LEE HALL

HALL--Lee.

Artist, author, national academic leader and intellectual polymath, Lee Hall, passed away at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, MA on April 17th at the age of 83 in the company of her colleague and friend for many years, Professor Emerita Margaret "Maggie" Horsnell and her personal physician and dear friend Dr. Marianna Marguglio. Lee was born in Lexington, NC in 1934 and pursued her academic career at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, where she studied with the painters John Opper and George Ivy. She received her MA in 1958 and her PhD in 1965, both from New York University and continued her post-doctoral work at the prestigious Warburg Institute at the University of London with research fellowships from the American Philosophical Society. In New York she soon forged close relationships with some of the leaders in American modern painting, including Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell among others. Lee was represented by Betty Parsons, one of the most important gallerists of the period, and eventually became her close friend and biographer. Lee's work was reviewed frequently and favorably in the central periodicals of the day including ArtNews, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, Arts Magazine and The New York Times by the widely respected critics Clement Greenberg, John Russell and Hilton Kramer, among others. It was presented in exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Newark Museum, the Indianapolis Museum, the Winston-Salem Gallery of Contemporary Art and many university gallery settings including New York University, the University of North Carolina (various campuses) and Davidson College, among others. Lee's works are held in the permanent collections of several museums including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Montclair Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC) and the Johnson Collection (Spartanburg, SC) and in many corporate collections such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank and Prudential. Alongside her lifelong devotion to making art, Lee also pursued a career in academia beginning in 1958. She taught at the University of New York, Potsdam and then Winthrop College in Rock Hill, SC. She spent almost a decade at Drew University where she left as full professor and Chair of the Art Department, then served as the Dean of Visual Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase where in 1975 she left to begin her tenure as President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design where she served for eight years before becoming the Director of Arts and Communication and Senior Vice President at the Academy for Educational Development in New York City. During these years Lee was also a prolific author in a wide range of intellectual disciplines. She published major works on the career of city planner and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, a cultural history of American fashion, a biography of Willem and Elaine DeKooning, a history of Betty Parsons and her legendary gallery as well as a scholarly "biography" of the Greek goddess Athena. She was the recipient of many awards including an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Athena Medal from the Rhode Island School of Design. Notwithstanding her many accomplishments as an academic, historian, university leader and teacher, throughout all of her life Lee was first and foremost a painter. She drew great inspiration from her engagements with the landscapes and history of Greece, Rome and her love of the New England countryside. She continuously experimented in drawing, collage, oil and acrylics. Her interests were expansive, deep and informed by her pragmatism, empathy and seductive sense of humor. Her growth as an intellectual and artist was persistent and enduring. As she wrote once, "A painter should live a long time. It takes decades of work, of arduous search and fretting, to know that labels don't matter, and to find what will suffice." She is survived by her family members Janna Fitzgerald, Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Fitzgerald; as well as countless friends and colleagues here and overseas. Lee became involved as an important advisor and supporter of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, even before it opened to the public in 2010. Over the years she has given generously to the institution and has left her estate to the museum. She requested that contributions in her memory be sent to the education fund created in her name at the Bechtler (420 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202). Private celebrations will be held in South Hadley, MA in honor of Lee. In addition, Lee's many accomplishments will be celebrated in Charlotte as part of the Bechtler's annual Member Appreciation event the evening of Thursday, June 29th. For more information please see www.bechtler.org There will also be an exhibition of Lee's work at the Jerald Melberg Gallery opening this July. For more information, please see www.jeraldmelberg.com