Shining a spotlight on a painter and illustrator at the nexus of folk art and Modernism. She appeared everywhere, from W.P.A. murals to Life magazine. Then she disappeared.
Shipped off to boarding school as a teenager in 1920 “to get the edges polished off and prepare for college,” the artist Doris Lee cut her hair to rebel against her surroundings — “the least adventuresome and imaginative” in her life, with no access to painting. This act of rebellion was met with suspension and the school’s admonishment that “nice girls have long hair.”
Judging from the many photos that remain of Lee (1904—1983), she never chopped off her hair again. But she continued to cut a path of her own for the next four decades.
An accomplished Depression-era figurative painter and tremendously successful commercial artist through the 1940s and ’50s, Lee learned at a young age that to stay in the game she had to at least pretend to play by the rules.