Antibes is a color serigraph from 1950 by American printmaker Dorr Bothwell. This impression is pencil signed, titled, dated, and editioned 15/25. It was printed by the artist on an ivory wove paper and the image measures 14-3/4 x 10-3/8 inches. Antibes is illustrated on page 91 in Dorr Bothwell: Straws in the Wind - An Artist’s Life as told to Bruce Levene.
While it's not certain, this classic mid-century abstraction, with its angular forms, appears to be an interpretation of the famous diamond-shaped, 16th-century Fort Carré, situated above the southeastern coastal edge of the city of Antibes. As with other works from this time, Bothwell employed an aerial vantage point. Here she incorporated splashes of aquamarine and olive green as a nod to the adjacent Mediterranean sea and the tree-covered hillsides surrounding the fort. Set against a rose-red background, black shapes structure the image but blacks also creates kinetic activity suggesting the vibrancy of this city along the Côte d'Azur.
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. She 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.
