Dorothy Hood
The enigmatic legacy of Houston’s first art star
CORPUS CHRISTI — The Art Museum of South Texas seemed strangely quiet one afternoon in early fall as a two-block line of Selena fans snaked around the convention center next door. • The museum had just unveiled the biggest project in its history, “The Color of Being / El Color del Ser,” a retrospective that honors one of Texas’ most fascinating and important 20th-century artists. • Dorothy Hood, who died 16 years ago, at 82, remains an enigmatic figure among those who were in her orbit. She had a love-hate relationship with her hometown of Houston, where dealers and collectors kept her afloat and allowed her
canvases to soar, but she often felt isolated, and superior. She could be quietly charming but also alienated people.
Yet all these years later, Hood still has ardent supporters who think — as she always did — that her work deserves more recognition. “The Color of Being” aims to put her in a pantheon of great American modern artists that includes Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.
The show fills both of the museum’s buildings with a gobsmacking assortment of monumental abstract paintings, vibrant collages and mysterious drawings that evidence a powerful talent with a unique visual language.
Hood’s best works can seem as profound and disorienting as a statement she once wrote: “A great painting makes you remember something out of time, something great and perfect, as a happening which did not begin but always was.”
She could manipulate a riot of techniques on a single canvas:
• Veinlike rivulets that ran as she poured paint thinned with turpentine.
• Limpid washes with sootlike flares that can make canvases look puckered from a distance.
• Jagged passages of decalcomania, a mottled effect achieved by applying paint with crumpled tinfoil or paper.
• Bold “fencing” strokes that show the clear lines of her brushes.
• Taped-off fields of solid color.
• Glowing sprays of light that appear to be emerging from behind clouds or over horizons.
These flourishes can look as aqueous as the matter inside a lava lamp or as jagged as lightning bolts, often colliding against each other in an audacious, high-contrast palette. Her masterpieces seem so charged they might spontaneously combust when you look away.
“Everything with Dorothy is dualities: light and dark, life and death, above and below, heaven and earth, he and she,” said Susie Kalil, the freelance curator who spent four years researching and organizing “The Color of Being,” also producing a large book.
Quietly intense and on one of the biggest missions of her career, Kalil treats Hood with religious fervor. Years ago, the artist told Kalil she wanted viewers to “hear the lions roar and the drums beat” — an idea that has become Kalil’s mantra.
“When I stand in front of those 10-foot paintings, I feel this reverberation in my stomach, like a rocket’s taking off,” she said. “It just transports me.” Ideas of existence
The day the show opened, Kalil marveled over Hood’s largest painting, the 7-foot-highby-12-foot-long “Minoan Blue.” “This is every bit as good as a Motherwell or a Frankenthaler,” she said. “Nobody of her generation had Dorothy’s range.”
“Minoan Blue” demonstrates Hood’s techniques as well as her ability to confront scale, Kalil said. “The larger she worked, the better she got.”
Hood tackled ideas about existence as she exalted in the mysteries of nature — inspired by grand expanses of Texas sky, NASA space imagery, geology, sea creatures, flowers and epic human mythologies.
She also strove to paint what was beyond the visible — always searching for the sublime place where the chaotic cosmos and universes of the psyche intersect, behind the so-called “mind’s eye.”
Hood’s paintings don’t enthrall everyone, though.
“When they’re very, very good, they’re very, very good,” said Clint Willour, another curator who specializes in Texas art. “But that’s a handful of paintings out of a lifetime of work.”
Kalil agrees that the prolific Hood, like many other artists, didn’t always hit perfect chords. In her haste to make a living, she sold bad paintings, too.
Some curators prefer Hood’s more spontaneous, playful and intimate collages, which are composed from newspaper clippings, gift wrap, gold and silver leaf, textile scraps and torn bits of her canvases.
The collages offer a better window into all the things that fed Hood’s insatiable appetite for art, from Pre-Columbian artifacts to works by Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst and many others.
But the virtuosity of Hood’s poetic, seductively detailed pen-and-ink drawings never fails to astonish everyone who sees them.
These works hum with tensile strength built from thousands of fragile-looking lines. They’re like precisely executed symphonies, brimming with fiercely psychological imagery.
Haunting, autobiographical figures fill the earliest drawings with the tormented swirl of Hood’s lonely childhood. Her later drawn images are spacey, surreal and full of potent sexual imagery, with flowers that might make even Georgia O’Keeffe blush.
“Our viewpoint of Hood has been so narrow,” Kalil said. “This really shows how many octaves she could reach.” An ‘Enigmatic Vessel’
An only child whose parents were strict Germanic-Swedes from Nebraska and Kansas, Hood grew up in comfortable, upper-middle-class surroundings. But the Hood home was near the Houston Zoo, so she also tuned into the more primal world outside her open bedroom windows. At night, young Dorothy heard hyenas laugh.
