Dorothy Antoinette (Toni) LaSelle: Texas Modernist

LaSelle’s own composition, however, is far more painterly compared to Mondrian’s. Her brushwork is looser, the color palette more variegated and the paint application more fluid than the geometric elements prevalent in Mondrian’s iconic “purist” works, which feature clearly rendered horizontal and verticals lines, as well as strict adherence to primary colors. In a group of works on paper from a 1953 notebook, we again see LaSelle’s utilization of solid lines and geometric shapes of color.

The bold lines in these and other works from early in her career laid the foundation for her full embrace of the grid as a compositional and organizational device in her hard-edge abstractions of the 1960s.

—Frank Spicer

LaSelle's appreciation of Dining Room is distilled in an extraordinarily beautiful painting, Untitled (from a Still Life), from that same summer. Little known until recently, it is unique among LaSelle's canvases of the late 1940s, a period in which she drew inspiration from the Provincetown harbor, as evidenced by her sketchbooks and the open spatial rhythms of Puritan, 1947-50.[2] In contrast, Untitled (from a Still Life) suggests an interior environment, with a treatment of stacked space that is unusual in LaSelle's work. Her palette succinctly echoes that of Bonnard's Dining Room-the pink, orange, and green hues rarely appear in her paintings of that era-and the cone-shaped device that dominates the center of LaSelle's painting mimics the ginger-colored vessel in the lower center of Bonnard's tableau. However, Untitled (from a Still Life) is not simply an hommage to Bonnard; LaSelle asserts her own sensibility in the underlying structure of the composition and her measured slabs of impasto. Furthermore, LaSelle seems to have taken pleasure in recomposing Dining Room, using similar shapes and blocks of color, but reorganizing them into different configurations. It is also tempting to speculate whether LaSelle rotated the orientation of her canvas as she completed the painting. And unlike Bonnard's strongly vertical and monumental canvas, LaSelle's Untitled (from a Still Life) is a compact 24 x 20 inches.

LaSelle often credited the examples of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Hofmann as the complementary anchors of her artistic inspiration. Adding Pierre Bonnard to this pantheon takes nothing away from her achievements. However, it opens our eyes to the sensuous delight of her work, and her deliberate break in 1948 from both from Constructivist and Cubist aesthetics for a deeper engagement with painterly luminosity. Some twenty years later, LaSelle once again allowed herself a similar spirit of freedom as she embraced commercially produced oil pastels to juggle pinks, oranges, and greens in drawings of exceptional buoyancy. Indeed, LaSelle acknowledged that each work contained the seed for the next. In 1993 she wrote: "Even though the [paintings and drawings] are there, they are also a state of becoming for which a lifetime is not enough."[3]

The title of each of these drawings, 3 Soper Street, refers to the address of one of LaSelle’s studios in Provincetown, MA, where she spent almost every summer, starting in 1944, at the Hans Hofmann School of Art. Hofmann was undoubtedly one of the most influential colleagues in LaSelle’s practice.

She recalled:

“My interest (since 1923) in Space Composition by Color drew me to Hofmann to find out if my realizations had any validity when viewed from his wide experience. I was not an Abstract Expressionist. It took all of the courage I could call up to go to Mr. Hofmann in his own school to communicate on Color-Space Composition but, with no desire or intention to paint as he did."

These drawings are classic examples of LaSelle’s use of geometry—her fundamental formal vocabulary—as well as her interest in design, stained glass and color structure. “3 Soper St. no. 4,” for instance, is a clear indication of her continued interest in the works of Piet Mondrian, while the bold vertical and horizontal black lines recall the works of the French painter Georges Rouault, whose early 20^th century Expressionist compositions were often compared to stained-glass (Rouault was trained in the art and outlined his subjects in black which gave the work a stained-glass feel). Equally important, the drawings in this notebook show LaSelle’s transition into a different type of abstraction.

This notebook contains five works from 1967/1970 and is presented in its entirety. This group is particularly remarkable for its unusually large size (18 x 12 inches), as well as the fact that in three of the drawings, the artist made revisions a few years after their initial execution. While two of the works in this notebook remain as they were in 1967, in 1970 she returned to three of the works, using acrylic white paint to carve into the existing geometric shapes. This act of subtraction became a revelation for her the following year when she commented, “I didn’t know until 1971 that subtracting was adding.” These works thus mark an important step in the evolution of LaSelle’s oeuvre, and underscore her lifelong penchant for experimentation, self-editing and reworking.