ART REVIEW : Personal Feel in Bothwell’s ‘40s Work

Dorr Bothwell, still working at 90, belongs to the second tier of California modernists. Not a stylistic innovator--though she was a pioneer of screen printing--Bothwell was liable to turn out tepidly decorative abstractions or waste time drawing cats. But some of her paintings and prints from the ‘40s have a strikingly personal quality.

In “Translation,” a small painting on composition board from 1940, a human hand, a snake and a cactus are closely grouped in a rudimentary desert landscape. A portion of each is trapped within a square area that has a magic power: Inside it, the hand turns red and the plant and snake become stylized motifs. Is the piece about the transformative power of art, specifically American Indian art? It’s hard to say for sure, but the symbolic intensity of the image is undeniable.

In “Family Portrait,” a swaggering little girl whose head nearly touches a cloud holds a giant lily that grows out of the mauve (desert?) landscape. Half of her body is naked, but gray, as if she is dead. The other half is dressed in turn-of-the-century style. Another plant with a blank tag attached grows within a tiny white fence marking what appears to be a grave. Mingling multiple signs of death and life, this tableau combines an idiosyncratic vision with an unblinking directness and simplicity of execution.

In other works, the artless gravity of these paintings is replaced by breezy stylishness, as in the 1947 screen print “Comment on Fashion,” an abstracted figure presumably celebrating the grace and freedom of Dior’s “New Look,” or by dreamy invention, as in “Skaters Waltz,” a gouache filled with airy little markings that might stand for balance, time, water and the tracks of blades on ice.