At 98 years old, American painter Lois Dodd remains remarkably active in her studio, working almost daily while her artistic reputation continues to soar. After nearly eight decades of following her own path in the art world, immune to passing trends and fame's trappings, Dodd has become one of the most compelling yet underrecognized artists of her generation. Her paintings now grace prestigious collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian, commanding fierce competition at auction houses worldwide.
Dodd's market value has skyrocketed in recent years, with her painting "Reflection of the Barn" (1971) selling at Christie's for $378,000 in October 2024—nearly five times its estimated value and setting the third successive record for her work within a single year. Despite beginning her career in the 1940s as a key figure in New York's post-war art scene, she didn't receive her first major solo exhibition until 2012 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, when she was already 85 years old.
This fall marks a significant milestone for Dodd's international recognition with "Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral," her first European retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, running through January 4th. The revelatory survey brings together nearly 100 paintings spanning from the 1950s to the present day. David Breslin, curator of Modern and Contemporary art at The Met, suggested in an accompanying documentary that "in some ways, she could be seen as one of the most important artists of our time."
Dodd has always maintained the simplicity of her practice, insisting that she "just paints what she sees." Her subject matter appears unremarkable at first glance—trees, flowers, windows, doorways, and laundry lines drawn primarily from her immediate surroundings in rural Maine and New Jersey, or her lower Manhattan apartment. However, beneath their everyday surface, these exquisitely observed works are spatially sophisticated, lyrical, and utterly compelling, hovering between abstraction and figuration as the result of lifelong dedication to the act of looking.
Her paintings capture brief, unrepeatable moments—whether a shadow on a wall, reflection in a mirror, rain on a windowpane, or ice melting on a river. Each work is carefully framed and executed with swift, economic brushstrokes and thin paint layers, typically completed within hours. As a dedicated plein air painter who never works from photographs or preparatory sketches, Dodd often returns to the same scenes across many years, at different times and seasons, recording subtle variations in light and atmosphere.
The thematically organized exhibition showcases these ephemeral moments throughout Dodd's career. "Light Reflected on Brick Wall, December" (2014) captures shadows cast on her apartment wall by fleeting winter sunshine. "Snow Patterns" (1985) shows streaks of falling snow etched across a gray barn's facade, while "Burning House, Lavender" (2007) depicts a controlled blaze organized by the local fire department raging through an abandoned building, with flames pouring from windows and smoke wisps skittering across the rooftop.
One exhibition room features an entire collection of nocturnes from the 1970s rendered in deep blues, silvers, and blacks, capturing moonlight and shadow play over landscapes distilled into stark contrasts of darkness and light. Exhibition curator Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen explained to Artsy that Dodd "notices what tends to pass most of us by, and by making us privy to her observations, she teaches us a new way of seeing." The paintings reward attentive viewing while offering an antidote to modern life's speed and noise through their stillness and clarity.
Born in 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey, Dodd was the youngest of five daughters who lost both parents by age 17, fostering the fiercely independent spirit that would shape her life and career. From 1945 to 1948, she studied textiles at Cooper Union in New York City, where she met painters Alex Katz and Jean Cohen, who became lifelong friends, and sculptor Bill King, whom she briefly married.
In 1952, Dodd made her mark as the only female founding member of the legendary Tanager Gallery, the first of several cooperative galleries that emerged on East 10th Street in lower Manhattan during the 1950s and 1960s. These artist-driven spaces offered avant-garde alternatives to the more conservative Madison Avenue and 57th Street venues, situated at the heart of the burgeoning post-war art scene where Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism intersected. Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Ludwig Sander were regular visitors, while Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg exhibited there. Notably, Andy Warhol had his work rejected by the gallery three separate times.
However, Dodd set herself apart from these new movements, acknowledging their importance while following her own artistic instincts. "I never got into total abstraction. But I see abstraction, and [it] is very important to me. But I think all painting is abstract, period," she explained in the documentary. Henriksen noted that Dodd "absorbed the lessons of modernism, but filtered them through an observational lens distinctly her own," simplifying forms, flattening space, and balancing shapes while preserving both the feeling and atmosphere of her surroundings alongside their visual representation.
While her work draws comparisons to American artists like Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and European painters like Johannes Vermeer or Vilhelm Hammershøi, Dodd most frequently cites Piet Mondrian as an influence. The Kunstmuseum, home to the world's largest collection of Mondrian's work, is displaying his paintings alongside Dodd's to create dialogue between the artists. As Henriksen points out, their approaches differ significantly: "Where Mondrian sought abstraction through construction, Dodd finds it in the underlying structures of the observed world."
Dodd's paintings often develop from abstract elements she discovers close at hand. "Sun in Hallway" (1976) transforms a doorway view into geometric color bars, while "Springtime Studio Interior" (1972) features the oval shape of a mirror. Even the stark geometric alignment of walls and shadows outside her apartment window in "View of Cemetery – Men's Shelter" (1967) became inspiration. "I just liked the shape of that rectangle out there, so I started painting it over the years," Dodd explained matter-of-factly. "It would change radically according to the season, according to the hour, and so it became a great subject matter for me."
"I think it's all about geometry," she remarked in a recent interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. "Even the trees outside, inside. Wherever you are, it's all about geometry." This is particularly evident in her window paintings, which have been an enduring motif since 1968. These works, often painted to scale and employing skillful trompe-l'oeil effects, appear in every room of the exhibition. Dodd calls them her "Mondrian Constructions," deftly exploring tension between the rigid grid structure of windowpanes and the layers of abstraction found within the glass.
The obvious question arises: Why did recognition take so long for Dodd? Henriksen suggests that her tenacity and refusal to compromise her personal vision served as both strength and hindrance. "By eschewing fashionable movements—whether Abstract Expressionism, Pop, or Conceptual art—she positioned herself outside dominant post-war narratives, which partly explains her long underrecognition, especially internationally." Recent years have brought broader reappraisal of overlooked women artists and those who quietly persisted outside the spotlight, with Dodd's work resonating strongly in this context.
Even now, approaching her centenary, Dodd retains the independent streak that has marked her career. Immune to attempts at interpreting or theorizing her work, she remains content having "done her own thing" and offers no advice to young painters except that they try to do the same. "I can't remember anybody giving me advice," she wryly told Obrist, "and if they did, I wouldn't have taken it anyway."
