MASTER OF ARTISTIC METAMORPHOSIS

Over the past three years, the historic, rare works of this pioneer female artist have become recognized by leading national curators:

“ . . . a remarkably sophisticated talent.” —Ilene Fort, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“ . . . Lewis’s vision is celebratory and powerful.” —Erica Hirshler, Curator of American Paintings, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

“Lewis was one of the few artists in New England in the 1930’s to explore veristic surrealism, a form of surrealism in which each element of the composition is rendered in painstaking detail. She was also familiar with dream analysis and Andre Breton’s* declarations on ‘convulsive beauty.’” —Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec
*Ref: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” ―André Breto n, Manifestoes of Surrealism

"BLUE PRAYER" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS, ABOUT 1930. $65,000. EXAMPLE OF VERY EARLY SURREAL PAINTING BY AN AMERICAN WOMAN. AN EXTRAORDINARILY EVOCATIVE OIL, FEATURING DISEMBODIED HANDS AND FEET, A GORGEOUS CHINESE BOWL CONTAINING BOTANICALLY CORRECT PITCHER PLANTS, BACKED BY A MYSTERIOUS FEATHER AND STRAP-HINGED DOOR PANEL. AN OUTSTANDING EXAMPLE OF LEWIS'S WORK.

NOTE: In addition to those pictured here, Lewis's remarkable paintings have been accessioned for
the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.. and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum
—as well as for such important private collections as the Horseman Collection.
This site and everything on it, copyright 2015 by J. Denis Glover.

"EDEN" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS, WITH BOTANICALLY CORRECT IMAGES. EARLY 1930'S. SCALLOP SHELL IN SEVERAL PAINTINGS SYMBOLIZES THE FEMALE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE, AS THE ICONIC SYMBOL HAS IN ARTISTIC HISTORY GOING BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE. $65,000.

"THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS. EARLY 1930'S. INSPIRED BY SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING TO INDICATE THAT GOD WAS NOT JUST A MASCULINE GOD, WHO CREATED MUSCULAR MEN, BUT ALSO A FEMININE GOD, WHO CREATED THE "ORDINARY" THINGS OF NATURE. SHELL AGAIN SYMBOLIZES THE FEMALE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE. $75,000, the pair.

THESE ARE THE MASCULINE HANDS FROM THE SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING. NOTE LEWIS'S "ECHO" IN THE PAINTINGS ABOVE WITH, HOWEVER, FEMININE CREATIVE HANDS.

"RETURN TO THE WOMB" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS. EARLY 1930'S. TITLE CONFIRMED IN LOVE LETTER TO HER FROM NOVELIST MALCOLM LOWRY. $55,000. THIS IS THE ONLY OVERTLY FREUDIAN PAINTING BY LEWIS, INFLUENCED BY INFORMAL CONTACTS WITH THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT AND BY WRITINGS OF ANDRÉ BRETON, FOUNDER OF SURREALISM.

"SELF-PORTRAIT WITH ALICE AND THE LOOKING GLASS" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS. EARLY 1930'S. $55,000. NOTE THAT IT IS NOT OF ALICE, BUT OF THE MECHANICAL BIRD.

"INTRUDER' BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS. EARLY 1930'S. INTERESTING PERSPECTIVE ANGLE WITH WHALE VERTABRA, DRIED(?) FLOWERS, AND TEMPESTUOUS SKY, INTRUDED UPON BY LARGE MENACING CICADA. $45,000.

Web Hosting by iPage

INFORMATION ABOUT DORIS LINDO LEWIS

ONE OF TWO PORTRAITS OF DORIS LINDO LEWIS BY ALICE STALLKNECHT. 1930'S. LEWIS PORTRAYS EVE, ONE HAND POINTING TO EDEN'S APPLE, THE OTHER TO A ROSE REPRESENTING CHRIST. NOT FOR SALE.

From book, "In Wonderland": “. . . a young student, longing to investigate art that was less boring than what she was learning at art school, explored surrealism. Little is known of Doris Lindo Lewis, but her paintings from the early 1930s such as Mamscape (c. 1934 . . .) created during excursions in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, reveal a remarkably sophisticated talent. She incorporated surrealist techniques of montage and found objects in canvases whose details are based on an intimate knowledge and love of the fauna and flora of the area but are evoked in magical, otherworldly spirit. She often added body parts—especially hands, feet, and limbs—to her arrangements of shells and vegetation. Although Mamscape may be indebted to Salvador Dali, it is a sensual image that reveals a woman investigating her own body and world.”

