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Art: Brett’s Stokowskis

2 minute read
TIME

“I was knocked all of a heap by his amazing appearance. When I said that 1 wanted to paint him, his wife told me that he refused to sit to anyone.” The obdurate nonsitter was Orchestra Conductor Leopold Stokowski. The painter: Taos, N.M.’s Dorothy Brett, artist, writer, former British peeress, sister of the White Rani of Sarawak (British Borneo), bosom friend of the late British novelist, D. H. Lawrence. This week Painter Brett proved that she could paint Conductor Stokowski whether he posed or not. Her exhibition of 27 paintings in the Santa Fe Museum featured some bombers in level flight, some portraits, but mostly her platinum-haired Leopold Stokowski in a “Symphony Series” for which he never sat.

Most of the eleven Brett Stokowskis are luminous, elongated impressions in which Conductor Stokowski seems to be swooning under water. In Leopold Stokowski Conducting Parsifal there is only a Stokowski-like manifestation, a sickle moon, blank planes of periwinkle blue, and a cometlike effulgence. In Liebestod No. 2 (Love Death), a pale Stokowski wears a rose-colored nimbus which also haloes his cupped, coaxing hands (see cut).

The Brett. The Honorable Dorothy Brett was born in London (1891), daughter of Reginald Baliol Brett, Viscount Esher, friend and adviser of Britain’s shrewd, sporty King Edward VII. Dorothy studied art at London’s Slade School. In her art-student days she met Novelist D. H. Lawrence, was so impressed by him that she followed him to Taos. After Lawrence’s death, in 1933. Dorothy Brett wrote Lawrence and Brett, a minor literary sensation.

Painter Brett dropped her British title when she became a U.S. citizen (1938). She now lives in a one-room adobe studio in art-conscious Taos, dines once a week with her great friend Frieda (von Richthofen) Lawrence, sees much of Taos Art Matriarch Mabel Dodge Luhan and her Pueblo Indian husband, Tony.

Stone-deaf, crop-haired, twinkling Dorothy Brett is known to her friends as The Brett. She carries an elaborate audiophone wherever she goes, paints long hours, professes complete indifference to criticism of her work, for which she asks prices up to $10,000. Says she: “I found out long ago that no matter what I do some people like it, some … do not.”

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