At 98 years old, American painter Lois Dodd is finally receiving the international recognition that has eluded her for decades. The Kunstmuseum den Haag in the Netherlands will open her first European retrospective later this month, featuring 100 paintings created between 1958 and 2025. The exhibition, titled "Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemeral," runs from August 30 to January 4, 2026.

Dodd has spent her summers since 1963 in the small town of Cushing, Maine, located along the St. George River estuary in Midcoast Maine. The area, known for Andrew Wyeth's famous painting "Christina's World" (1948), has provided endless inspiration for Dodd's intimate studies of everyday life. Her characteristic subjects include doorways, trees, flowers, windows, and shadows, mostly painted in and around her homes and studios in Cushing, Manhattan's 2nd Street, and Blairstown, New Jersey.

"It turns out that the stuff that you see on a daily basis, right around you, is the best stuff to work with," Dodd explains matter-of-factly. Now 98, she mostly paints the world from the expansive windows of a sun room that her architect son Eli added to her Maine house in 1990. Her Cushing home has remained largely unchanged by modern technology, with no television, no WiFi, only a landline phone, a wood-fired range, and a 1950s refrigerator.

Dodd's artistic approach centers on plein air painting, carrying a folding French easel and Masonite panels into the surrounding woods and fields. She works quickly, using wet-on-wet techniques mostly in single sittings with thinned oils and a light touch. "I'm not going to stretch little canvases," she says. "Too much work." Her finished panels rarely exceed 50 centimeters in any dimension.

The artist has a remarkable ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, capturing abstract geometry in bedsheets drying on a line, the perspectival play of tree trunks, ghost forms of shadows, and the gridded drama of windows. In an astonishing 2007 series, lily-orange flames engulf a clapboard house during a real training exercise by the local fire department, creating a potently symbolic image.

"I'm not imaginative enough to make a painting without observation," Dodd admits. "I really need to have the thing in front of me to be inspired." This commitment to direct observation has defined her seven-decade career, though she notes that "the more you look at things, the less stable they become – like words repeated to the point of meaninglessness."

Gallerist Phil Alexandre, who has represented Dodd since 2001, places her work within the early American modernist tradition alongside Charles Burchfield, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley – artists who filtered landscape through abstraction and personal vision. The Kunstmuseum den Haag exhibition traces this lineage further by including works by Piet Mondrian, whom Dodd cites as a major influence. "Everything you want to know about painting is in Mondrian," she says.

Dodd studied textile design at Cooper Union in the 1940s, a tuition-free and highly competitive New York institution. She remained untouched by abstract expressionism despite brushing against it. In 1952, she co-founded the Tanager Gallery, one of several artist-run cooperatives on 10th Street that provided alternatives to commercial dealers uptown. The gallery showcased the first work Jasper Johns ever exhibited and repeatedly turned down Andy Warhol's line drawings of men kissing.

Despite common perceptions of her as a solitary figure, Dodd has always been part of artist circles. She first visited Maine with her then-husband, sculptor Bill King, and their Cooper Union classmates Alex Katz and Jean Cohen. She co-owned a house in nearby Lincolnville with Katz and Cohen before buying her Cushing property. Katz and his second wife Ada still summer in the area, and Dodd appears among artist friends in Katz's painting "Lawn Party" (1965).

The artist taught for 20 years at Brooklyn College and maintains close relationships with former students. Until recently, she participated in a group in Maine that worked from nude models outdoors. For years she resisted painting flowers, determined not to be labeled a "lady flower painter," until watching her friend Nancy Wissemann-Widrig paint flowers gave her permission by proxy.

Dodd's belated recognition stems from several factors. As curator Louise Bjeldbak Henriksen notes, her work didn't fit neatly into movements – "not quite regionalist, not quite modernist; never abstract enough to be fashionable, never figurative enough to have a social message." Her gender also played a role, as did an art market that "for decades, has rewarded loudness over looking." Her refusal to theorize her work may have cost her critical currency, as she has always preferred to show rather than tell.

Recent developments signal changing fortunes. An important work, "Attic Staircase with Sunlight" (1987-88), entered the Metropolitan Museum collection this year. Last October at Christie's, a 1971 window painting sold for $387,000, more than three times its high estimate. Her work is in the Museum of Modern Art collection thanks to a gift from artist Robert Gober.

"Lois didn't follow fashion in painting," Alex Katz observes. "She represents something that is admirable and genuine. She found herself, and she didn't shift with the winds." Henriksen believes Dodd's work is newly relevant in our "screen-scrambled age," noting that "one of the key roles of museums at this time is getting us to slow down and really look at what's there."

At 98, after decades of quiet dedication to her craft, Lois Dodd is finally experiencing the recognition that her distinctive vision deserves. Her first exhibition outside the US came in 2019 at Modern Art in London when she was 92, but now, as one observer notes, "the winds seem to be blowing in Dodd's favor."