Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In today's episode we will explore the remarkable work and career of Lois Dodd, a celebrated American artist admired for her unique perspective and captivating landscapes. Join me, as always, with our art expert, Nicholas Robinson, and I'm your host, Jeppe Curth . Let's get started. It is with Alex Rotter, at 400 million Selling here at Christie's $400 million is the bid and the piece is sold.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:32

We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself, and how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls, to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered thoughtful and well-informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Jeppe Curth: 1:27

Hi Nick,

Nicholas Robinson: 1:27

Hi Jeppe, how are you doing? I'm very well, thank you. How are you today? I'm good, thank you.

Jeppe Curth: 1:31

Good, so today we're going to talk about Lois Dodd.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:35

Yes, lois Dodd, yeah, the legendary Lois Dodd.

Jeppe Curth: 1:43

Yeah, you say that, but it's not a long time ago. I didn't know about her, so I guess you brought her into this and we just bought some works from her.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:47

Yes, I mean we've been looking at her works for a while. It's not the first group of works we've bought, but it's not so long, so many years, that she's been so keenly on my radar either, and I suppose we'll find out why yeah, yeah.

Jeppe Curth: 2:07

So maybe we should start, as we usually do it, by taking it from the beginning. So can you take us through her early days in the art world and how she got started?

Nicholas Robinson: 2:18

uh, yes, gladly. Um lois dodd was born in 1927 and she is actually still working today. So for those of you who are adept at mathematics, you will no doubt be able to work out that she is 96 or 97 years old. She received her education at the Cooper Union from 1945 to 1948. And the Cooper Union is a very sort of unique and distinctive establishment in a North American educational context. It has very specific ideas about education, very specific faculties in the things that they teach, in the things that they teach, and it has had a key role in the formation of some key thinkers, personalities who have gone on to become very influential in public life in the United States. So that's a sort of interesting by the by. And then she was part of this sort of interesting by the by Um, and then she was, uh, part of this sort of downtown group of painters.

Nicholas Robinson: 3:30

Um, and at this time in New York there was not a very large audience for modern art. Um, obviously New York had become a central place in the production of art, but there was still a very sort of small group of collectors who were living uptown, on the Upper East Side, in and around Park Avenue and the galleries that typically served the needs of this collecting community was also located uptown, concentrated around 57th Street. So at this time, these downtown artists, they started to organize and by that I mean working together in a sort of cooperative, almost unionizing type way, and one of the things that they were doing to facilitate the opportunities for themselves to promote, exhibit and sell their work was forming galleries together, and the scene was largely centered around 10th Street, and the 10th Street avant-garde scene has become a byword, in fact, for these galleries and, back at this time, the community in this area. It was not the salubrious, uh village, greenwich village that we know today. This was an area consisting of, um tenement buildings, cold water apartments, uh sheet metal workshops, uh late night billiard pool rooms, uh porn shops, um, and so it was. It was a sort of a gritty urban uh environment, um, and because it was like this, it had become somewhat of a mecca for artists to live there, because they were able to find premises that enabled them to live and work very inexpensively.

Nicholas Robinson: 5:51

So in 1952, lois Dodd was the co-founder of a gallery called the Tanager Gallery, and that was one of the two that were founded in this year, and a number of others continued to be, to be founded throughout the 1950s. So this was kind of a key development in this milieu from which Lois Dodd came. The gallery was next door to the, the place where de Kooning lived and worked. Franz Klein lived around the corner, so this was really a key neighborhood that started to foment this kind of artistic energy. Some other founding or early members of the Tanager were Alex Katz, philip Perlstein, tom Wesselman, who was one of the early uh pop artists, a collagist initially. George Siegel, um, who was a sculptor, became known for making um, uh figurative sculptures out of plaster.

Nicholas Robinson: 7:06

So this is a very interesting, a very vital, a very vibrant part of a downtown scene, a downtown where the elevated subway was still running up and down the Bowery and very different from the downtown, from the downtown that that that we know today, um. So. So Lois Dodd is the is the founder of the Tanager um, a gallery that would actually go on to be managed by Irving Sandler, who's a uh, I suppose the seminal chronicler of this period. It was the gallery that hosted the very first reading by Jack Kerouac. So this is a really important venue in the cultural scene of New York, the burgeoning cultural scene of New York, and so I think I know that's sort of a long answer to understanding. You know where Lois Dodd came from, but these formative years and this cross-pollination amongst these people is very key and Lois Dodd is not just a sort of willing acolyte participant, she is a leader of these amongst these, these people, amongst these peers thank you, nick um.

