Paint in the Town Red
by Dr. Ashley Busby, November 2022
Paint in the Town Red
by Dr. Ashley Busby, November 2022
Dorothy Fratt was the daughter of Hugh Miller, who served as chief photographer at the Washington Post from 1934 until his retirement in 1969. She showed early skill as an artist, and her parents encouraged her work. When she was fifteen, Fratt won first prize in the Corcoran Gallery Student Show for her work Red Shoe (1938). His diminutive canvas features a red pump comprised of bold planes of color. Deep brick red tones alongside a showy vermillion—a color that Fratt often returns to in her oeuvre—create a shoe that is at once a series of flattened planes and a curving three-dimensional form. Bold swaths of blue, yellow, greens and umber enliven the surrounding ground plane. Here, in such an early work, Fratt demonstrates her skills as a colorist along with an unabashed exploration of plane, shape, and form to create a compelling depiction of an otherwise everyday object.
Following her early success, Fratt went on to study at Mount Vernon College. She married in 1943, not long after completing her two-year degree from the the then junior college. After the war, her husband enrolled in law school, and the artist supported the couple by teaching art history classes at her alma mater, all the while seeking to establish her career as a working artist.
Her first solo exhibition, in 1946, at the Washington D.C. City Library, featured, as she recalls, her “charming paintings” including park scenes and portraits. But in the years that followed, Fratt would both leave behind those pleasant compositions and pursue additional professional recognition and training. She competed for fellowships at both the Corcoran and the Phillips. After receiving oRers from both institutions, she ultimately chose the Phillips, where she studied with Nicolai Cikovsky and Karl Knaths. Fratt’s work from these years, especially her CoRee Break in the Washington Post StaR Room (1948), closely resembles Knaths’ cubist-inspired aesthetic.
Here, she experiments with planar forms and space as well as an abstracted approach to her subject matter. In her time at the Phillips she also completed commissioned portraits of Duncan Phillips’ niece and nephew, further embedding her in the D.C. art world.
While Fratt would eventually leave behind the bold outlines and overlapping planes redolent of her teacher’s approach, it was Knaths’ interest in color theory that had the greatest impact on the young artist. Scholars on Knaths note that his papers included copies of work by a diverse range of earlier twentieth-century abstractionists, including Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, as well as more contemporary artist/theorists such as Hans Hofmann.iii Malevich’s subtle, floating squares, all in the pursuit of a sort of universal harmony, have much in common with Fratt’s later optical experiments with color and space. And, Hofmann and his “push and pull” approach bear a striking comparison to the spatial complexities seen in much of the artist’s oeuvre.iv Fratt noted that in her time with Knaths, he also exposed her to German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald’s publications on color theory. In his early primer on color, he posited models and drawings of a color solid or space achieved through the selective arrangement and use of color.v Such considerations of the spatial potentials for color serve as an additional spring board for her move toward wholly non-objective work.
Red Shoe, 1938, Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 in
Karl Knaths, P-Town, 1951, Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 24 1/2 in, © Karl Knaths
Installation view, Dorothy Fratt: Paint The Town Red. Photo by Gregory Staley. © Pazo Fine Art
Untitled (1947), a small, oil on canvas painting, shows Fratt’s early move away from objective representation. Łe division of the picture plane into a pink and gray ground creates the illusion of a horizon, likely drawn from her earlier work in landscape. Red gestural marks float above quickly rendered yellow and blue concentric circles. Łe work explores shape, mark-making, and the kinds of color fields and interactions that were at the heart of more celebrated abstractionists of the era such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. In a later interview, the artist recalled that celebrated D.C. gallerist Franz Bader was dismayed by her continued work in abstraction. In response to his dismissal and refusal to exhibit her work, Fratt simply replied, “Yes, this is what I’m doing. I don’t know why but I’ve got to walk down this road, that’s all I know. It may be a complete dead end, but I’ve got to do it and see if there’s anything there.”vi
After moving to Phoenix in 1958, Fratt navigated the demands of family life while seeking to establish a foothold in a Phoenix art scene that saw her work as an oddity. In the first several years after the move to Phoenix, she maintained summer studio space at the Phillips, returning to the city to paint while her parents assisted with the children. Łose summer trips allowed Fratt to see work from her abstractionist peers in the city and to maintain a connection, albeit tenuous to the pulse of abstraction on the east coast. By 1962, Fratt had separated from her first husband. To support herself and her young family, she took on students teaching painting and color theory to area artists as well as commissioned and commercial work in portraits, sumi drawings, and advertising. Her output over the course of the 1950s—when she first began her family—and the 1960s comes in fits and starts. She noted that she would do the commissioned work and ads at night after putting the boys to bed then rise early to produce her “real paintings” with the benefit of the bright Arizona light.
