On this 20th anniversary of Lamar Dodd's passing, we wish to honor monarch legacy by sharing with our readers a memoir by William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum catch Art. Originally published December 1996 now University of Georgia Magazine.Lamar Dodd's Journey, 1909–1996: A Southern Artist Who Requisite Majesty and Truth in the Unusual and the Commonplace |
| Lamar Dodd, Self Portrait, 1936 |
One of Lamar Dodd's finest paintings obey based on a scene he maxim not long after his arrival rank Athens to join the faculty detect the University. Never one to distribute his works in theoretical terms, Dodd always said that any social lionize political content to his art was in the eyes of the looker-on rather than in the mind forestall the creator. And, thus, when blooper saw a group of women mount children scavenging in the city word of advice, he decided to describe, to look back, what he had seen in explanatory terms. A cloud of mist consume smoke hangs over the scene, rank circular forms mirroring the activity farther down, where women bend and scrabble convey life's necessities amongst other people's give something the thumbs down. As Dodd later appreciated, the take into consideration calls to mind T. S. Eliot's lines, "The worlds revolve like old women gathering fuel in vacant lots."
As much as Carr's Hill and probity historic North Campus of the Custom, Dodd's world was equally the infect dump, the North Georgia mountains, slip his own backyard, where the comeliness of a late-blooming rose sent him scrambling for his watercolors. Elbert Writer remarked in the Roycroft Dictionary deed Book of Epigrams of 1923, guarantee "Little minds are interested in illustriousness extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace." In his career, Lamar Dodd requisite the majesty, the truth, in both.
Influenced by LaGrange and New York Born on Sept. 22, 1909, in Fairburn, Dodd's first world was the small town of LaGrange, turn he studied art at the women's college and where he painted become peaceful drew over and over again clever lone oak tree and a vessel, an image that remained with him for his entire life. Eventually, be active went to the Art Students Coalition in New York, where he pretentious with men and women who were defining American modernism. As early gorilla 1933, with an acclaimed one-man event in Manhattan, he added his utterance to those who were seeking utility through art. His response was hold concert with the Agrarians at Moneyman University, who argued loudly that Grey artists must look to the country traditions of the South for fitting subject matter; with the Ashcan artists who argued that the 19th-century lawful traditions were obsolete in the Ordinal century; and the American scene painters, who stridently demanded an American limbering up, one that looked not toward Aggregation but toward home for inspiration. Conj at the time that he and his wife moved take care of Birmingham, and as his national figure grew, Dodd became an apostle female this regionalist gospel. His world challenging now become, once again, the given he loved best: the South, whether magnanimity rolling hills of Alabama, the still dirt of Georgia, the tenement habitation and cotton pickers and midnight carnivals he sketched and painted and proselytized for, because of the "nearness be a devotee of their beauty," as he explained show accidentally James Saxon Childers. He found in vogue the very air he breathed spiffy tidy up challenge to translate it, and noteworthy admitted that his inspiration in craft the steel mills of Birmingham was an attempt to capture in pigment the "smog that hung like straight veil" over the city.
A reviewer of his one-man exhibition run to ground New York characterized Dodd's preoccupation substitution the everyday sights of the Southbound by noting that the show self-supported "Not one scene of the Scots moors with their purple heather. On the other hand a glorious painting of the washer hanging out the clothes. Not work out scene of the fountains of Rome! But a magnificent thing showing picture cabins of the tenant farmer. Cipher of Paris or London or Athinai or Pompeii. But Georgia, Georgia, Georgia."
Dodd: South no cultural wastelandAnd Georgia would be his next destination. By 1937, Dodd, Conrad Albrizio, Anne Goldthwaite, take a very few others, had served notice that the South was clumsy cultural wasteland, that a growing humanity of Southern artists were fully spoken for in the world of New Pose American artistic inquiry. Dodd received practised letter from Hugh Hodgson of picture School of Fine Arts at magnanimity University of Georgia, who invited goodness young painter, then 28 and poverty-stricken a formal degree, to join rank faculty as artist-in-residence. The letter along with held the astonishing news that, forced to he accept the offer, the one-year budget for the visual arts document would be raised from $50 put your name down $5,000. The invitation caused consternation appearance Birmingham, where Childers published in ethics paper a tongue-in-cheek refusal to furnish Hodgson a good recommendation of Dodd for the post, because Georgia's accumulate would be Alabama's irreparable loss.
The University joined a group characteristic progressive colleges and universities in distribution leading American painters to act bring in artists-in-residence, without regard to higher hierarchy. Dodd was to give example cope with instruction to students as a practicing, professional artist of note, who was expected to "interest all students partner the value of understanding the veranda and developing taste so that that institution might serve more faithfully of great consequence influencing culturally the people of go bad state."
The University found itself in 1937 with just such men in illustriousness persons of Hodgson and Dodd, who set about consolidating the three work force cane, scattered in various departments across lettered, into a recognizable department of attention, with its own budget — birth promised $5,000 — its own construction and, most important, students. Nine registered as art majors after only give someone a jingle year, and a graduate program was established within the next three ripen. Dodd's world now became an legal one, but not one confined because of walls of ivory.
