Content provided in partnership with
Dorothy Dehner - aged artist - Interview
Art Journal, Spring, 1994 by Elizabeth de Bethune
Dorothy Dehner's personal history has laid the groundwork for her philosophical temperament. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1901 to progressive, cultured parents, she was orphaned as a girl and raised by maiden aunts in California. She has suggested that the early loss of her family made her more accepting of mortality. Despite this tragedy, she was happy with her aunts, who encouraged her creativity. She went east as a young woman to study theater and dance and then traveled to Europe, where she discovered the Paris art scene of the early twenties. Upon returning to New York she went "directly from the boat with my three suitcases" to study sculpture at the Art Students League, but signed up for drawing instead. There she met David Smith, to whom she was married until 1950. During this time she more or less subordinated her own artmaking to his. When she left Smith her work started pouring out; around 1955 she was able to get back to her original impulses toward sculpture. Dehner's first sculptures were small bronzes cast from wax-slab constructions. In the seventies she changed scale and began working with a fabricator to make large steel pieces. Since 1986 her ability to work has been impaired by a near-total loss of vision. When I first interviewed her in the fall of 1991, she was no longer making art. By January 1993 she had figured out a way to work again, relying heavily on the collaborative efforts of her fabricator.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Her work was shown in 1993-94 in a retrospective entitled "Dorothy Dehner: Sixty Years of Art," with venues at the Katonah Museum in upstate New York; the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, New York; and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth deBethune: You're not making sculpture right now?
Dorothy Dehner: I can't see. I'm legally blind. I have no vision whatsoever in this eye and I have just a little in this. I get around perfectly in this house where I have lived thirty-five years, but I can't get around easily anywhere else. My vision is very bad, and the strain on my eyes is terrific. I have felt that I couldn't make any more art, but three months ago |in 1992~, I completed four maquettes for sculptures, from drawings I had done in the seventies. These are possible to make with the help of my fabricator, Jim Schmidt. They are two-dimensional wall panels, and I can explain to him how to execute them. I surprised myself that I was able to do this, and it made me very glad.
E. deB.: How long has it been since you've been able to work in your studio?
D.D.: Nearly six years. In good moods I feel I'm the same, but in bad moods I feel like the little match girl. I feel this way rarely. I have come to accept my loss of vision and I just go on.
E. deB.: Do you wonder why your body isn't as tough as your mind is?
D.D.: Yes. The mind is tough, it's very tough. When I had my last heart operation I was in intensive care. When I came to, an old man was there (you know, intensive care is co-ed), and he said, "Did you know you died?" I said "No." "Well, you did! You did!" he said, "Them doctors was all over you. They was pounding your chest, they gave you electric shock, and they was giving you mouth to mouth, and they was all around you." He asked. "Did you see anything when you was dead?" And I said "No."
It was all right to be resuscitated once, but no more. I have a living will that my doctor, my lawyer, and my stepson have copies of, but how do you know? You get into a hospital and they start putting tubes into you . . .
E. deB.: Are you afraid of losing control?
D.D.: Well, I don't dwell on it. I want to be alive as long as I'm alive. I wanted to live to be three hundred to see how it all comes out. When you're seventy, you think you'll have another decade. When you're in your nineties, you know damn well you don't have much more time.
I don't mind dying; most of my friends have left me. It's the pain I mind. I don't want to have a dead brain and I don't particularly want to lie in bed for the rest of my time.
E. deB.: What do you think being old is? As you once said to me, life just goes on, it's not like you suddenly wake up old. Do you think that making art is a prescription for a long life?
D.D.: I am not able to make a firm statement on that. I do think that a love of life keeps you going. There are times when people sink themselves within themselves and die off. As far as growing older, of course, you have more experience, but the mystery of life is even more to me now than it was when I was a child. You take it for granted when you're a child; there you are, with your toys and your mother. Then it builds. With experience I think the mystery of life, the wondrous mystery of nature, and the various things that enlighten us as we go through life, become more interesting, stranger, and more poignant than in childhood.
E. deB.: I think that if you bring the kind of spirit, and sense of listening to something interior that you use in making art, to the observations of life, you can be nourished by it.