Catalog/book cover for ground-breaking international exhibit, "In Wonderland," which includes painting by Doris Lindo Lewis. (see below)

ARTISTIC BIOGRAPHY

As a teen-ager, Doris Lindo Lewis lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, summered on Cape Cod, and often visited the art scene in New York and Boston. On the Cape she at first painted typical Cape oil landscapes, exhibited in Cambridge in the late 1920's.

Beginning about 1930, Lewis suddenly began producing a strong body of surrealistic oils, which showed at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Provincetown Art Association, and other locations. Her groundbreaking surreal paintings, called "portraits of consciousness," document an internal journey. What you see is not what you get—or what you get is more than you immediately see. They tended to be portentous, without humor--designed to keep the viewer intrigued. Although many women’s surreal works lean toward the two-dimensional, Lewis's have a psychological/spiritual/mental depth to them. That depth is evidenced in "The Conscience of Pinkerton," a surreal composition centered on the returning, now-civilian Lt. Pinkerton of "Madame Butterfly," accessioned by the National Gallery in Washington D.C.

Doris Lindo Lewis’s surreal work precedes and/or is contemporaneous with Frida Kahlo’s, to whom she is compared in vitality and imaginative breadth. Several Lewis surreal paintings were conceived before Kahlo moved into surrealism. Further comparison of Lewis to Kahlo is worth considering: both were born in Central America, Lewis started in the late 1920's with realistic landscapes, Kahlo at first painted folkloric scenes; and Lewis is noted, like Kahlo, for inclusion of native plants and other natural objects in her works. Interestingly, the Boston exhibit mentioned above included a painting by Kahlo's husband, Diego Rivera.

Note: Lewis burned many of her paintings in an oil drum on the Bass River, Cape Cod, beach in 1948, keeping only a relatively few she was satisfied with. What remained of her surreal work became relatively rare and more desirable.

Acclaim

Doris Lindo Lewis shrank from promoting herself. She lived life off stage, behind the scenes, never lifting a finger to advance her reputation. But in 2012 after 80 years, Lewis's surreal paintings were discovered by Ilene Fort, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. One ("Mamscape") became part of the museum's remarkable, pioneering international exhibit, "In Wonderland." Printed in both English and Spanish editions, the book/catalog sold 11,000 copies.

Between 2013 and 2015, Lewis paintings entered the permanent collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Horseman Collection.

Lewis's surrealism is historic, in that she was one of the very first woman surrealists in America, starting about 1930. Many female surrealists tend to date from the 40's and 50's. Lewis's is archetypical early surrealism. It grew out of the mental depression following WWI and the writings of Andre Breton, founder of surrealism—as well as out of her father's and step-father's deaths.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Artist and environmentalist, Doris Lindo Lewis divided her creative life among New York, Massachusetts, the Caribbean, and South Florida. Her paternal grandparents descended from old New England families and built a house on Boston's Marlborough Street when the Back Bay neighborhood first opened. Later some of the family moved to Cambridge, where several in-laws had lived for many years. One had married Longfellow's artist son, Ernest.

On her mother's side, Lewis descended from the prominent "Anglo" Lindo family of Jamaica and Costa Rica. Her Park Avenue grandfather was one of the eight partners of Lindo Brothers, which owned coffee, banana, and sugar plantations in both countries. They owned the J. Wray rum company, the Daniel Finzi wine and spirit business, and extensive land in Costa Rica and on the north Jamaican coast, some of which later became high-end resorts. The Lindos also founded a Costa Rican bank.

Doris Lindo Lewis was born in 1909 at Great-Uncle Cecil Lindo's Historic House on Parque Morazan in San Jose, Costa Rica. The infant was returned to a family plantation, "El Sitio" at Juan Viñas, by her father, Sidney Lewis (of Boston and Cambridge) and her mother, Daisy ("Mimi") Lindo Lewis (later Voorhis). For a few years just before and during World War I, Sidney ran mining interests out of Wheeling, West Virginia. But in 1919 when his daughter was ten, he decided to return to Costa Rica.