Jeppe Curth: 8:28

You have lived in new york for many years. Do you have you walk around this neighborhood?

Nicholas Robinson: 8:32

yes, it's. Uh, it's rather different now. Um, there are lots of row houses in this neighborhood which are townhouses which are very expensive. Um, but there are still apartment buildings and still some loft buildings, but now they just consist of expensive real estate. The taxi workshops and the cottage industries are long gone.

Jeppe Curth: 8:57

Can you explain the central themes she explores in her paintings and what you think makes it compelling to collectors?

Nicholas Robinson: 9:03

Yes, absolutely. Her work is very humdrum, everyday subjects consisting of the things that she observes in quotidian life. They are scenes of her apartment in downtown New York, um, vignettes of of things that she's able to see in her apartment, sometimes scenes out of the window of her apartment, but done sort of on the spot in this very low key observational way, um, and there's just a sort of quiet beauty in you know this, a certain sense of things that you might look at but never actually see. Lois Dodd sees them and then she depicts them.

Jeppe Curth: 10:02

I think there's some peacefulness in the works when I look at them.

Nicholas Robinson: 10:06

Yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the you know, if you ask what characterizes her work, I mean we haven't really yet talked about the main thing that characterizes her work. Now, for anyone who's ever spent time in New York, it's they will know that New York in the summer is very cloying, claustrophobic, stifling in this sort of heat and the smell, and the thing that one most wants to do in New York in the summer is leave Um and Lois and her contemporaries werecot Bay and they were attracted by the very cheap, somewhat ramshackle farmhouses, the landscape, the barns, the fresh air and the light, and they would go there in the summer and they would make paintings. And the thing that Lois Dodd has ultimately become most known for is a lifetime of making plain air paintings, and plain air, simply put, is just working outside. So she would take her easel and her support and her materials and she would venture out into the great outdoors and she would capture the things that she was seeing, and this could be still lives of leaves and plants and pine cones and other type type of things that she would discover in nature, or it could be a slightly more expansive scene of a landscape and and you would see trees, a little cottage, a barn, a brook, a path, and you would see the characteristics of this scene as she was seeing it, in making very specific painterly choices with her brushstrokes in order to really encapsulate what she was seeing in this particular moment. And she was, of course, channeling her experience into this painting. And so you see this very immediate response to light, to the time of day, to the season, and you know, she became a master at communicating this fleeting, ephemeral moment in time.

Nicholas Robinson: 12:57

And the thing that is sort of most striking about her work is that I don't think anybody would specifically say this about her work, but what she did was very much like what the Impressionists did in the 1870s, 1880s, and the Impressionists were the very first generation and I think most people would trace the beginning of modern art to this final quarter of the 19th century. But the Impressionists were the first group of artists to take this kind of working methodology out of. The were emblematic of the leisure classes, um, experiencing modern life, um, and Lois Dodd, in her very quiet, very unassuming, very modest way, did the same thing, uh, with her experiences of life in downtown New York, in the city, and her experiences of life in the summertime in coastal Maine Primarily Maine, I suppose, is what she's become known for, but any painting that really captures the essence of her experiences in this environment. And there are other artists that she was spending time with up there, artists that were part of this summertime exodus from new york um alex katz is the most well-known of them but very iconic um. Landscape artists also were part of this.

Nicholas Robinson: 14:40

This group um Rex Drawdowns, neil Welliver.

Jeppe Curth: 14:44

Sorry for me to interrupt you, nick, but the first time I saw the work from Lois Dott, it reminded me of works by Alex Katz, which you just mentioned. Is it correctly understood that Alex Katz is inspired by Lois?

Nicholas Robinson: 15:05

Well, I think that they have been friends and colleagues for 60, 70 years at this point, so obviously they've seen and been around each other's work and maybe even working alongside each other at times, I don't know. Um. I've also heard, anecdotally, that Alex Katz has been a big supporter of her work, having acquired many examples of her paintings from almost all of her exhibitions over the years. So so clearly these are two artists that have worked alongside each other, that have known each other as close friends for more than half a century. Um, have they influenced each other?

Nicholas Robinson: 15:49

I think when one looks at their work, and any sort of superficial reading of their respective works would see that there's clearly been, uh a a back and forth of visual information that they have each managed to integrate into their working lives. I mean, probably they're, they have some shared values about what painting is, what it's for, what it what they think it it's best served doing. Um. So so these, these affinities are there. I mean, I with Alex Katz.

