Painted in a deliberately cartoon-like manner, this bustling scene of women preparing a Thanksgiving feast debuted in the midst of the Great Depression, a time when the themes of a national holiday, rural customs, and family life appealed to struggling Americans. It became the object of national headlines, however, when it was first exhibited at the Art Institute in 1935 and won the prestigious Logan Purchase Prize. Josephine Logan, the donor of the prize, condemned the work’s broad, exaggerated style as too modern, and founded the conservative “Sanity in Art” movement in response. This controversy only brought Illinois-born artist Doris Lee fame, and Thanksgiving has been recognized as one of the most popular views of this American ritual since that time.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
Signed recto, lower right, on white and red checkered floor, in white pigment: "Doris Lee".
Dimensions
71.3 × 101.8 cm (28 1/8 × 40 1/8 in.)
Credit Line
Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund
Reference Number
1935.313
Extended information about this artwork
C.J. Bulliet, “Around the Galleries,” Chicago Daily News, October 26, 1935.
“‘If This Is American Art, Let’s Scrap It,’ Says Critic of Chicago Show,” Art Digest 10, 3 (Nov. 1, 1935): 5, ill.
Virginia Gardner, “Calls Prize Canvas Atrocious,” Chicago Tribune, November 6, 1935.
“Awards Shock Art Patrons: Mrs. Logan Terms Pictures ‘Vulgar’ and ‘Indecent,’” Herald–Examiner, November 8, 1935.
“Controversy Continues over Merits of American Art Exhibition,” Chicago Tribune, November 8, 1935, 5, ill.
“Art Show Gives “Jitters” to Mrs. Logan,” Chicago American, November 9, 1935.
“Doris Emrick Lee Picture Shown at Chicago,” Carthage, Illinois Republican, November 13, 1935.
Gifford Ernest, “New Art Institute Show Reveals Depression Used for Ideas in Paintings,” Chicago Daily News, November 15, 1935, 40.
“Doris Lee’s ‘Americana’ Shown in New York,” Art Digest 10, 12 (March 15, 1936): 20.
“Doris Lee One–Woman’s It At The Walker Gallery,” American Magazine of Art 29 (May 1936): 334.
“Doris Lee: An American Painter with a Humorous Sense of Violence,” Life, September 20, 1937, 44.
Josephine Hancock Logan, Sanity in Art (Chicago: A. Kroch, 1937), 92 (ill.).
“Chicago Surveys Half Century of Native Art,” Art Digest 14, 4 (November 1939): 9, 34.
“Worcester Surveys a Decade of American Painting, 1930–1940,” Art Digest 16, 11 (March 1942): 5 (ill.).
“A Decade of American Painting, 1930–1940,” Worcester Art Museum News Bulletin and Calendar 7, 6 (March 1942): 1 (ill.).
Alfred M. Frankfurter, “Only Yesterday in American Painting: Worcester Shows 50 Pictures of the Turbulent 30s,” Art News 41, 2 (March 1942): 10 (ill.).
Charles Fabens Kelley, “Chicago: Record Years,” Art News 51, 4 (June–August 1952), 69 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, Masterpieces in the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, 1952), n.p. (ill.).
Kenneth Shopen, “Painting that Raised a Storm now Symbol of Thanksgiving,” Chicago Daily News, November 23, 1953.
Mary Anne Guitar, “Close–up of the Artist…Doris Lee,” Famous Artists Magazine, Winter 1959, 23 (ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, 1961), 257.
“Beeline,” Chicago Daily News, November 27, 1974.
Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 59, pl. 11.
Charlotte Moser, “’In the Highest Efficiency’: Art Training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,” in The Old Guard and the Avant–Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910–1940, ed. Sue Ann Prince (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 207–208.
Deedee Wigmore, Doris Lee: Images of Delight 1930–1950 (D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., 1996), 3.
Todd D. Smith, “Painting for the Middlebrow: Doris Lee and the Making of a Popular Artist,” in American Art from the Dicke Collection, exh. cat., (Dayton, OH: Dayton Art Institute, 1997), 33 (ill.), 34, 39–42.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), 18–19, 183–85, cat. 81 (ill.).
Judith Barter et al., Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2013), 41–42, 44, 194–96, 224, cat. 32, fig. 1 (ill.).
Yang Zhigang, ed., Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, exh. cat. (Shanghai: Shanghai Book and Painting Press, 2018), cat. 61.
Jessica Skwire Routhier, “The Art of Doris Lee,” Antiques and The Arts Weekly, Sept. 17, 2021, 30-31 (Ill.).
Art Institute of Chicago, America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, June 5–Sept. 18, 2016, cat. 30; Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Oct. 15, 2016–Jan. 30, 2017; London, Royal Academy, Feb. 25–June 4, 2017.
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 61.
Greensburg, PA, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee, Sept. 26, 2021–Jan. 9, 2022, cat.; Davenport, IA, Figge Art Museum, Feb. 5–May 8, 2022; Vero Beach, FL, Vero Beach Museum of Art, June 5–Sept. 18, 2022; Memphis, TN, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Oct. 30, 2022–Jan. 15, 2023 (Greensburg, Davenport, and Vero Beach only).
Doris Lee (1905–1983), c. 1935; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1935.
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