The family stopped in New York on the way, staying with Lewis's grandfather, August Lindo, the Lindo Bros. banker, on Park Avenue, where he lived across from the family of J. D. Salinger. Before embarking for Costa Rica, Sidney traveled alone to Cambridge to visit his mother and suddenly died, perhaps victim of the flu epidemic. After her father's death, Doris Lindo Lewis was taken by Daisy to live with members of the Lindo family in Jamaica for about a year, possibly at her Great Uncle Robert Lindo's plantation, "Sunnyside," two miles outside of Linstead.

Then Lewis and her mother migrated to Cambridge to live near her deceased father's family. There she was listed in the Social Register, "came out" as a debutante at Brattle Hall, and was photographed by Bachrach. In the Boston area she attended the Buckingham School, the May School, and the Museum School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Associated With Noted Artists and Writers

Visiting Cape Cod from the middle 1920’s and moving there briefly about 1934, Lewis broke with "society," and at a young age became associated with a group of New York, Boston, and Cape Cod artists and writers, including poet laureate and novelist, Conrad Aiken, and novelist Malcolm Lowry. The latter hand-wrote his most famous letter to her—a 30-page love missive, placed by her family with the Ransom Center of rare books and manuscripts at the University of Texas, which has a noted collection of the author's materials.

Artists who were associates included: Van Gogh's acquaintance, Dodge McKnight (also friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner; Lewis owned a McKnight watercolor), Howard Gibbs (whose first-rate "Still Life" she owned), Harold Dunbar (who painted her portrait, and she, one of him), Charles Cahoon (prolific Cape Cod painter; she had two of his), Byron Thomas (whose fine oil "The Skater" she owned), Frederick Wight (later associated with UCLA), Janet Folsom (shaped canvases—combinations of sculpture and painting), Biron Valier (an originator of the Sydney Biennale), and Alice Stallknecht (who did two portraits of her).

For over sixty years, Lewis was a close friend of Catherine Huntington, owner of the Provincetown Playhouse, who kept Eugene O'Neill's plays alive during the 1940's. She painted Huntington's portrait, showing in 1933 at an invitational Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit, sponsored by the New England Society of Contemporary Art. The exhibit also included a painting by Diego Rivera.

Cuban Years

Through her mother's family, Lewis maintained keen interest in the Caribbean and in 1937 married Anglo-Jamaican Edward Henriquez in Havana, where she spent the next twelve years. Henriquez had been educated at Belmont Hill School outside Boston, founded partially for him and his brother Norcott by the Atkins family, for whom his father worked in Cuba and who held extensive sugar holdings in Cuba and land in Belmont. Henriquez's sister Marion became part-time secretary to Ernest Hemingway at the author's "Finca."

An "Anglo," Lewis—unlike many North Americans—showed great interest in and love for both native peoples, Cuban Hispanics and Blacks. In the early 1940's when her husband's sailboat was being built, Lewis lived under modest conditions among Afro-Cuban sugarcane workers some distance from the cultural and social life of Havana.

During the day the men toiled in the fields, and Doris Lindo Lewis was struck by the spiritual faces of the women and children left at home: their long-suffering and innocence. The only art materials she had with her were conte pencils and a sketchpad. And so were born 25 character-full portraits in an exhibit, "Faces of Afro Cuba," which showed posthumously at the African Meeting House on Boston’s Beacon Hill in 1996. During her years in Cuba, she also painted many land- and townscapes, as well as collecting Caribbean seashells, two of which were named for her.

Modernist Period

In 1949 Doris Lindo Lewis returned to the States with her husband to live and paint in Florida for the rest of her life. In addition to pursuing her own artwork in hard-edge painting, other modernist styles, iron sculpture, and pottery, she personally encouraged artists, potters, and gardeners, as well as serving on various county- and state-wide boards and founding the Ceramic League of Palm Beach County.

There, in the modernist vein, Lewis painted "Homage to Clyfford Still," "The Moment of Ascension," "Identity," "Tension," and "Resistance," among others.

She also played a courageous role in Florida's environmental affairs and was credited by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, known for her staunch defense of the Everglades, as one of the leading activists to save them. Doris Lindo Lewis died in 1995 at her home in West Palm Beach.

RETURN TO MODERNISM
EXTRAORDINARY RANGE OF SKILL AND GENRE
from realism to surrealism to realism to hard-edge to abstract expressionism

HARD-EDGE "TENSION" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS. 1950'S or '60's. SIMILAR TO 'RESISTANCE" BELOW. $35,000.

