Doris Emrick Lee

Doris Emrick Lee was born in Aledo, Illinois in 1905. She graduated from Rockford College in 1927 and studied with the American Impressionist and Ashcan School painter Ernest Lawson at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1929. Lee also attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1930. She worked in New York City and then moved to Woodstock, NY and established herself as an artist there and remained there for the rest of her artistic career. 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, the artist painted two murals in the Main Post Office in Washington, DC, and another in the Summerville, GA, Post Office. That same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired her 1936 painting "Catastrophe" for its permanent collection. Her 1935 painting, "Noon," was referenced in Vladimir Nabokov's book," Lolita." 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 illustration on travel to places such as North Africa, Mexico, and Cuba. Curing this time, her work became much more stylized with more concern with color and pure forms. She taught at Michigan State University and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In the 1960s, Lee retired from painting and later died in Clearwater, Florida, in 1983. Lee's work can be found at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Greenville County Museum of Art. Lee was awarded the Logan Medal of the Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago.