Magician’s Scarecrow II is a color serigraph from 1947 by American printmaker Dorr Bothwell. This impression is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 27/35. It was printed by the artist on an cream wove paper and the image measures 12-5/8 x 10 inches. Magician’s Scarecrow II is illustrated on page 85 in Dorr Bothwell: Straws in the Wind - An Artist’s Life as told to Bruce Levene.
A fractured composition that reads like a stained glass window, Bothwell's Magician's Scarecrow II bridges both surrealism and abstraction. Out of the controlled chaos of symbols and layered color fields emerges the magician and, to his left, the pink scarecrow holds up an orb containing the faint outline of a bird.
By 1947 Dorr Bothwell had shed the realism and classical subject matter she had learned in order to fully delve into the abstract. By this time she referred to herself as a Symbolist and applied the theory to her abstracted compositions. In many of her mid-century works, there is abundant use of patterns that echo her time on the islands of American Samoa, where she learned about the textile production of the islanders.
Dorr Bothwell, painter, printmaker, and educator, was born in San Francisco in 1902. Her family moved to San Diego in 1911 and Bothwell began her art studies five years later with Anna Valentien. She returned to San Francisco in 1921 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts where she was greatly influenced by Gottardo Piazzoni and Rudolph Schaeffer.
Bothwell moved to San Diego and then to Los Angeles where she joined the circle of post-surrealists which included Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundberg. Dorr studied under Feitelson in classes organized by the Public Works of Art Project and she was accepted into the mural division of the WPA and painted murals in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Francisco. During this time, Bothwell learned the technique of serigraphy.
In 1968, Bothwell and Marlys Mayfield co-wrote the book Notan: On the Interaction of Positive and Negative Spaces, which encompassed the principles developed in her teaching. She received the Abraham Rosenberg Fellowship, the 1979 San Francisco Women in the Arts award, and was twice awarded Pollock-Krasner grants.
Bothwell is represented in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Hunterian Galleries, Glasgow; the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California.
