Violence

The wind seems to blow in all directions at once, the sky is usually spattered with flights of birds, and people pursue their business or pleasure with bounce and intensity in the paintings of Doris (''Doric") Emrick Lee. Even a sleeper sleeps so soundly that he looks dead, and a woman threading a sewing machine is obviously incapable of fatigue. When young Mrs. Lee's bustling kitchen scene, Thanksgiving, was awarded the Chicago Art Institute's $500 Logan prize last autumn, Mrs. Frank Logan pointed her finger in scorn, called it an "awful thing'' (TIME, Nov. 18). Shortly thereafter the Art Institute, of which Mrs. Logan's husband is honorary president, acquired Thanksgiving for its permanent collection.

Few months ago Doris Lee had her first one-man show in Washington. Last week she had her first Manhattan exhibit all to herself. The 20 pictures at the Walker Galleries did not include Thanksgiving.

Highest priced ($900) is Noon, a depiction of bucolic love during the lunch hour. Beside a hayrick, against which he has dropped his pitchfork, a sturdy young farmer, barefooted and stripped to the waist, clutches a girl in a blue dress who looks both alarmed and fascinated. Another farmer is asleep on his back atop the hay wagon, with his hat over his face. In the pie pan one piece of pumpkin pie is left.

The picture of which Doris Lee is fondest is The Runaway, showing a girl in a streaming yellow dress gripping the mane of a bolting horse. The Haunted House is a dilapidated structure, surrounded by grim and groping trees, with all the windows on the third floor boarded up except one from which a wildly gesticulating woman is leaning. One of the best is The Widow, an Amazonian figure with feet planted wide apart, grasping the bridles of two snorting, dancing horses. There is one nude, a pert, heavy-legged girl with fruity lips, combing a mop of chocolate-colored hair. Doris Lee's brush is too kinetic to be good at still life. Her flowers look like artificial ones.

Doris Lee dislikes to hear her painting called "optimistic." "What I feel," she once declared, "is a sort of violence." She says she cannot help putting people in her landscapes or painting a sky red if she feels like it. Born 32 years ago to a merchant-banker in Aledo, Ill., Doris was brought up to be an "outdoorsy" gentlewoman. She went to a swank school in Lake Forest, majored in philosophy at Rockford College, became student art instructor, married a chemical engineer named Russell Werner Lee. In Paris she got pointers from Andre L'Hote, in Kansas City from Ernest Lawson and the late Anthony Angorola, in San Francisco from Arnold Blanch. She and her husband live in a rambling house, full of stuffed birds, at Woodstock, N. Y. During her conscientious walks she makes sketches, paints from them. She likes Manhattan's frowsy 14th Street, almost all animals, has a 15-lb. tiger cat more than a yard long which hunts rabbits and eats them warm.

In a Manhattan studio last week Doris Lee was busy making preliminary sketches for two 7 1/2-by-13-ft. panels, depicting the Rural Free Delivery, which .she has been commissioned to do for the Post Office Department building in Washington.

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