The truth in things

From the beginning of his career, Lamar Dodd, one of the most influential artists from the twentieth-century South, ascribed to Vasari's dictum that drawing is the mother of the arts. Although Dodd passed through a variety of styles, always attempting to get at "the truth in things," the verities that underlie mere representation and make a picture a story, this relentless seeker's draughtsmanship can be seen as the constant underpinning of his decades-long painting career. This first monographic treatment of Dodd's life and work shows how, even in his more abstract works, description and narrative are intermingled so that symbols take on iconographic gravity through repetition. William U. Eiland discusses the various stylistic shifts of the artist's truth-seeking, from the realism of the thirties through the cubism and abstract expressionism of the late forties and fifties, to his return to a mature naturalism tempered by a growing optimism in the ability of the artist to order and explain the universe. Lamar Dodd has been an arts administrator, arts advocate, and teacher, but he has always preferred the role of artist. As a young man, he studied at the Art Students League in New York and there came in contact with many of the men and women who would define the major currents in American art for the remainder of the century. An early practitioner of ashcan and American scene principles, Dodd returned to his native South and made his project a cultural reawakening, one in which regional themes and concerns would predominate. He rebuilt and revitalized the University of Georgia's department of art and headed it until 1973. In 1995 the department was officially named the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Dodd also served as an "ambassador of culture" in his role as a representative of the U.S. State Department abroad and as two-term president of the College Art Association.