Acquisitions: LACMA

Cecil de Blaquière Howard, Guitarist, 1915-17

LACMA has added two works by underrecogized American modernists: Cecil de Blaquière Howard's Guitarist (1915-17), a cubist-polychrome sculpture, and Dorr Bothwell's 1949 painting, Keepsake from Panama.

Canadian-born Howard was in the Armory show. He knew Guilliame Apollinare in Paris and helped introduce the avant-garde to America. After the dislocations of the first World War and the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Howard went classical with a vengeance. He churned out Art Deco reinterpretations of Greco-Roman antiquity, an aesthetic project that appealed to wealthy patrons, including Gertrude Whitney. As a consequence the Whitney Museum storeroom is well-supplied with Howard's later work. Today Howard is prized for the few cubist wood sculptures he made in the mid 1910s. Guitarist's subject links to Picasso and Braque. One side shows a painted profile and suggestions of frets and a sound hole. The other side is a chromatic abstraction evoking the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Eleven inches high, Guitarist is one of the most daringly abstract of all Howard's sculptures.

Sotheby's London auctioned Guitarist for a mere £12,500 (about $16,200) in 2017. At LACMA it joins another groundbreaking work of American abstraction, Maniere Dawson's Coordinate Escape (1910).

Cecil de Blaquière Howard, Guitarist, 1915-17

Dorr Bothwell's life (1902–2000) ought to be a biopic. Born in San Francisco, she inherited $3000 from an aunt at the age of 16. She quit her job as a waitress and moved to Samoa, carrying a letter of introduction from Rudolph Schaeffer, of the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Rhymo-Chromatic Design (in Chinatown, San Francisco). Schaeffer attested, to whom it might concern, that Bothwell was interested in "studying the sources of underlying impulses producing individual expressions of decorative design with various races in different lands."

Bothwell arrived in Samoa as Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa was being published. She spent two years in the South Pacific, learning the language and dances and being tattooed as a Samoan.

Dorr Bothwell, Keepsake from Panama, 1949

Returning to the states, Bothwell did L.A., joining the Post-Surrealist movement of Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson. The mid-career Keepsake from Panama presents post-war anxiety via eyes, trompe l'oeil shadows, and patterns that fall somewhere between Samoan textiles and Paul Klee.

Dorr Bothwell in her studio with Samoan textiles

P.S. LACMA has also acquired two works by Betye Saar.