FILTER RESULTS × Close
by Artist (106)
by Object Type (27)
Skip to Content
NEHMA logo
Showing 75 of 113

Print this page
Image of Stag's Heart

Dorr Bothwell

American
(1902–2000)

Stag's Heart
1946

Collage with gouache on board
26.5 x 32.5 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
2003.2

A seasoned world traveler, Dorr Bothwell applied her broad knowledge of decorative arts to paintings and prints that are extremely sophisticated and well designed. In the early 1920s she studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Gottardo Piazzoni, whose segmented, subtly hued landscapes proved to be a major influence on her work. In 1928 she traveled alone to American Samoa, where she lived for two years making block prints, drawings, and watercolors. She later studied art history and painting in England, France, and Germany, where she became conversant with surrealism. Returning home, she taught color and design in San Francisco, focusing in her own work on intriguingly enigmatic, symbolic paintings with private significance. Bothwell brought an extraordinary variety of media and techniques into her practice. Conversant with traditional art-making practices such as the use of egg tempera, she never hesitated to mix media, variously utilizing in her works oil painting, photography, screen printing, watercolo, sculpture, textile design, collage, and assemblage.

Her paintings of the 1940s were mystery-laden tableaux of symbolic imagery. Stag’s Heart demonstrates her penchant for personal symbolism, incorporating a collaged photograph of a stiff-looking young man tellingly embellished with painted and drawn details: blood on his right hand, a glove on the left holding a menacing black lasso, and, most dramatically, stag horns on his head. This oppressive stag has been consumed by a female deer, outlined in silhouette, seemingly in the act of running. The cutaway vision of the animal’s rib cage and interior evokes techniques used for animal drawings in Samoan design. The image evokes as well the abstractions of her friend and colleague, San Francisco painter Charles Howard. Bothwell cloaked her paintings in mystery, here condensing a narrative of sexual tension into a single graphic emblem.

Michael Duncan

Keywords
Click a term to view the records with the same keyword
This object has the following keywords:
abstraction, antlers, bone, boot, coat, collage, deer, gouache, gray, man, mixed-media, orange, pants, photographs, pink, purple, silhouette, yellow

Exhibition List
This object was included in the following exhibitions:

Also found in
Click a portfolio name to view all the objects in that portfolio
This object is a member of the following portfolios:
Thumbnail image of Collecting on the Edge
Collecting on the Edge
Thumbnail image of Collecting on the Edge Part II
Collecting on the Edge Part II
Thumbnail image of Drawings
Drawings
Thumbnail image of San Francisco: The Golden Years, 1930-1960
San Francisco: The Golden Years, 1930-1960
Thumbnail image of Women, Surrealism & Abstraction
Women, Surrealism & Abstraction

Your current search criteria is: Keyword is "GY".





This site facilitates access to the art and artifact collections by providing digitally searchable records for thousands objects. The information on these pages is not definitive or comprehensive. We are regularly adding artworks and updating research online. We welcome your comments.