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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
DOROTHY DEHNER River Landscape #4.
Engraving on Rives BFK, 1958. 113x446 mm; 4½x17½ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 28/35 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression with strong contrasts.
Dehner (1901-1994) initially came to New York by way of California to pursue acting and dance, which she studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. She enrolled at the American Academy of Art in New York, but her travels in 1925 throughout Europe, where she was introduced to works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, convinced her to change course and pursue a career as an artist.
She studied for several years at the Art Students League and there met the American abstract sculptor David Smith, whom she married in 1940. She explored more progressive art forms similar to Smith's interests, adhering to abstract and cubist tendencies rather than representational imagery.
The couple moved to Bolton Landing, in upstate New York, where gradually Dehner's art became secondary to her duties as a wife (her painting series Life on the Farm and a group of black ink drawings she called the Damnation Series, mid-1940s, serves as a psychological reflection of the mundanity of her life then). Their marriage was deteriorating at Bolton Landing; they separated in 1950 and divorced a year later.
In 1952, Dehner began to produce intaglio prints at Atelier 17 in New York, where she worked alongside contemporaries including Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. After the workshop closed its doors in 1955, Dehner continued to expand her print œuvre at the Pratt Graphic Art Center, New York. Later, in the early 1970s, Dehner produced twenty lithographs at the Tamarind Institute, New Mexico, and experimented with screenprinting.
