Lee Hall: A Memorial Exhibition, The Last Paintings

Lee Hall was a North Carolina native and renowned Abstract Expressionist, whose muses were the American and Mediterranean landscapes. Her paintings, titled by the locale they represent, were rendered using sophisticated, muted color relationships and varied, textural painting techniques. Her poetic landscapes are iterations of the tradition of abstraction derived from meditations on nature, whose forbearers include a myriad of great minds from painters of the Sung Dynasty to modernist John Marin.

She leaves an enormous legacy as an exceptional painter as well as a respected educator and writer. Hall stood toe to toe with the great artists of the New York School, earning herself representation at Betty Parsons’ famed New York gallery. Lee also served as president of the esteemed Rhode Island School of Design, and she has written a number of books, including biographies of Willem and Elaine DeKooning and Betty Parsons.

Lee Hall generously gave her estate to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, and proceeds from acquisitions of her work through the gallery support the Education Department of the museum.

The gallery will concurrently host a summer group exhibition with new works by gallery artists.

About Lee Hall

Lee was born in Lexington, NC in 1934 and pursued her academic career at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she studied with the painters John Opper and George Ivy. She received her MA in 1958 and her PhD in 1965, both from New York University, and continued her post-doctoral work at the prestigious Warburg Institute at the University of London with research fellowships from the American Philosophical Society.

In New York, she forged close relationships with leaders in American modern painting, including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. Lee was represented by Betty Parsons, one of the most important gallerists of the period, and eventually became her close friend and biographer.

Lee’s work was reviewed frequently and favorably in the central periodicals of the day, including ArtNews, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, Arts Magazine and The New York Times by the widely respected critics Clement Greenberg, John Russell and Hilton Kramer, among others.

Lee’s works are held in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) and the Johnson Collection (Spartanburg, SC) as well as in many corporate collections such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank and Prudential.

She was the recipient of many awards, including an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Athena Medal from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2016 she was awarded an Alumna of Distinction Award by the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Alongside her lifelong devotion to making art, Lee also pursued a career in academia beginning in 1958. She taught at the University of New York, Potsdam and then Winthrop College in Rock Hill, SC. She spent almost a decade at Drew University where she left as full professor and Chair of the Art Department. She then served as the Dean of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase where, in 1975, she left to begin her tenure as President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. There, she served for eight years before becoming the Director of Arts and Communication and Senior Vice President at the Academy for Educational Development in New York City.

During these years Lee was also a prolific author in a wide range of intellectual disciplines. She published major works on the career of city planner and landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmsted, a cultural history of American fashion, a biography of Willem and Elaine DeKooning, a history of Betty Parsons and her legendary gallery as well as a scholarly “biography” of the Greek goddess Athena.

Notwithstanding her many accomplishments as an academic, historian, university leader and teacher, throughout all of her life Lee was first and foremost a painter. She drew great inspiration from her engagements with the landscapes and history of Greece, Rome and her love of the New England countryside. She continuously experimented in drawing, collage, oil and acrylics. Her interests were expansive, deep and informed by her pragmatism, empathy and seductive sense of humor.

Her growth as an intellectual and artist was persistent and enduring. As she wrote once, “A painter should live a long time. It takes decades of work, of arduous search and fretting, to know that labels don’t matter, and to find what will suffice.”