Lucile Blanch & Doris Lee: Leading Artists of the Woodstock Art Colony

by Sylvia Day

In keeping with the continuing celebration of the exhibition Making Her Mark: 50 Women Artists of the Historic Woodstock Art Colony, on view at the Historical Society of Woodstock through September 7th, 2025, Learning Woodstock Art Colony is posting unpublished articles on artists Lucile Blanch and Doris Lee, both of whom have work in the showing, by Sylvia Day (1910-2005).

To learn more about Sylvia Day's life and accomplishments please discover her son Rowan Dordick's Sylvia Day: A Woodstock Profile among the more than eighty posts in Learning Woodstock Art Colony. I would like to thank Rowan for his continued contributions.

I will be giving a second gallery talk

on Making Her Mark

at the Historical Society of Woodstock

on Saturday August 30th at 2 p.m.

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Peter Juley & Son

Lucile Blanch, c. 1930

Smithsonian Museum of American Art

Lucile Blanch (1895-1981)

Lucile Blanch was one of the diminishing number of Woodstockers who witnessed the extraordinary changes in both the Maverick Art Colony and in Woodstock during a large part of the twentieth century. Born in Minnesota, she was a neighbor of Arnold Blanch, whose father, she recalled, courted her aunt. Lucile was an honor student at the Art Institute of Minnesota, where she was awarded a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, an institution that has nurtured many leading American artists. Arnold and his friend Adolf Dehn, also a native of Minnesota, continued their studies there, as well. Dehn, who became an eminent lithographer and watercolorist, spent summers in Woodstock during the 1940s.

In 1920 Lucile and Arnold were married and after carefully saving their money left for Europe, where they remained for a year. Except for a short trip to Italy, they spent most of their time in a rented villa text to the home of Renoir, who had died in 1919.

The couple returned to the States virtually penniless but soon received a letter from their friend Carl Walters, an artist noted for his sculptures and ceramics, who urged them to pick up their cat and come to the Maverick, whose founder, Hervey White, needed a couple to run his restaurant, called L’Intelligentcia. The well-known anarchist Hippolyte Hovel, who had run it previously, had accumulated so many debts that White turned him out. However, Lucile mused that Hovel had simply become bored. The Maverick, situated three miles from the center of Woodstock, began when White—a former associate of Ralph Whitehead who founded the Byrdcliffe art colony—purchased a farm with the intention of establishing his own colony based on a more spartan lifestyle.

Elvira Henrotte, the wife of the famous Metropolitan violinist and longtime Maverick resident Pierre Henrotte, helped Lucile and Arnold in their new venture. White, an admirer of Thoreau, eschewed modern conveniences, and the Maverick offered only the most primitive accommodations: the rustic cabins and studios had no electricity, running water, central heat or other concessions to modern existence. Daily life required not only demanding physical labor but ingenuity and resourcefulness.

On Sundays, the restaurant was especially busy, and Lucile recalled cooking 25-pound roasts on a Perfection oil stove, a task that even professional cooks would likely find daunting. Arnold, too, did his part, and, according to Lucile, “he was most cooperative and never shirked his duties.” For example, on Sundays, he would rise early and peel vast quantities of potatoes in a washtub. But it was Lucile who did all the cooking, baked all the pies and kept the restaurant spic and span, which included scrubbing down the chestnut dining tables daily.

By the end of season, which concluded with the Maverick Festival, held in the rustic hall White had built—and where the Maverick summer chamber music concert series continues to this day—the Blanches had reduced the outstanding debt by one hundred dollars. Their plans to return to New York City were put on hold, however, when White invited them to stay on.

“I like you,” he said. “You’re talented, literary and bright, and I’d like you to live here.” As a further inducement, he promised to build them a house.

  “But we have no money,” Lucile pointed out.

  “I paid you $10 a week, and you didn’t need spend any money,” White replied. “Send to Macy’s for a crate of staples and you’ll have that for a backlog.”

The young couple accepted his offer. White had made a study of how to live on practically nothing—or, more precisely, how to live off the land--and he shared his knowledge, pointing out the various edible plants that abounded nearby. Arnold also happened to be an experienced hunter, and between wild plants and small game they managed to survive for a year despite their meager finances. Later, the couple would spend several months of the year in the City, and the remaining months at the Maverick in the home that White built for them.

Lucile had her first solo show in 1924 at the invitation of the Whitney Studio Club on West 8^th Street in New York. It was favorably reviewed, especially in an article written by the critic Elizabeth Luther Cary. “That,” Lucile claimed, “started the ball rolling,” and in 1929, before the Whitney began transforming the club into the Whitney Museum of American Art, she was again invited to exhibit there.

