Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle (Beatrice, NE 1901- 2002 Denton, TX), The Prodigal, 1948, Oil on canvas, Museum purchase with funds provided by Cecily E. Horton (Class of 1980) and The Dorothy Johnston Towne (Class of 1923) Fund, 2019.38

An artist who lived and worked primarily in Texas, Dorothy LaSelle moved towards abstraction early in her career, painting fully abstract canvases by the 1930s. She was influenced by modernists such as Hans Hoffman and László Moholy-Nagy, instead of the narrative and landscape paintings predominant in Texas at the time. LaSelle met Hoffman in 1932, while on sabbatical from the Texas State College for women. In 1944, she enrolled in a course with Hoffman and alternated her time between Texas, where she taught, and his artist’s colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She also studied with Moholy-Nagy in Chicago during the summers of 1942 and 1943. While LaSelle’s work is often discussed in conjunction with the male dominated modernist art scene, her placement as one of the first abstract artists in Texas should not be overlooked. In 1948 she had a solo exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, and in 1950 a solo exhibit at Pinacotheca (Rose Fried Gallery). Almost ten years later, in 1959, the Fort Worth Art Center had a retrospective of her work. LaSelle was a progressive artist, pushing the boundaries of Texan art in the 20th century by introducing abstractionism to the area. Her 1948 painting The Prodigal was recently purchased by the Davis Museum.