Nicholas Robinson: 16:23

He's a little more closely associated, I suppose, with the advent of, of pop, pop art in the 1960s. Um, whereas I think you can maybe more more clearly see in Lois Dodd's painting almost a rejection of this and just to sort of explain why. I mean the pop art of the 1960s, commercialism and consumerism, uh, that exploded in New York in the post-war period and this is a. This is an art that recognizes the power of advertising and consumerism and marketing and the potency of branding. Um, and you could say that Lois's work is, maybe implicitly, a sort of rejection of these values. There is almost a rejection of this and a clear communication that the key to a certain kind of satisfaction and fulfillment in life is just the vocational dedication to one's craft, um, the, the pleasure in the repetition and learning of one's craft, and this sort of simplicity of things that one is able to communicate from from, from doing it well from doing it well.

Jeppe Curth: 18:05

So Lois is 97 years old.

Nicholas Robinson: 18:09

Yeah, 96 or 97, yes, yeah. So why are we first starting buying them now? Well, it's a good question and I think there's no really simple answer.

Nicholas Robinson: 18:21

I mean, we, we Are they hard to get, or Well, well, I mean, maybe they're not super hard to get. I mean, they're perhaps difficult to get a very precise example of the very best of what she does. Um, she doesn't make so many paintings anymore, even though she's still working. Um, there are. Her paintings are quite, uh, modest in size for the most part, although there are some larger ones a meter, a meter 20. Um, she's become actually very well.

Nicholas Robinson: 18:53

When people think of her work, I think that they think of particular types of of work. She's became very well known for paintings of windows. She would be, she would be, um, known for painting, uh, a scene of a window in in very sort of close up, where the window frame is very close to the um perimeter of the painted surface, um, and you would maybe see something a little bit through that window. You would maybe see things also reflected in the window, and often the window is a window of a cottage, the window of a barn. So you get this very, you know, very specific snapshot of a simple rural life. And those paintings are in fact sufficiently well known that they have become quite expensive. In fact, there was a painting that sold quite recently of a barn window, uh, that sold at auction for, I think, $225,000. Uh, 39, 239, $239,000. There you go, um. You're the man with the these facts, um, and that was the first time that uh, very sort of notable price had been achieved for a painting that one felt was long overdue, well-deserved and had been a long time coming.

Nicholas Robinson: 20:12

But I think the sheer modesty of her paintings and the lack of shoutiness in her paintings is what has maybe kept them from coming more to the fore. She's also painted a lot of trees and flowers and this kind of thing, and for many, many years she actually resisted painting those kinds of things. She had always found these very sort of small moments in nature very rewarding and had wanted to paint them, but she decided that she would be better served not painting them, um, for fear of being denigrated as a woman Sunday painter, uh, because of course this kind of subject matter, um could be more closely associated with this kind of painting or painter Um, and she did not want to be that Um. So it's only uh, in maybe later years where she has become established as a, as an artist, become a well-known artist. I mean she also has had, you know, very significant roles in education. She has been the roles in education. She has been the leader I don't know the exact job title of the Skowhegan School, which is a very famous art school in Maine that is particularly renowned for its summer programs and the way that these summer programs take place. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters, so she's a very well regarded, very decorated artist.

Nicholas Robinson: 21:46

Um, but I think also, you know from, for women artists, it's also been very difficult for a long time. Um, I mean, there's a very famous woman artist from new York, also from this generation, alice Neel, known as a portraitist, who was very much a part of the New York avant-garde. I mean, she even famously painted Andy Warhol, who was notoriously reticent and eccentric and shy, and he he painted. She painted him with his shirt off after he had recovered from surgery. He was a victim of an assassination attempt in the late 1960s. A woman called valerie solanus tried to kill him and alice neal painted warhol with of his all of the scars on his torso.

Nicholas Robinson: 22:44

But anyway, she is a painter who received a certain kind of recognition amongst the avant-garde and the intelligentsia of her day but in a market sense, took many years to be properly recognized and she famously struggled as an artist with two young children at home. Lois was married, became a mother in 1952, and it could be that she was juggling the demands of her career as a leader, an academic leader, and also as a mother. And and and the men, of course, as is so often the case, were the ones receiving all the accolades and all the acclaim and all the glory.

Jeppe Curth: 23:25

But is she current as a trend in art market or more a rediscovering thing that we have looked into?

