's Art Journal

At 61, restless and energetic, she continues to paint on a large scale, to draw, to study diligently, to show frequently, to travel (as I write she has just returned from two weeks in Rome), to lecture, to teach. She has added new strings to her bow in recent years, designing settings for ballet and theater, including sets for the Houston Ballet's Bicentennial Celebration and for the Toronto Truck Theater productions of "Gold for the Gods" and "The Royal Hunt of the Sun." She has also worked in clay sculpture.'2 As time permits, she is writing an autobiography. Every day, Dorothy Hood looks to the joy of doing.

Interviewer What are your intentions for the art you have yet to create?

DorothyHood: To let it be an adventure. ?

1. Most of the material for this article is drawn from letters and taped interviews with the artist. I have indicated a few of the quotes which were previously published under the title "Dorothy Hood Interviewed" in Women Artist News (November 1978), 9.

2. Ann Holmes, Paintings/Drawings by Dorothy Hood (San

Antonio, Texas: McNay Art Institute, 1978). 3. Moore, "Dorothy Hood Interviewed." 4. The seven paragraph prose poem printed on a leaflet for the exhibition

is in Spanish, translation mine. 5. Jay Jacobs, "Pertinent and Impertinent," Art Gallery (May 1970), 11. 6. Moore, "Dorothy Hood Interviewed." 7. Ibid. 8. James Harithas, Dorothy Hood Drawings (Syracuse, N.Y.:

Everson Museum of Art, 1974), 5. 9. Moore, "Dorothy Hood Interviewed."

10. Charlotte Moser, interview in Currant (February 1976), 44. 11. Moore, "Dorothy Hood Interviewed." 12. Dorothy Hood's sculpture was included in the exhibition "New Work in

Clay by Painters and Sculptors," sponsored by Syracuse University and the Everson Museum of Art, 1976.

SYLVIA MOORE has an MA in Art History from Hunter College, CUNY. Formerly Review Editor of The Feminist Art Journal and Associate Editor at Garland Publishing, Inc., she is a frequent contributor to Women Artists News and other publications. She worked on the Committee for the International Festival of Women Artists, Copenhagen.

FIG. 3. Dorothy Hood. L. Going Forth, Everson Museum, Syracuse; R. Zeus Weeps, Michener Collection,

University of Texas. Installation photo from Rice University exhibition: Hickey & Robertson.



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