I became interested in Brett and her work years ago when I was first visiting Taos and picked up threads of her story scattered everywhere: how she had intersected with the other remarkable women there, including Frieda Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan; how she had spent time at the ranch north of town with Lawrence and Frieda; how she had stayed on after they left for Mexico, painting and interweaving with the community, finally becoming the grand old lady whose letters and diaries fill seventeen boxes in the archive at the University of New Mexico.
She has been written about, and has also left a memoir, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, that seems to overweight his relatively brief presence in her life. That approach is familiar: the better known writer, a man, becomes the only way later readers learn about the women who long outlived him and, in terms of creative output, outshone him. Her numerous paintings have long been disparaged by art critics for the rustic quality that for me lends to their dramatic appeal.
I am so gratified that the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos is giving Brett her first solo show, opening July 13. It will include seven of her paintings that I own, having begun to collect her work years ago.
This is that poignant moment in my writing life when, with Taken By the Shawnee about to be launched here on June 9th and in Louisville at Carmichael’s on Frankfort Avenue on June 21, with 260 pages of my next short story collection, Cowboy Tales, waiting for my editing, and even with a nibble of interest from a small press (the hope of serious writers these days) on my memoir of my son Will, I am ready to begin to think about the next book.
I must spend a good deal of time on this process. Is there an actual need for another biography? Is Brett, as I get to know her, complex and interesting enough? Is it possible to pry her out from under the shadow of D.H. Lawrence?
And these are only the first questions.
But how much fun it is to imagine and speculate before the hard work begins.
[“Dorothy Brett – Celebrating the 100 year anniversary of her arrival in New Mexico” opens this summer at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.]
Thank you Sallie for this post on Dorothy Brett. I am an art lover and always rejoice in finding new/old artists that are not a part of my wheelhouse. Dorothy most certainly would have known Ms. O’Keefe! Mrs. Georgia O’Keefe Steinlen is the one I think of when I think of Santa Fe & Taos New Mexico. I love the pic of her with her big hat and cowboy boots. And she is not a skinny one either. She looks thick! She may be more interesting than Mr. Lawrence of Arabia! Good luck with your research into this beautiful looking woman. I checked out her art on the web. I dig it! The art critics that disparaged her work were just haters with no talent of their own. Just my opinion. So much history that is hidden from the “main stream”. Keep up the good work of uncovering the hidden “broads” aka women that have done so much in the USA and other places in our world. Wish I could travel to see the show at Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.
My first “Gen-Ed” assignment at Harvard was to write an essay about Ernest Hemingway’s _The Sun Also Rises._ One of the two principal characters in that book was Lady Brett Ashley, a rather promiscuous British aristocrat. The book was published ibn 1926, two years after Dorothy Brett (also a British aristocrat) followed D. H. Lawrence to Taos NM. I submit that Papa possibly used the name “Brett” under the influence of the notoriety of Dorothy’s move.