Nicholas Robinson: 24:08

Find the important women artists of history that have you know been sort of fallen victim to a lack of opportunity or a lack of critical acclaim simply because they were not, you know, at the forefront of just to use a sort of a parallel for this.

Nicholas Robinson: 24:15

The advent of abstraction was considered a male innovation in the first decade of the 20th century. People would variously point to works by Kandinsky or Malevich in Russia, or even Piet Mondrian with his purist doctrine in the Netherlands around 1910, 11, even certain types of sort of cubism. All of these types of art were considered a thrust towards abstraction and people would attribute these innovations to these male artists. But it's only in the last few years that um the work, the pioneering work of a Swedish artist, uh, hilma Aklint, um her work is now considered the very first abstract work and um the work of Carmen Herrera is also now considered among the very first uh types of abstraction. So there's a certain revisionism that takes place, which kind of looks afresh at these examples from history and it starts to sort them out in new ways that give credit where it was not given in the initial instance.

Jeppe Curth: 25:14

Well, we have bought Lois' works, but we have also placed some in collections. How have you explained how to see her works, the market and her future potential?

Nicholas Robinson: 25:29

Well, my first key thing is really just to look at the work, and qualitatively, these works are extraordinary. They're made quickly and yet they're made very decisively, in a fleeting moment, and yet they're extremely communicative, with an incredible amount of both nuance and precision. And when you're able to see that an artist is able to communicate so much with such economy, then you know, you can say with conviction that they're an extraordinary artist, and Lois is is an extraordinary artist. Um, the way she's able to capture light and shadow and, you know, very sparse visual information into a scene of abundance or a winter scene where a certain kind of you know, you feel the warmth, you feel the cold, you feel what she is feeling. And that's the first important thing to note that she's an extraordinarily good painter. And when you have an extraordinarily good painter, then of course it makes sense to Try and acquire them, just because qualitatively they, they, they deserve that. And if, if you wish to have a collection of of of painting, then may as well make them good ones. So that's, that's the first thing. But then the second part is that when one look, looks at her work in a, in a market sense, relative to the prices of her peers, then the prices are extraordinarily affordable.

Nicholas Robinson: 27:09

Alex Katz's work is extremely expensive and he is an icon of 20th century painting and, and I mean, to my eye, qualitatively, there's not really any difference between what the two of them are able to do with, you know, quite a lot of bold color and sort of flat painted, uh, swathes of whatever on a flat surface.

Nicholas Robinson: 27:34

They both, they both have that, that ability, um, but her, her other colleagues from this generation, neil Welliver's work is costs has traditionally costed a lot more.

Nicholas Robinson: 27:45

Rackstraw Downs' work has has cost a lot more, um, and you know, lois is a, is a, is a leader, and and the fact that she has vocationally achieved this kind of consistency over such a long period of time, I mean one of her achievements is her longevity as an artist, um, and I think it's, you know, it's definitely not overstating it to say that she's an iconic figure who has, you know, new York, has written the book of modernism.

Nicholas Robinson: 28:13

New York is the epicenter of modernism and modern art since the Second World War and Lois Dodd has been a consistent component of that, almost since its inception. And I think that you know what you will find in the future is that her works were her works are in. You know all the important museums and what I think you will increasingly see is these works being taken out of the storage and the basement and becoming much more prominently displayed in these modernist galleries. And you will see the works appearing increasingly at auction and I think, as these visual documents, they're very important and I think that you will see collectors increasingly competing to buy them and own them.

Jeppe Curth: 29:08

Which galleries is Lois represented by, and is there some notable collectors or museums collecting her works?

Nicholas Robinson: 29:17

Well, her work is in many important American museums Too many to list.

Nicholas Robinson: 29:23

She's shown with a gallery called Alexandra gallery in New York for many years and they do a really great job, uh, with a particular roster of American modernists, um, and that's their specialization and that's what they've done, done really well with, and she's been been showing there for for a number of years.

Nicholas Robinson: 29:44

Um, she has an exhibition now at uh been showing there for a number of years. She has an exhibition now at the Parrish Heiden Gallery in Los Angeles and that is one of the galleries under the aegis of Franklin Parrish and he's a New York dealer who's also extremely scholarly, extremely adept at finding really interesting artists and, you know, bringing them back to prominence, understanding them contextually, showing them in a very sensitive way and and he's you know I was really happy and excited to see that he was um becoming involved, because that, to me, is another sort of signifier of a increase or a revival of interest Her work is. I think that the the whole collection or foundation is has a number of very fine examples of her work and I actually think that they, they, they did an exhibition of her work in their Vermont galleries a couple of years ago, so you know her work is you know her work is not new to people's awareness, but it's growing in awareness and it's been, perhaps you could say, a well-kept secret amongst the initiated for a long time.