In 1930, however, the two young artists pulled up stakes and moved to San Francisco, where Arnold had obtained his first teaching job and where they met Russell and Doris Lee. In 1933, after both Lucile and Arnold had received Guggenheim Fellowships, they were divorced, and Lucile set out on a life devoted to painting and teaching.

Her first position was at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she took over the teaching duties of Bradley Tomlin, a [longtime] Woodstocker, while he was on sabbatical. At the conclusion of that assignment, she received commissions from the United States Treasury Department for murals in several government buildings in the South. Soon afterward, the Carnegie Institute funded a position for her as artist-in-residence at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

In 1947, Lucile began teaching at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. At the time, women art instructors and, for that matter, women in general were openly discriminated against. Indeed, the president of the college unapologetically told her that it was their policy to pay women less than men because women did not have to support families. She needed the job too much to raise objections to this preposterous justification, and her diminutive salary did not diminish her dedication to teaching to the best of her abilities.

As her career developed, Lucile’s continual searching for newer and fresher modes of expression led her, first, to adopt a new color scheme. She had been accustomed to using frosty blues and white, but now they began to annoy her, and she determined to institute a change. To that end, she bought a large quantity of inexpensive, brilliant-colored cloth at Woolworth’s and proceeded to decorate her studio with reds and yellows. Against this background, she painted a dancer in warm golds and browns.

At the 50^th Anniversary Show at the Woodstock Artists Association in 1969, one of the outstanding paintings was a nude that Lucile had painted in 1936. It represented her first attempt to break away from the traditional manner of applying pigment. For some time, she had been interested in interpreting the birth-of-Venus myth by emphasizing its inherent passion. Thus, she used a red underpainting and over it painted a pure white as a glaze. The result was striking, and the painting possesses a remarkably contemporaneous quality. Later, she made a lithograph using the same pose for the nude but with changes in the composition, signally a difference in interpretation.

Her next preoccupation was with line, not as a boundary but as an entity in itself. In the autumn of 1944, she began to paint landscapes without leaves, connecting up line patterns with everything else that was linear in the landscape. She felt that she had added a new dimension to her work, but she also realized that it might look merely decorative if it were not an honest construction.

In fact, at the time Lucile felt that her painting was becoming stylized. Nevertheless, she thought that if she could get past the mannerisms, she would be successful. She had a flair for caricature, which she said provides for “a little bit of guile,” and which, in the end, provided a natural lead-in to abstraction. He first abstract painting, she admitted, was “purely a hunch [based on] an innate sense of composing.” But she had come to see that there was a “compositional thing” that she felt she had not mastered. Although she believed that she could benefit from instruction by the renowned teacher and Abstract Expressionist artist Hans Hoffmann, who was teaching a course called “The Dynamics of Pictorial Area” in New York City, she could not afford to attend. So, for a year she read and experimented on her own. In particular, the study of Paul Klee’s writings proved helpful, but she still remained dissatisfied.

She tried pushing shapes and lines around without seeking for an idea or interpretation, which led her to the realization that, if she handled lines alone for a while, she would attain the results she was seeking. “I found that by working and pushing with lines,” she recalled, “the interrelationships of the lines with each other throughout the area were held in place by the proportions of the area.”

Ultimately, the insights she arrived at became part of her teaching. “Area,” she explained, “is a prelimited world all to itself, It has a sense of center and an indivisible sense of placement.” It was not something reducible to theory or, for that matter, to geometry, she felt, despite some of the terminology. Indeed, she recalled that, when she and Arnold lived in San Francisco, among their friends and acquaintances were the Mexican artists Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. A mathematician friend of Rivera’s was teaching a geometry class, which Lucile joined. However, the paintings she attempted at the time on the basis of geometrical theory were unsatisfactory, and she had to go back to relying on intuition.

Despite her disciplined approach to creating abstract art, it is fair to say that her reputation rests more on her representational paintings. Lucile was not only an inspiring and immensely knowledgeable instructor, she was also uncompromisingly honest. Spirited and dynamic, she lived a full, rich life and left a body of work that will long be admired and collected.

Doris Lee by Arnold Blanch

Cover: The Art of Today: A Magazine Dealing with Vital and Living Art, April 1935

Doris Lee (1905-1983) 

Doris Lee was the creator of a formidable body of work spanning an imposing range of media, including easel painting, murals, lithographs, book illustrations, record cover designs and even stage curtains. Dedicated and incredibly productive, there is ample justification for the widely shared opinion that she was one of America’s most successful women artists. Self-assured, with a noteworthy presence, Lee was singularly free from the self-consciousness fame frequently elicits, and she permitted little to interfere with her disciplined work regimen.

