Inman Gallery is pleased to present Summer 1964, a solo presentation of select works by by Texas Modernist Dorothy Antoinette "Toni" LaSelle. The works on view span her three most active decades – 40s, 50s, and 60s – principally made during her summers in Provincetown. The installation exemplifies LaSelle's formal experimentations from biomorphic Surrealism through geometric Abstraction, and celebrate her diversity of mediums in oil, charcoal, and watercolor, including both paintings and works on paper.
TONI LASELLE // 1940s
The works on view from 1946 show us LaSelle’s acute understanding of contemporaneous art movements. In particular, we see her use of lyrical abstraction and biomorphic Surrealism, a dominant style of the 1940s. LaSelle visited New York often in the 1940s and likely saw Peggy Guggenheim’s “Art of this Century,” the gallery that showed the work of Surrealists, including Jean Arp, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst and others. LaSelle’s first visit to New York came in 1944, when she spent the spring of that year studying modernism with Hans Hofmann.
In the spring of 1948, LaSelle had a solo exhibition of drawings at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art). LaSelle’s practice included creating individual, finished and signed works within spiral bound notebooks. In her lifetime, she tore sheets out to exhibit the drawings, and these works have been torn from the original notebook, presumably by the artist, although we do not know if they were ever exhibited in her lifetime.
TONI LASELLE // 1950s
The 1950s saw LaSelle with increased recognition for her work, beginning with a 1950 exhibition in New York at Rose Fried Gallery, which was favorably reviewed in the New York Times. Unfortunately, the gallerist told Toni that her clients did not buy the work of women and that exhibition became her only solo show in a commercial gallery in New York. Each summer, LaSelle decamped from Denton, TX to Provincetown, MA where she studied at Hans Hofmann’s summer school. She participated in group exhibitions at the Provincetown Art Association and at various locales around the Dallas region.
In 1959, the Fort Worth Art Association (the precursor to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) mounted a retrospective exhibition, which included 25 paintings and 42 works on paper spanning 1948-1957. With a forward written by her mentor Hans Hofmann, this exhibition was a highpoint in her career.
TONI LASELLE // 1960s
By the 1960s, LaSelle’s canvas and works on paper are lighter, more sparse, and focus on the perceived visual tension between the shapes in her compositions. She increasingly turned to oil pastel (cray-pas) as her primary drawing medium, producing a prodigious number of expressive compositions in the mid-1960s through early 1970s. She focused on simple geometric shapes, the circle, triangle and square, and their relationship to one another, with bold, high key colors. It was also in the 1960s when she began experimenting with tape to define or outline geometric shapes, resulting in the most hard-edge compositions of her career. All of these works show her fine-tuned attention to color and space.
LaSelle had a solo gallery exhibition at the well-regarded New Arts Gallery in Houston in 1963, as well as a solo exhibition at the Elder Gallery, at Nebraska Weslayan, her alma mater, in 1967. Additionally, she participated in a number of group exhibitions, in Dallas, Fort Worth, and a few locations outside of Texas during this time. Additionally, LaSelle presented a number of lectures at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) on Mondrian, Picasso, DuBuffet, and the Sidney Janis Collection, as part of programming surrounding these exhibitions.
Summer 1964 is on view in our south gallery July 19 – August 30, 2024. The show is concurrent with Weathervane, a group exhibition, installed in the main gallery.