Jeppe Curth: 31:08

We just mentioned it, or you just mentioned that the auction record was around $240,000, right, correct. And you also mentioned that, compared to similar careers artists' similar careers, representation in museums, exhibition history and plays in art history her work is compared to them affordable in some way. What is affordable? What is the primary price of these works?

Nicholas Robinson: 31:33

Her prices for her typical 30, 40 centimeter paintings is around $40,000, plus or minus depending on small variations in size. The landscape paintings that are a bit bigger that are maybe much more emblematic of the sort of visual world that she depicts in Maine they're getting a bit more expensive, up to $100,000. These are the primary market prices for her paintings.

Jeppe Curth: 32:15

From both artistic and financial perspective. How do you see Dutt's work fitting into a well-rounded art collection?

Nicholas Robinson: 32:24

Well, I mean they're excellent works and they're very, very good value, so they fit into any collection. I mean they're beautiful to look at, so they're not difficult things to incorporate into any kind of environment. I mean they, they challenge you in that they challenge you to understand how somebody has managed to be so communicative with such economy of means, with such rich gesture, such nuance of, of of light. Um, you know that's the, that's the, the, the, the first thing to note, um.

Nicholas Robinson: 32:55

But in terms of being part of any sort of coherent, uh, collecting group, I mean she's a, she's an iconic New York modernist Um. So so any painting collection or any, a collection of any type of art that wishes to have, you know, really good examples of a certain type of thing, I mean she can fit, fit in any, any kind of collection. It's. It's not something that people have habitually or traditionally collected Um. I lived in New York for 20 years, from the late 1990s to almost to 2020. And I mean I knew her work, but it was not something that people were, you know, actively talking about or pursuing, and I think that there's just become an increased appetite in finding interesting things from history that have been underrepresented.

Jeppe Curth: 33:56

And you know people explore the reasons why and it becomes a motivation for them to get involved. For someone that is new to Lois Dodds' works and maybe want to investigate more, of course they can always contact us, but where else could they start exploring her works?

Nicholas Robinson: 34:07

Of course they can always contact us, but where else could they start exploring her works? Well, I think that if you look at the website of the Alexandra Gallery you'll find nice sort of truncated biography and images of examples of her paintings. I think if you search in some of the main museums you'll see the holdings of her work that they have. The Hall Art Foundation has a pretty nice text about her practice and images of some really seminal works. There's a painting that they have of her studio or apartment in New York or apartment in New York, and they have some larger examples which are much rarer than I suppose. When you're painting outdoors, taking the easel outside, it's much easier to work on a very small, intimate scale than it is with a large, unwieldy canvas, and that's most likely why there's many, many more small paintings than there are large paintings.

Jeppe Curth: 35:06

Thank you, Nick. I think we're through all my questions for today about Lois. Do you have anything to add?

Nicholas Robinson: 35:16

No, I mean, the only thing that I would say is that you know, when people are looking to acquire things, one of the first things they often look to, instead of individual artists' work, they look at trends. You know work they look at. They look at trends. You know they look at what's maybe popular, what kinds of work, and then which of the artists that maybe most represent which are the artists that have become the most, you know, known, the most, have the most instagram followers, artists whose name is sort of becoming synonymous as a brand of art, if you like.

Nicholas Robinson: 35:51

And Lois Dodd is not that. Lois Dodd is just a really insightful, quiet painting whose experiences with what she's seeing is translated in a painterly sense, in a way that's really felt and really profound. So I think that oftentimes, when you're looking to buy things, one of the things that you can best do for yourself is to step outside of trends and pay very close attention instead to the specifics of an individual artist and the specifics of the way their work is regarded, or perhaps not regarded, by the market, and then, if all of those things you know tally up in a certain way, then then it's. You know it's a very interesting proposition.

Jeppe Curth: 36:43

Thank you, nick, for that advice, and thank you for letting me pick your brain again.

Nicholas Robinson: 36:47

Yes, it's, it's nice to be here, thank you, and really nice to talk about Lois Dot, really really nice.

Jeppe Curth: 36:57

Thank you. So if you have any questions, you need any help, any advice, please contact us for info at nordicartpartnerscom and we'll see you next time.