Her father gave her a taste of life above the Earth in a small plane he co-owned — but also pulled the ground out from under her. Her parents divorced when Hood was 11, leading to a dark and transient adolescence spent largely with her depressed and frail mother, who had tuberculosis and went blind in one eye. Hood couldn’t walk for a year after a bout of pneumonia.
Despite the hardships, she emerged as a beautiful, strong, precocious and talented teenager. She won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, a launching pad to 20 years of adventure.
“I was always a risky person,” Hood says in the 1985 documentary “The Color of Life.”
That was wildly apparent during her early 20s, when Hood was living in New York, working as a model and hanging out with edgy artists such as the surrealist Roberto Matta.
In 1941, Hood and two friends drove her old roadster to Mexico City, and Hood stayed, enthralled by the warm sense of freedom and churning intellectual scene.
Mexico in the 1940s was like Paris in the 1920s, the gathering ground for surrealists who had fled war-torn Europe, politically minded muralists and a global cadre of poets, novelists and filmmakers. This was the golden era of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Pablo Neruda.
Hood — a headturning, statuesque strawberry blonde — had no trouble finding her way into that male- dominated world.
“She went full-tilt boho, down the rabbit hole,” Kalil said.
Neruda helped the aspiring artist get her first gallery show of drawings; it sold out, and the buyers included the Museum of Modern Art. Orozco, old enough to be her grandfather, became a passionate mentor.
Hood’s mother made several arduous bus trips, trying to bring her daughter home to Houston. She gave up after Hood married Bolivian composer and filmmaker José María Velasco Maidana, who was 22 years her senior.
Maidana’s conducting jobs and other business ventures across the Americas kept the couple’s lifestyle thrilling but nomadic, and a lessdriven artist than Hood might have abandoned her own career. Instead, she built relationships with important curators and dealers that would last for years.
New York’s prestigious Willard Gallery gave Hood a solo show in 1950, although her first small paintings didn’t impress the critics as original enough. She persevered through about a decade to develop her signature painting style.
When Parkinson’s disease cut Maidana’s career short, Hood finally came home, needing a steady teaching job. Her mother was nearby, and an aunt left her a Woodland Heights bungalow.
Meredith Long, the most powerful art dealer in town, signed Hood to his roster, doled out a monthly stipend to keep her afloat, kept commissions and shows coming and got Hood’s art into important museum collections.
Finally, Hood had a place of her own to paint, and a reason: Her bold, increasingly large canvases appealed to corporate collectors and the owners of mansions in the River Oaks and Memorial neighborhoods, who had big walls to fill.
Hood often was treated as the only female equal among the handful of male artists who dominated Houston’s art scene during the 1960s and ’70s. Dee Wolff, one of her former students, fondly recalls how Hood swooshed into the museum school studio in flowing caftans: “You knew she was somebody.”
Hood painted her first 10-foot canvases for a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in 1970, launching a decade of successes. She won awards. She had shows in Europe. The ballet commissioned her to create sets and costumes. She was everywhere.
Except New York galleries.
Hood couldn’t get that kind of traction in an era dominated by abstract expressionism, and she wasn’t willing to change her art to suit their premise that painting needed no subject other than itself.
She also sabotaged herself at home, demanding too much of people she depended on.
She called her much younger half-brother, Frank Hood, only when she needed something, he said. “I get along with her art better than I ever got along with her.”
He owns about 15 of her paintings — purchases, not gifts. The exception is an early piece he stored in a closet after she asked him to throw it away.
Dorothy Hood left a debris field of relationships, but her split with Long was the most devastating.
“He cuts a wide swath, even in New York,” Frank Hood said. Long’s wife is a lifetime trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Long severed his ties with Hood because she was selling work directly to collectors, cutting him out of the deals — a huge no-no in the art world.
Hood had romantic secrets, too. As Maidana grew invalid, she found the love of her life in Baron Krister Kuylenstierna, a dashing European who knew Frank Lloyd Wright, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Bette Davis and important collectors. They traveled together for about 14 years and corresponded almost daily, until he died in 1987.
After Maidana died in 1989, Hood found a more unlikely younger companion, Krishna Dronamraju, whose background in genetic research impressed her. He had contacts in India; and she felt drawn to the seat of Hindu spirituality, facing her own mortality with breast cancer.
They made the journey twice. Hood was still frail from a mastectomy and chemotherapy on the second trip. She broke a leg, and Dronamraju called Frank Hood for cash to get her home.
The final tab of about $30,000 turned out to be Frank Hood’s last straw, because Dorothy refused to pay him back. He hired a lawyer, and won.
With Dronamraju in control, many of Hood’s friends drifted out of the picture during her last years. She left him her entire estate.
