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Motif Theme I
Artist
Toni LaSelle
(American, 1901 - 2002)
Date1952
MediumOil on canvas board
DimensionsUnframed: 24 x 20 in. (60.96 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 25 x 21 x 1 1/4 in. (63.5 x 53.34 x 3.18 cm)
Framed: 25 x 21 x 1 1/4 in. (63.5 x 53.34 x 3.18 cm)
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase
Object number2012.7
Status
Not on viewSignedSigned verso "Toni LaSalle, Aug 1952, Motif Theme I 1952"
Copyright© Estate of Toni LaSelle
Category
Label TextOne of the first painters in Texas to make the radical commitment to nonobjective painting was Dorothy Antoinette (“Toni”) LaSelle. In 1928, with her MA from the University of Chicago and recently returned from a six-month sojourn through England, Italy, and France, she accepted a summer teaching post at Texas Woman’s University (then called the Texas State College for Women) in Denton, Texas; an offer to join the faculty full time followed. LaSelle taught at the college until her retirement, calling Denton home until her death in 2002 at the age of one hundred. Little recognized by the art establishment outside of North Texas during her lifetime, she is belatedly but firmly gaining recognition for her role in bringing modernist trends to the Southwest and for her exemplary contributions to American abstraction.
When LaSelle first settled in North Texas, advanced painting in the region was dominated by the Dust Bowl–era landscapes of the so-called Dallas Nine. LaSelle, on the other hand, was working in an entirely abstract mode by the mid-1930s. During her summer breaks and sabbaticals, she sought instruction from leading avant-garde artists, finding her most important mentors in two European émigrés: the Hungarian-born Bauhaus painter László Moholy-Nagy and the German-born artist Hans Hofmann.
The Modern’s four paintings by LaSelle, all from 1952, are vibrant not in spite of their small size, simple forms, and spare colors but because of them. The artist turned the neutral, flat space of the canvas into a tightly calibrated field of activity where volumetric forms dramatically converge, interpenetrate, and separate. In Motif Theme I, she left behind strips of unpainted canvas like halos or highlights along the edges of some shapes, making them seem to vibrate.
When LaSelle first settled in North Texas, advanced painting in the region was dominated by the Dust Bowl–era landscapes of the so-called Dallas Nine. LaSelle, on the other hand, was working in an entirely abstract mode by the mid-1930s. During her summer breaks and sabbaticals, she sought instruction from leading avant-garde artists, finding her most important mentors in two European émigrés: the Hungarian-born Bauhaus painter László Moholy-Nagy and the German-born artist Hans Hofmann.
The Modern’s four paintings by LaSelle, all from 1952, are vibrant not in spite of their small size, simple forms, and spare colors but because of them. The artist turned the neutral, flat space of the canvas into a tightly calibrated field of activity where volumetric forms dramatically converge, interpenetrate, and separate. In Motif Theme I, she left behind strips of unpainted canvas like halos or highlights along the edges of some shapes, making them seem to vibrate.