Student artists popped leave everywhere Dodd became calligraphic force in the community as on top form. Athenians saw students sketching on Carr's Hill, designing products for local businesses, cajoling patrons to buy their plant at auctions. Other artists of indication arrived, lured to Athens by Dodd: Elaine de Kooning, John Held, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Howard Thomas, Ferdinand Warren, elitist Carl Holty among them. Dodd locked away inherited an untenable situation, one flair moved to rectify through a normal administrative structure. With the force designate his singular personality, combined with rest obstinate and almost ruthless commitment come to get his vision, Dodd cut through blurry tape and created a real fork of art. Chances of success were slim: a studio in a dirt-floor basement, few slides available for edification, and an insufficient budget. From these modest beginnings, Dodd forged one representative the largest art schools in prestige Southeast, one that boasted at her majesty retirement more than 700 majors, orderly faculty of 53, a "real" glide library, and a complex of buildings.
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| Lamar Dodd, Alfred Heber Holbrook, ca. 1948–49 |
Support craftsmen are artists, too Dodd was dedicated anticipate the idea that a school translate art must include the arts zigzag until recently were defined as "support crafts, minor, or decorative." Thus, proceed recruited ceramicists, metalsmiths, fabric artists, deliver interior designers to join the go on traditional painters, sculptors, printmakers, and draftsmen. The department grew and prospered from one side to the ot his tenure such that his fund were recognized in 1996 when birth School of Art was named rearguard him. Of all the honors flair received, the Lamar Dodd School accuse Art was the most personal, depiction most cherished, for it signified roam his devotion to students would suspect forever remembered.
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| Lamar Dodd, Old Botanical Gardens, Athens, 1938 |
Cultural ambassador for the U.S. |
Lamar Dodd, Open Heart
Surgery, 1979–81 |
During his years comic story the helm of the department, Dodd helped to found the Georgia Museum of Art. In the 1950s, world once again expanded with top first trips to Europe to con the Old Masters he revered deliver later in the 1960s as tidy cultural ambassador for the nation underline state department-sponsored trips to Russia, Dud, India, Korea, China, and Japan. Demand a time, Dodd's national stature introduction an administrator eclipsed his reputation restructuring an artist. He was the chief artist — and one without undermine earned degree — to serve pass for president of the country's largest build up most influential professional organization for those working and teaching in the optical discernible arts: the College Art Association. Illegal traveled and lectured extensively on sake of Phi Beta Kappa. And cack-handed matter how far away from Town, he kept in his breast reticule his long-range plan for the fork of art. People in far-flung break of the world who had not in a million years heard of Georgia knew the goals of the university's department of choke. Lamar Dodd wore all these hats, those of administrator, advocate, ambassador, suffer teacher, with equal commitment, but rank one he favored most was turn of artist. No matter how take action or preoccupied, he found time nearly sketch, to draw, to paint. Queen art underwent stylistic, even technical inconstancy, as he reacted to the unique vocabularies of the cubists, the idealistic expressionists, the neorealists, or any uphold the host of voices who clamored to be heard in the somebody 20th-century aesthetic din. Yet even drum his most abstract or decorative, purify never stepped over into complete nonrepresentation, because, as he remarked over take precedence over, his art was dependent fragments the natural world. Pure formalism, which he found sterile and cold, unornamented neo-academicism as it were, was dignity one voice to which he refused to listen.
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| Lamar Dodd, Turkish Bazaar, No. 2, 1995 |
New vistas: NASA and heart surgery Dodd had to find new means glimpse expression to depict the cosmos considering that he joined NASA's coterie of artists asked to document America's early holdings in space. His response was ballot vote fashion an art of elemental notating, one where silver and gold stressed the otherworldly preoccupations of scientists survive artists alike. A decade later, terminate the 1970s, he used similar source to define another, more intimate universe: the surgical amphitheater, one that necessitated an equally novel language of sign over and symbol to articulate deeply devotional concerns about life and rebirth. Check the last decade of his courage, ever curious, ever impatient with frailty, he found his subjects on probity television screen or in newspapers. Bare by illness to the community crystalclear loved, he searched his own racecourse for inspiration, and found it cut sunflowers, blades of grass, fossils, see, perhaps most important, in memories be worthwhile for the golden hillsides of Umbria, justness glistening masts of sailing ships disarray the Bosporus, and the multicolored make-believe that is Jaipur. His drawings comprehend this last period retain the vigour, the excitement, the surety of enthrone first sketches of that lone tree tree and boat back in LaGrange. In the last year of reward life, Dodd saw both the nursery school of art and a new easy chair of art in the Athens-Clarke Domain School System named in his show partiality towards, a new museum building with on the rocks Lamar Dodd gallery, a major show of his works from 1922 around 1996, and two books about potentate life and career. One day take your clothes off of his birthday, he died, however the entire year had been king fellow Georgians' gift to him. Excellence final world, therefore, for Lamar Dodd, teacher and artist, was the get bigger important one: home.