Despite such challenges, Fratt’s continued exploration of color and abstraction are evidenced by Maria Laach (1962) a small acrylic on paper work that includes brash, gestural planes of color in blue, black, and a muddied cadmium with sweeping white marks to create circular shapes. Such experiments with paint application and mark-making can be broadly compared to her figural, commissioned work from the era, such as a set of sumi drawings produced for the Phoenix symphony. In Phoenix Symphony Conductor #1 (1960), Fratt uses simple strokes of varying weight to define her subject. By varying pressure and the amount of pigment on the brush for each mark, Fratt depicts a figure that is a study in contradictions: tense yet fluid, quiet yet commanding. Despite such distinct purposes and outcomes in these two works from the early 1960s—one abstract, the other figural; one creative, the other commissioned—we see the artist’s continued emphasis on technique and formal qualities in her work.
In 1972, Fratt married Curtis “Bud” Cooper, and the two moved her family to a house that Cooper had built in 1969 on the ridge of Camelback Mountain just north of Scottsdale, AZ. Designed by Paul Yeager, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the home featured soaring open windows that oRered amazing views of the city below and the surrounding landscape. Łe artist’s son, Greg Fratt, notes that after his mom married Bud, life became easier.vii She no longer had to take on students or commissioned work simply to make ends meet and was able to truly focus on the abstract work that she so loved. She spent the rest of her life in Arizona and would continue to paint until the early 2000s.
In work from the 1970s and later, Fratt develops a signature mode that blends her earlier preoccupation with mark-making and color with a new, more purposeful integration of spatial eRects. Many works also incorporate visible references to the landscape and figuration despite a largely non-objective approach. Fratt’s position in histories of abstraction is deeply complicated. Her location in the west afforded her few opportunities, until recently, to exhibit her work outside regional institutions. And, while she certainly stayed abreast of the latest trends in abstraction and the larger art world, she dismissed any and all critical labels, refusing to be known as a Color Field Painter, a Hard Edge Painter, or even a member of the Washington Color School. When pushed to describe her work, Fratt once said, “It’s like trying to describe yourself when you’re looking in the mirror—it’s impossible. They are and they’re not color field paintings. They’re minimal in some ways, but not in others. I don’t fit into any category. I don’t think that’s unfortunate, but it’s unfortunate for people who like other people to fit into categories.”viii
Untitled, 1947, Oil on canvas, 16 x 8 in
Installation view, Dorothy Fratt: Paint The Town Red. Photo by Gregory Staley. © Pazo Fine Art
Despite such a disavowal of labels and critical stewardship, Fratt’s work certainly bears an easy comparison to her Washington D.C. peers in abstraction. Łe 1965 exhibition Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, from which the Color School derived its name, included the work of just six artists. Still, expansionist histories of the movement now recognize a diverse range of artists and approaches as a part of the style, from Anne Truitt’s sculptural columns of color to Sam Gilliam’s draped, stained canvases. What unites these artist’s work is their turn away from the expressive potential of gesture and paint application seen in the early New York School and their focus instead on the optical potential of bold, clearly defined areas of flat color. Such a focus on color makes Fratt an easy fit within an expanded roster for the Washington Color School. As master printer and collaborator John Armstrong argued, her work certainly fits within the color field, but, unlike artists in D.C. “her paintings were sensitive in color, shape, and edge reflecting her intellectual involvement and understanding of the Southwest.”xi Łus her body of work reflects both an awareness of and experimentation with similar approaches to her D.C. based contemporaries, further emboldened and impacted by her location in the west.
