Doris Hatt
One has to be careful what one wishes for! I have a friend who also collects obscure British painters and potters and who always enquires about my latest obsession or acquisition. I am naturally secretive about such things, so when she recently made her enquires I told her that ‘lesbian, abstract painters who worked between the wars’ was the direction I was taking. She took this without any question, encouraged coincidentally, by the fact that many of the painters and potters in my collection are single woman who lives were absorbed with making art (rather than looking after husbands). It is their art that interests me, rather than their sexuality. What a surprise then, when researching a small linocut I had found, to discover that the artist Doris Hatt was an out lesbian, lefty, radical, abstract painter... yippee!
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| Linocut found recently |
Doris Hatt was born in Bath in 1890 and studied Art locally before progressing to the Royal College and the Vienna Conservatoire of Art.
During the mid 1920s she worked in Paris where she befriended many artists of the day, including Picasso, Braque, Gris and others, this having a profound effect on the direction of her art, moving her away from her more naturalistic post-impressionistic work to a more radical modernism and an investigation of cubism among other styles. Although she undertook a return to a more personalised naturalism in later life, the works of her late period still possess a strong modernist sense of colour and boldness of composition.
During the mid 1920s she worked in Paris where she befriended many artists of the day, including Picasso, Braque, Gris and others, this having a profound effect on the direction of her art, moving her away from her more naturalistic post-impressionistic work to a more radical modernism and an investigation of cubism among other styles. Although she undertook a return to a more personalised naturalism in later life, the works of her late period still possess a strong modernist sense of colour and boldness of composition.
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| from my collection |
In 1932, Doris had a remarkable modernist house built for her in the seaside town of Clevedon, Somerset, to her own design. The house replaced a wooden ex-army bungalow with a veranda front, which she had put on the site after the First World War.
She later scandalised polite Clevedon by living here with her partner Margery Mack Smith. Doris, an artist, writer and red-hot flag-waving Communist, attempted to sell the Daily Worker to uninterested Clevdonians, painted them in the monumentalist style of her hero Fernand Leger, and was a general all-round bad egg (according to the retired colonials whiling away the afternoons in Clevedon's tearooms).
Exhibitions included Royal Academy, Leicester and Redfern Galleries, Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery, and Foyles Gallery. In the 1950s and 1960s she had a series of one-man shows, including Minerva Gallery, Bath, and Osiris Gallery, Oxford; with a retrospective at RWA, Bristol, 1960. Michael Wright Fine Art, Bristol held a retrospective in 1998.
Her work is represented in several major public collections. She not only painted but was also a wood carver.
Miss Hatt continued to paint until her death in 1969. Margery, also born in 1890 (but in Bristol) died in 1975, aged 84.. How fantastic they must have been!
I wonder if Doris Hatt studied under Leger in 1920s Paris - it certainly looks like it. They sound an interesting and lively pair.
ReplyDeleteAll very interesting. This must be the artist that Mary Fairclough, another linocutter, trained with. I couldn't quite work out who she was but now I begin to see the picture.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is a remarkable thing how many women painters and printmakers of the period appeared to remain unmarried. The fact that we know about their partners in a fairly small number of cases makes it all the more intriguing - although, like you, I'm not keeping count.
Wonderful work, but do remember that many of these ladies were single not out of preference, but because all potential husbands had been killed off in WWI. Lovely lovely work, so pleased to see it here.
ReplyDeleteHi josa
DeleteWe must set a date so you can come and see phyllis's pots dx
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