“That’s the really sad thing, that she drove friends and relatives away and ended up with him,” Frank Hood said.
Rediscovery
Many of the 155 works in “The Color of Being” have not been shown publicly in years, or ever.
About a third are from the permanent collection of the Art Museum of South Texas, which acquired most of Hood’s studio contents from Dronamraju in 2001 for for $50,000 — the amount of Hood’s final medical bill.
The deal went down as a kind of emergency because Dronamraju was unloading Hood’s house, too, but museum director William Otton thought Hood’s legacy was too important to ignore.
“We are a regional museum that had the opportunity to acquire what I consider the mother of modern art in this state,” he said during a panel talk. “She was the first one, in my opinion, doing the kind of work that could hold up anywhere in the United States.”
Otton hauled two 24-foot truckloads of art, archives and memorabilia from Hood’s studio to the museum’s basement, where it sat for more than a decade, through a building expansion and a change in directors.
When Kalil took on the project in 2012, she found three pallets, each 6 feet wide and tall, piled with hundreds of shrinkwrapped boxes. Some of the contents were molding: The museum’s vault sidles up to the seawall of Corpus Christi Bay. The boxes held decades’ worth of journals, letters, receipts, credit-card bills, you name it. Like a truffle hound on scent, Kalil scoured the files to piece together Hood’s life story and understand how her art developed. She coaxed 65 lenders, including private collectors and major museums, to participate.
“It was like peeling an onion,” Kalil said. “Every museum I went to, they never pull these paintings out. Nobody had seen them.”
It’s hard to believe a painting as big as “Minoan Blue” could disappear, but Kalil spent a year and a half tracking it down. Passed from a Fort Worth bank to a private collector, it was sitting in a warehouse in Arlington. She has a lot of stories like that.
Kalil’s quest yielded some hoodoo moments, too
Her friend Norris Fergeson owned an orgasmic-looking red canvas titled “Out of Africa: She.” Kalil knew it was half of a diptych but had no idea if the mate — a “He” canvas — still existed. Then one night, as she and Norris walked a dog on Houston’s Ferndale Street, there “He” was, glowing through a window, in a law firm’s reception room. The vertical painting was hung horizontally, but Kalil still recognized it immediately.
No ragged edges
So why isn’t Hood better remembered? Is it really because she was a woman, living in Texas, as many people say?
“That’s an easy way out,” curator Willour said. “Agnes Martin was stuck in New Mexico … and she’s recognized as one of the greatest painters ever.”
Martin’s canvases sell for millions of dollars, he noted, while Hood’s can still be had for $15,000 to $30,000. “If she’s that great, it seems like the market would be there,” Willour said.
Kalil thinks Hood’s work has long been undervalued because the artist’s career hasn’t been thoroughly, critically examined until now. She said prices already are rising.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator Alison de Lima Greene sounded philosophical about Hood’s success.
“She wanted the sun, the moon and the stars, and she got some of them,” Greene said. “Dorothy may have felt she didn’t get as much as she deserved, but boy, she got a lot. … She was collected in ways many artists would envy.”
Yet even today, Hood’s affairs seem prone to friction.
Houston philanthropist Carolyn Farb, a Hood champion since the 1980s, spearheaded a $1.3 million campaign to support “The Color of Being,” then withdrew her two large paintings and boycotted the opening.
She is furious that the museum spent as much as $500,000 on interactive technology toys for the show instead of applying those funds to advancing Hood’s legacy. Farb, Kalil and Willour predict the huge effort of “The Color of Being” will be wasted if the show doesn’t travel to other venues.
It closes in six weeks, and current museum director Joe Schenk said the full display would be impossible to repeat. No other institution is likely to devote so much space to Hood. And managing so many borrowed works is expensive.
Greene thinks Kalil’s excellent book will be the enduring takeaway for scholars. “No show is definitive; every show opens a door to another show,” she said.
Artist Richard Stout traveled from Houston to attend the show’s opening, even though he and Hood were estranged for years.
“Dorothy really doesn’t have any ragged edges,” he said. “It astounds me that the MFAH did not have this show. They need to deal with this.”
James Harithas, who championed Hood as early as the 1960s, gets almost the last word in Kalil’s book. “Unless you acknowledge your own artists, you’ve got nothing,” he writes. “It’s like you don’t recognize yourself.”
The people lining up at the convention center that October day might have understood. They were buying makeup from a new collection inspired by Selena, the late Tejano superstar, but it wasn’t about vanity. Selena is like a patron saint in Corpus, and even a tube of lipstick with her name on it can be a sacred relic.
Maybe if a show as powerful as “The Color of Being” happened in Houston, Hood’s hometown fans would line up that way, too.
“It was like peeling an onion. Every museum I went to, they never pull these paintings out. Nobody had seen them.” Curator Susie Kalil