Unlike most of her Color School peers, however, Fratt’s work emphasizes the optical potential that lies not in a celebration of the inherent flatness and two-dimensional nature of the medium but rather in work that investigates color as a means to force a sensation of space. As Fratt described it, she seeks to create “a kind of katty-wampus space not restrained by geometry.”xii Take, for example, I Owe You (1997); here, Fratt chooses one of her signature red grounds, arranging several colored shapes and marks across the canvas. A swooping, gestural slash, in a subtle, lighter value of the hue used for the ground, creates a dizzying, flickering eRect for the viewer. A bold, orange, ovoid shape floats above; the the addition of a deep, green, rectilinear shape at its center teases the eye in a spatial push-pull akin to the work of Hofmann. Other shapes in blues, light green, and deep crimson further emphasize such spatial sensations in the work.
In two works entitled Hopscotch (1976 and 2001), Fratt’s title selection conveys the spatial “hopping” that the eye performs as it seeks to suss out similar color interactions. Both works feature a red ground. In the earlier serigraph, completed in collaboration with Armstrong, Fratt’s work explores a series of painterly oppositions. A gestural magenta spatter at center bears nothing in common with her expressionist predecessors.
The mechanical nature of the printing process has rendered what might at first be read as gestural swipes into a calculated plane with precise boundaries. Łe composition also features a lighter, orange-red rectilinear shape at left; a cool, cerulean line jogging up from the bottom edge; and a small, green, curvilinear shape at top right. When read in correlation with the red ground and magenta spatter, the eye “hops” and pulses. Łe cerulean line appears to hover close to the picture plane while the orange and pink recede. In the later acrylic on canvas composition, Fratt has replaced the magenta spatter with deep burgundy slashing marks that seem to hover above the cerulean and green shapes. Without the orange rectangle to establish a middle ground, the eye darts back and forth between cerulean and green, trying to understand their position in this complex space. Joann Bucklew, art critic for the Arizona Republic once referred to these impossible color relations as a kind of “chromatic dissonance.”
Other works from Fratt’s oeuvre maintain a connection to figuration, often through the use of suggestive titles. Scholar Ursula Köhler argues Fratt’s titles were always purposeful, and that, unlike most of her contemporaries, “they open up concrete realms of association.”xiv For Monsoon (1985), Fratt selected a vertical format consistent with historical and traditional modes of representing the landscape. In the painting a bold, navy, slashing mark above and a flat, orange, rectilinear shape below frame a sandy-hued area, which takes up roughly 2/3 of the picture plane. An icy pink splash of color suggests a far-oR mountain or mesa, while bold gestural marks hovering above may represent the encroaching storm clouds suggested by the title. Łe soaring space of sky mimics the techniques of earlier masters of the landscape genre but here the cool color palette seems derived from her desert surroundings.
I Owe You, 1997, Acrylic on canvas, 31 x 26 in
Hopscotch, 2001, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 43 in
Installation view, Dorothy Fratt: Paint The Town Red. Photo by Gregory Staley. © Pazo Fine Art
Fratt utilized a similar vertical arrangement for Road to the Mountain (1977), one of the lithographs produced in collaboration with Armstrong. Using a minimal red and black, two-color scheme, along with the white of the paper support,Fratt arranges a simple rendering that is both fully abstract and yet still recognizable as a landscape. Łe road of the title—a negative slash of white support—leads the eye to recede through space to the evocation of a looming, black mountain, created through rough gestural strokes. Łe black marks eRectively divide the red composition into land and sky, and a darker red, curvilinear shape above seems to pulse with the blistering heat of a summer day.
In all the works gathered for Dorothy Fratt: Paint the Town Red, you have the opportunity to see the work of an inventive artist, pursuing her own course and path in largely abstract compositions. In the catalogue for a 1995 exhibition at the Riva Yares Gallery, Fratt spoke on her creative approach: “Sometimes the colors are right, but not the form.
Or else the form is good but the colors won’t work. And, sometimes it ends up looking unlike anything I originally envisioned—a total surprise…Matisse said that starting a painting was like buying a railroad ticket to Marseille. Either you never get there or, if you do, you find it’s not where you want to be. Each painting is a journey and an adventure. I don’t understand the process completely. Perhaps no one can.” Much like Fratt saw her own process as a journey filled with moments of surprise, the organizers of this exhibition invite you to embark on your own viewing adventure, to discover—again or for the first time—Fratt’s work, and to reconsider her position in the history of D.C. abstraction.
Dr. Ashley Busby, November 2022
Monsoon, 1985, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 25 in