Dorothy Dehner

Dorothy Dehner was born 1901 in Cleveland, Ohio. Although Dehner’s parents and siblings all died before she reached the age of seventeen, family was nonetheless a major influence on her life’s creative ambitions and her belief in women’s capacity for individual achievement. Her mother and father, and eventually the aunts who helped to raise her after her mother’s death in 1917, modeled behaviors and ideologies that were significant to the young Dehner. Her father, the owner of a Cleveland pharmacy shop, was also intellectually creative and wrote short stories, albeit unpublished.1 Importantly, her mother was involved in the pacifist movement and was part of the first wave of activism for American women’s right to vote, though she would die before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.2 Her mother’s sisters, Flo and Cora Uphof, were also significant role models. They were quite different—Cora, the globetrotter who for twenty years lived a glamorous life abroad, and Flo the more grounded aunt who raised Dehner after she lost her nuclear family. The sisters, like Dehner’s mother, had musical backgrounds, having graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, which fostered Dehner’s early interest in music, dance, and theater.3 Dehner’s earliest creative expression involved some stage performance and dabbling in the visual arts. Her art classes in both elementary and high school were quite progressive for the first decades of the twentieth century and included modernist activities such as tearing paper and collaging it to make abstract designs.4 With her mother, sister and aunts, Dehner relocated to Pasadena, California, in 1915. While she attended high school and during the one semester she spent at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dehner performed with an acting troupe that would go onto start the Pasadena Playhouse.5 For a young woman who had already experienced quite a bit of freedom and had exposure to liberal philosophies from her parents and adult guardians, college was not rewarding; she chafed at the conformity, saying “It was too square for me,” and ultimately joined a sorority just to fit in.6 She remained in California for a short time longer, acting and studying dance and piano, and then made the decision to strike out on her own: initially to New York City in 1922 and, after a couple years of performing in plays and attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (academic year 1923-24), she ventured off to Europe in 1925 which she noted was vibrating with “new” expression.7 She spent a few months in Florence where she saw work by Old Masters at the same time she attended a performance by the German dancer and pioneer of expressionist movement, Mary Wigman (1886-1973).8 Travel to Paris was exhilarating, too. She caught the l’Exposition International des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which promoted the new Style Moderne or Art Deco, and also saw artwork by the Cubists and Fauves. Returning to New York in September 1925, she resolved to be a visual artist. She immediately registered for classes at the Art Students League.9 Although initially planning to study sculpture, she found the teaching of the League’s two instructors—William Zorach and Robert Laurent—less innovative and avant-garde than what she had seen in Paris. Instead she enrolled in drawings and painting classes with Kimon Nicolaïdes and Kenneth Hayes Miller. Though neither were particularly stimulating to Dehner’s modernist interests, Nicolaïdes was instrumental in teaching Dehner to successfully draw the objects she saw. Soon thereafter, she found her way to Jan Matulka (1890-1972), the Czech-American whose deep, personal exposure to European modernism appealed to Dehner. Like others in the class, she experimented with semi-abstraction using oil paint thickened with an array of materials (sand, cement, pebbles, coffee grounds) and related to Matulka on a personal level, having coffee near the League and going to his house for