“Just making art itself is the great thing. It has always been my biggest thrill. It’s a joy, a high, better than ten martinis!” *

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Dorothy Dehner did not start sculpting until 1955, when she was fifty-four years old. As a teenager, she studied painting with three artistically inclined aunts and dance with a former member of the Denishawn Company, a modern dance troupe and school. By the time she was eighteen, Dehner had lost both of her parents and her only sister. She moved to California to study acting, taking classes at the Pasadena Playhouse and majoring in drama at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the mid-1920s, Dehner moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League and met several artists, among them, David Smith. They married in 1927 and lived in Brooklyn.

In 1929, Smith bought an eighteenth century farmhouse at Bolton Landing, in upstate New York, where the couple spent summers before moving there full time in 1940. During their marriage, Dehner drew, painted, and participated in group shows. She also ran their household, assisted Smith with his work, and advised him about his sculptures. In 1948, he translated her drawing Star Cage into a sculpture. Although Dehner was passionately pursued art, her career ambitions always took a back seat to those of her husband, who could be demanding and domineering at times. Dehner addressed her conflicted feelings about Bolton Landing and their marriage in two series of drawings: Life on the Farm, idyllic representations of everyday life, and Damnation Series, featuring “demonic figures surrounded by vultures and bats. . . . Only years later did she realize how much these drawings expressed the increasing psychological discomfort she felt in the waning years of their marriage.”†

In 1951, Dehner divorced Smith, left Bolton Landing, and moved back to New York City. She studied painting at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, where she met sculptors Louise Nevelson and David Slivka. In 1953, her work was included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1955, Dehner made her first sculpture. Her earliest sculptures