About Dorothy

Dorothy Stratton (1909-2007) was a midcentury American painter and printmaker. She carried what the Washington Post described as a “brooding, gestural” style across both painting and printmaking, making a distinctive contribution to the southern California modernist movement from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Georgetown University Fine Print Collection, the former Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. It has also graced the walls of the World Bank, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, the Long Beach Museum of Art, and U.S. embassies through the Arts in Embassies program.

She grew up in Sharon, Mass., and studied at Pratt Institute and the Brooklyn Museum School with Alexander Brook. She moved to Los Angeles in 1944, where she painted Tom and Jerry film cells for Warner Bros Studios and designed costumes and sets for Paramount Pictures and George Pal’s Puppetoons. In 1948, she married animator William Asbury King and spent two years studying painting in Paris with cubist and sculptor Andre Lhote at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.

Her vivid abstract paintings gained attention in the early 1950s. Studying with Rico Lebrun at the University of California in Los Angeles, her first major solo at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1959 signaled a deliberate shift to abstraction. She turned to printmaking in the 1960s in La Jolla, studying at the University of California at Los Angeles while traveling to Tunisia and Morocco to visit her family. In 1966-7 she worked as an assistant to printmaker Paul Lingren at the University of California at La Jolla and within a few years her mastery of etching, aquatint, drypoint, engraving, softground collograph, and mezzotint reversed her role from student to teacher. 

She also at the time served as conservator for Beatrice S. Levy, a prominent painter and printmaker from Chicago’s modernist movement, securing Levy’s presence in several notable exhibitions and the permanent holdings of museums up and down the coast.

In the early 1980s she moved to McLean, Virginia, co-founding the Washington Printmakers Gallery in 1985. After her husband’s death in 1990 she returned to San Diego and held solo exhibitions at Acadia University in Nova Scotia (1991), the Washington Printmaker Gallery (1992), and the University of San Diego’s Founders Gallery (1994).

Returning to Virginia in 1996, Stratton exhibited at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, London’s Barbican Center, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Three Washington, DC institutions added her work to their permanent holdings before her death in 2007: the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Georgetown University Lauinger Library’s Fine Prints Collection.

Today, galleries on both coasts feature Stratton’s work and the City of San Diego last year secured the rights to use a small oil painting for marketing purposes. Stratton’s work also now shapes the permanent holdings of the print archives of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, which has added several of her prints, plates, and etching tools to its vast collection of all things print.