About the Artist

Dorothy Browdy Kusher was a Modernist painter active from the 1940s through the 1980s. She was raised in Kansas City, Missouri and went on to receive a master’s degree from Columbia Teachers’ College in New York, but most of her career was spent in Southern California. She was the mother of and major inspiration for the noted artist Robert Kushner.

Dorothy’s early work consisted primarily of bold ink and watercolor landscapes and Cubist-inspired casein landscapes she called the “Prismatics.” In mid-career Dorothy began abstracting landscapes and florals to the point that many appeared nonrepresentational. In her late career Kushner created a series of acrylic “High Horizon Landscapes” which featured vibrant colors with small strips of sky above large swaths of land, often set in vertically oriented picture planes.

Her work was overlooked in its time because she was a middleclass female living in the suburbs an hour from the LA art scene. She exhibited extensively where she could, through art associations and nonprofit galleries. She showed most frequently at the Pasadena Society of Artists, California Watercolor Society, and the Los Angeles Art Association. Notable exceptions were solo exhibitions at Ramon Lopez Gallery in Sierra Madre in 1961, Tower Gallery at Occidental Life Insurance in Los Angeles in 1969, and Carlson Gallery in San Francisco in 1989. Posthumously her work received a solo exhibition at Susan Teller Gallery in New York City in 2008 and a two-person exhibition with her son, Robert Kushner, at the same gallery in 2011.  

Although Kushner did not receive the attention her work deserved during her lifetime, she was a serious artist. She founded “The Group” a circle of female artists who convened monthly to vigorously critique one another’s artwork and she studied the contemporary art of her time as well as that of earlier generations.

Dorothy Kusher studied directly with the Social Realist painter Reginald Marsh, California watercolorist James Couper Wright, and abstract painter Richards Ruben (who had studied with Hans Hoffman.)  She was influenced by the art of Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Franz Kline, Georgia O’Keefe, Lyonel Feininger, Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still, Bay Area Expressionist Richard Diebenkorn, the floral watercolors of Emil Nolde, and the landscapes of fellow Californian Helen Lundeberg.