From the late 1930's to the late 1940's, Lewis lived in Cuba when it was in its heyday. However, glitter was of no interest to her. She was entranced by the "natives," painted a number of land- and townscapes, and drew its people. $15,000.

One of 25 Afro-Cuban portraits, which showed over ten years ago at the Beacon Hill Meeting House, Boston, and in 2015 at the Berkshire Gallery. Appropriate for an Afro-American or Cuban restaurant, as in Sardi's of New York. $25,000 for all 25.

But about 1950, Lewis returned to modernistic styles. Here's "Resistance," one of several of her striking hard-edge paintings done in the 1950's and '60's at the peak of hard-edge painting nationwide. $35,000.

HARD-EDGE "BOUNCE BACK," 1950'S, SIGNALS DORIS LINDO LEWIS'S RETURN TO MODERNISM. HARD-EDGE PAINTING IS KNOWN FOR ITS ECONOMY OF FORM, FULNESS OF COLOR, IMPERSONAL EXECUTION, AND SMOOTH SURFACE PLANES. BUT LEWIS FOUND THE GEOMETRY LIMITING AND SOON BLOSSOMED INTO MORE "MEANINGFUL," AND PERHAPS MORE "ROMANTIC," TECHNIQUES AND THEMES. $15,000.

THE FULL RANGE OF DORIS LINDO LEWIS'S LATER WORK IS SHOWN HERE. "IDENTITY" IS A PSYCHOLOGICAL MASTERWORK, INCORPORATING MANY STRAINS OF LATE 20TH CENTURY STYLE. "IDENTITY" REPRESENTS THE CULMINATION OF HER RETURN TO MODERNISM AFTER MOVING FROM CUBA TO FLORIDA IN 1948. 1970'S. $65,000.

"THE MOMENT OF ASCENSION" IS ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING OILS OF LEWIS'S EVOLVING MODERNIST PERIOD. FINDING HARD-EDGE TOO CONFINING, SHE CREATED THIS ALBERS-LIKE IMAGE, BUT "EXPLODED" IT WITH A FADING CHI-RHO CHOSS IN THE BACKGROUND TO REPRESENT THE INABILITY OF THE CRUCIFIXION TO PREVENT CHRIST'S ASCENSION. 1960'S. $60,000.

CHI-RHO CROSS, REPRESENTING JESUS AND THE CRUCIFIXION. (See above.)

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST "HOMAGE TO CLYFFORD STILL" BY DORIS LINDO LEWIS, BOOKENDED BY TWO OF HER IRON SCULPTURES. CLYFFORD STILL WAS ONE OF THE LEADING FIGURES IN THE FIRST GENERATION OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS. 1980'S. $95,000.

IN AN OUTRAGEOUS DUO, "BEYOND POLLOCK AND DE KOONING" (LEFT) AND "THE PERSISTENCE OF LIFE" (RIGHT), DORIS LINDO LEWIS SPECTACULARLY UNITED HER VARIED TALENTS (AND GENRES) IN TWO DRAMATIC AND CHALLENGING PAINTINGS. "BEYOND" BRINGS THE STYLES OF POLLOCK AND DE KOONING TOGETHER INTO HER OWN CREATIVE MELANGE. IN "PERSISTENCE," A BLACK ORGAN-LIKE CUMULUS STRUGGLES TO EMERGE FROM A COLD, INHUMANE MECHANISM. THIS UNSETTLING ORGANIC IMAGE, FIGHTING AN INTRICATE, "ROTATING" HARD-EDGE CONSTRUCTION, RETURNS LEWIS TO HER EARLY SURREALIST PERIOD OF 40 YEARS EARLIER. $65,000 EACH.

IN ADDITION TO DORIS LINDO LEWIS'S OWN WORK, SHE HAD A LARGE COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, AND ETCHINGS CREATED BY OTHER SIGNIFICANT ARTISTS, AS LISTED IN THE "INFORMATION" SECTION ABOVE. (Photo of Lewis in Cuba.)

Doris Lindo Lewis1909-1995One of America's Earliest, Most Innovative, and Most Talented Female Surrealists

Doris Lindo Lewis
1909-1995

One of America's Earliest, Most Innovative, and Most Talented Female Surrealists