Dorothea Blom has been identified with the Pleasantville Adult School since 1954 and lectures to religious groups, clubs, and schools in the New York area. All her life she has been involved with the arts, from occupational therapy to window display, from writing books on flower arrangement to museum tours. Since the early 1950’s she has concentrated on art as it becomes a language of relationships to life. Out of this concept grew her Encounters with Art, a lecture series given at Pendle Hill, followed by a pamphlet of the same name.
In the present pamphlet she uses the term “Modern Art” in a broad sense, implying art which departs radically from the Post Renaissance concepts of reality, beginning in the first half of the 19th Century with the late works of Goya, Blake, and Turner, and continuing into the present. For later 19th Century artists, and those who followed, she frequently uses the word “contemporary.”