Dorr Bothwell; Painter Lived Nomadic Life

Dorr Bothwell, painter and pioneering printmaker who announced at age 4 that she would become an artist and remained creative through her long, nomadic life despite struggles with sexism and occasional poverty, has died at 98.

Bothwell died Sunday in Fort Bragg, Calif., said Tobey Moss, who handled the artist’s work at her Tobey Moss Gallery on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. Although Bothwell traveled andpainted in Samoa in 1928, when it was considered unseemly for women to travel alone, and went on to absorb visual ideas in Asia, Europe and Africa throughout her life, she had recently returned to live in Mendocino, where she had been a cornerstone of the Mendocino Art Center since 1960.

In addition to that center and the Tobey Moss Gallery, Bothwell exhibited her paintings, drawings, collages and prints in more than two dozen museums across the United States and Europe, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage here; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art; the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

A 1925 charter member of the Society of San Francisco Women Artists, Bothwell, who changed her original name, Doris, to Dorr to muddle her controversial entry into the art world as a woman, earned the San Francisco Women in the Arts Award in 1979. Although she had lost her eyesight because of macular degeneration, she was working under a 1998 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award to organize her works, records and memoirs for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Bothwell had two memories of when she was 4 and growing up in San Francisco: her small bed scooting across the floor in the 1906 earthquake and her steadfast decision to become an artist.

Despite rampant sexism in the early 20th century, she entered the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. There she was to meet the teacher who would be a lifelong influence on her art and her own teaching, Rudolf Schaeffer, founder of the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design.

“He not only made you see color,” she once said, “but made you see design and see pattern in nature, see that there is design and order in everything around you.”

Later she would turn his teachings, honed by her own vast experience, into the classic art textbook “Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design” in collaboration with her friend Marlys Mayfield. First published in 1968, the book is still in print and has been widely translated.

The word notan is Japanese for “dark/light,” or, in Bothwell’s words, “the theory that opposites don’t conflict, they complement.”

Bothwell survived her hungry Depression days by working as a Federal Arts Project muralist in Los Angeles. In that period, she also learned screen printmaking, designed pottery for Gladding McBean and opened a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard.

To help fund and inform her work and her travels, Bothwell taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California School of Fine Arts, Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, Sonoma State College, the Mendocino Art Center, the Parsons School of Design in New York, the Ansel Adams Photography Workshops in Yosemite and the Victor School of Photography in Colorado.

Her American sojourns were interspersed with years of living and painting abroad--in France, England, West and North Africa, Indonesia, China, Japan and Mexico.

But her first and most daring adventure was that first trip in 1928 to Tau, Samoa, the island where Margaret Mead had done landmark studies among the natives.

Traveling alone was simply not respectable, Bothwell’s mother admonished the 26-year-old, but Bothwell sailed anyway. On Tau, she not only produced linoleum block prints, sketches and paintings, but she also learned native language, songs and dances and was initiated into a tribe with elaborate--and very permanent--blue tattoos on both legs.

Returning to San Francisco in 1930, she was much in demand, singing Samoan songs on the radio and demonstrating Samoan dances for art world parties.

Her work continued to change, using different media to depict cats, shrines, multiple designs and surrealistic collages.

“Dorr Bothwell was a painter who never stayed with a successful formula but always moved on into new styles and themes as her life evolved,” Mayfield said.

The artist was married briefly in the 1930s to sculptor Donal Hord, with whom she remained friendly long after she decided that marriage was too confining for her free spirit.

A memorial gathering is planned for Oct. 28 at the Mendocino Art Center, and donations in her memory can be sent to the center at P.O. Box 765, Mendocino, CA 95460.

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