Lee was born on a farm in Aledo, Illinois, where she grew up in a family that, contrary to her own modest assessment of it as being “ordinary,” was remarkably creative. Her paternal grandfather enjoyed painting, and her grandmothers and aunts were endlessly creative, so that when Lee and her three brothers and two sisters showed evidence of artistic talent, their parents were unimpressed, regarding it as normal.

Aside from an aptitude for painting, Lee enjoyed sports and was something of a tomboy.  Believing that a more ladylike education would tame his young daughter’s ebullient spirits, her banker father sent her to the fashionable Ferry Hall boarding school in Lake Forest, Illinois.  Lee subsequently attended Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, where she majored in philosophy. Although her primary interest was art, degrees in that subject were not common at that time in colleges and universities.

Shortly after graduating in 1927, Lee met and married Russell Lee, a chemical engineer, as well as a photographer and painter, and the couple went off to Paris, where she studied art with André Lhote. On their return, Lee continued her studies, first in Kansas City and then in San Francisco under the tutelage of Arnold Blanch. In 1932, Lee and her husband were drawn to Woodstock by Blanch, with whom she began a romantic relationship that evolved into a lifelong partnership.

Gifted, poised, witty and good-humored, Lee commenced her career practically at the top by winning the famous Frank Logan prize, or the Logan Medal of the Arts, at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935. That alone was indisputable evidence of her youthful talent, and the prize created a stir in art circles, and also in the mind of Mrs. Logan herself, who was known to have commented unfavorably. However, she is scarcely remembered, whereas the reputation of Doris Lee is firmly established in the history of American art.

Lee’s work has a quality of elfin gaiety, both in terms of content and color, and what may initially appear to the casual viewer as unsubstantial and fanciful, upon closer analysis becomes a gratifying aesthetic experience, something that is already apparent in her painting Thanksgiving, which won her the Logan prize.

Her superb sense of design is evident in the huge 60-foot-wide curtain she was commissioned to design to cover the extra-wide Todd-AO screen used in the New York film premiere of Oklahoma. She described her design “as a combination of collage and patchwork patterns, whose dominant colors were blues and greens accented by red, gold and black.” The curtains, included cleverly stylized designs depicting designs depicting depicting fringe-covered surreys, a type of horse-drawn carriage with a fringed canopy that was popular in the late 19^th century, and which was the subject of the famous song from Oklahoma, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”  Lee’s curtain design led to other commissions, including one from Life Magazine for four paintings based on themes from the Broadway version of the musical.

Indeed, Lee received many commissions based on the wide recognition she gained early in her career. In a competition featuring some of the foremost artists in the country, Lee was commissioned by the Treasury Department to paint two murals in the U.S. Post Office Department headquarters, which she completed in 1938; a further commission for another mural in the Summerville, Georgia, post office, was completed the following year. Still later,

she was commissioned to illustrate the Rogers and Hart Song Book.

Among the numerous honors she received are the Carnegie Institute Award, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Award and inclusion in the Arts and Science Traveling Exhibition. In addition to being found in many private collections, her work is represented in the foremost museums in the country, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Teaching constituted an important aspect of her life, and over the years she taught at various universities and art schools, including the University of Michigan, the University of Hawaii and the Gulf Coast Art Center in Florida.

Lee traveled widely, painting wherever she went. With genuine modesty, she said that her “life was reasonable.” In a sense it was for her, having been fortunate in being able to spend as much time as she wished on her art. Her home in Woodstock was set among tall trees, well-tended lawns and her beloved flowers, all of which conduced to creating an idyllic environment. Glass walls in the rear of the living room looked out upon Overlook Mountain, which has served as a source of inspiration to so many artists.

While Lee was an avid collector of anything that caught her fancy, from shells to butterflies, in her later days she wanted to get rid of things. She even wondered what society would do with the endless number of paintings that artists continue to paint. “Who will judge them?” she asked. “But I suppose then it’s a matter of time and that’s not reliable,” she added.

Continuing in that contemplative mood, Lee remarked that “When people get a little older they should organize and try to do some ‘throwing away.’ One unloads a little at the end of a trip; people should do the same. The artist himself should be the one who chooses what’s good and what he wants to leave behind.” Lee’s advice reflects the mind of an enlightened individual, who had experienced much and read widely, both prose and poetry. She believed in peaceful revolution, and she believed that society must and will change.

At her alma mater, Rockford College, there are seven portraits she painted of some of the world’s outstanding women writers and poets: Sappho, Emily Dickinson, the three Brontë sisters (on one canvas), George Sand, Edith Sitwell, Carson McCullers and Gertrude Stein. Although she chose not to include any artists, it is not inconceivable that, some time in the future, a portrait of Doris Lee will be added to this assemblage of talented women. It would be a grand and fitting gesture.