Winter Valley, 1944

In 1937, 26-year-old Lamar Dodd was invited to serve as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia in Athens, a town with a population of about 18,000 located on a hill above the Oconee River. He accepted the position and was appointed chairman of the art department the following year. Over the next decade he invited such noted American artists as Boardman Robinson, Thomas Hart Benton, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi to the campus. Dodd stated that his objective was “to produce not just a sensational regional scene, but to revive an interest in the truth of things.”[1]  [1]
Lamar Dodd, “The Truth in Things,” Magazine of Art, Mar. 1942, 104. By 1949 he had transformed the University of Georgia’s art department into one of the best in the Southeast. Dodd was an active presence in the Athens community who brought this transformation about, as Life magazine expressed it, in “an un-bohemian way.”[2]  [2]
“Lamar Dodd: In an Un-Bohemian Way He Sparks an Art Movement in the South,” Life, Sept. 26, 1949, 62.

Discussing Winter Valley, Dodd remarked, “I have no hesitation in saying that I consider this to be one of my best canvases.”[3]  [3]
Lamar Dodd to J. Carter Brown, Dec. 29, 1970, NGA curatorial files. It is the sequel to his A View of Athens, a painting that was greeted with critical acclaim after it was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and purchased by IBM in 1940.[4]  [4]
A View of Athens was reproduced as a full-page color illustration in “Lamar Dodd,” Life, Sept. 26, 1949, 64–65. It had also been illustrated in Maude Riley, “Carnegie Institute Opens Exciting Survey of American Painting,” Art Digest 19 (Oct. 15, 1944): 7, and Howard Thomas, “Lamar Dodd, Southern Painter,” American Artist 10 (Feb. 1946): 12. In both paintings Dodd has represented Athens as a semiurban industrial community rather than the genteel Southern university town described in a contemporary guidebook: “Greek porticoes with pediments and large Doric columns are the dominant architectural feature. Old-fashioned boxwood gardens, towering oaks and elms, and white-blossomed magnolias with their sweet, heavy perfume, all embody the romantic traditions of the Deep South.”[5]  [5]
Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside (Athens, GA, 1940), 147. Dodd’s deeply rooted affinity for the South, and more specifically his native Georgia and the landscape surrounding Athens, is evident in his own detailed description of Winter Valley:

The painting was done from a railroad in East Athens along the Seaboard Railroad. I made many drawings on that subject. I studied that subject mornings, afternoons and evenings. The houses in the foreground for the most part were between North Avenue, which used to be Madison Avenue, and the railroad. Some exist today, some have been abandoned. I was fascinated by the monumental quality of the city. . . . I think if you look rather closely at the picture you will see three significantly tall structures. One the spire of the Methodist Church; a suggestion of the City Hall dome; and one of a vertical water tower which has been replaced. Those objects are not necessarily in the correct geographical order as they were. I think the artist has the privilege of moving things to enhance his design.[6]  [6]
Lamar Dodd to Mary Levin Koch, May 5, 1989, NGA curatorial files.

Elsewhere he provided a more personal commentary on the painting: “This happens to be one of my favorite paintings of all periods. . . . Of course, I saw the city in my own way—a contemporary way. I was impressed by the chilly, clean air—broken by the floating streams of white smoke drifting across the valley. As I worked on the drawings, I enjoyed my own remote loneliness in relation to the drama of humanity that was there in front of me."[7]  [7]
“Dodd: An Athens Portfolio,” Athens 2 (Fall 1970): 23.

Painted during the Great Depression and World War II, Dodd’s views of Athens and the surrounding countryside are often tinged with a subtle melancholy that matched the somber tenor of the times. Dodd frequently depicted African American communities in the South, and in Winter Valley he has focused on the eastern section of Athens where the majority of the city’s black residents lived near the industrial plants in which they worked.

Winter Valley drew upon the urban realism practiced by George Luks—Dodd’s former teacher and a member of The Eight—as well as the views expressed by Robert Henri in The Art Spirit.[8]  [8]
For a discussion of Dodd’s interest in Henri and The Eight, see William U. Eiland, The Truth of Things: The Life and Career of Lamar Dodd (Athens, GA, 1996), 13–20. And, as was generally the case with Luks, Henri, and other prominent urban realists like George Bellows, Dodd, while he frankly depicted the conditions of modern life, did not intend to convey any explicit social or political message. Dodd’s predilection for representing the Deep South was also influenced by the currency of regionalism, an interest cemented by his association with two of its greatest proponents: Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. In addition to the Ashcan school and the regionalists, Winter Valley was further inspired by Dodd’s reverence for the old masters. Dodd himself credited the scene’s ominous, brooding quality to his close study of El Greco’s View of Toledo [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] El Greco, View of Toledo, c. 1597, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929:

I'm a great admirer of El Greco and when I looked at our city and saw the Methodist spire, the dome of City Hall, the monumental view of the hillside, I couldn't help of thinking of El Greco's View of Toledo. During the time I worked on the painting, I actually went back and studied certain qualities of his paintings. I made numerous drawings of the scene to the right of Madison Avenue, which was potentially one of the most beautiful sections of Athens.[9]  [9]
Jerry L. Cain and Donald A. Smith, "The Chambers Column," Athens 2 (Fall 1970): 3.

Dodd’s belief that “the artist has the privilege of moving things to enhance his design” and is not required to make a topographically accurate representation of the city may have been prompted by his familiarity with the art historian Harry B. Wehle’s description of El Greco’s famous painting as a “violently imaginative conception of Toledo [in which] El Greco has sacrificed the actual arrangement of the city’s buildings for dramatic effect.”[10]  [10]
Harry B. Wehle, The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Italian, Spanish, and Byzantine Paintings (New York, 1940), 231. Nevertheless, a photograph of Dodd sitting on or near the vantage point from which he painted Winter Valley [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] John Dominis, Art teacher Lamar Dodd conducting outdoor class, LIFE Magazine, 18167, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images and a map of the city [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Map of Athens from Georgia: A Guide to Its Towns and Countryside (Atlanta, 1940), 2–3 suggest that the view was quite accurate.

Ultimately, however, Winter Valley cannot be understood as the sum of its influences or judged on the basis of its fidelity to nature. The painting’s restrained color scheme, high horizon, and intricately structured composition, with the rhythmic geometric forms of the rows of small houses echoed by the gently undulating coils of smoke that emanate from the shacks and rise into the somber, overcast sky, produce a memorable effect. As the art historian Gudmund Vigtel has noted, Winter Valley is “a major example of Dodd’s intellectual program as a painter, flavored by his emotional involvement with the subject.”[11]  [11]
Gudmund Vigtel, 100 Years of Painting in Georgia (Atlanta, GA), 1992, 40.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018