Knee belongs to the small group of women modernists who broke with their inherited social roles in the late 1920s and early 1930s and remade themselves as serious painters in the unconventional setting of New Mexico, a generation whose work has only recently begun to be reassessed at its real historical weight.
Knee's first life was the conventional one of her class and place. She grew up among the polo, parties, and debutante season of upper-class Virginia, married a man from her social set at nineteen, and lived for a decade as a young Southern wife. The decision to walk away from that life, the marriage, the household, the social structure that contained her, came in her early thirties, after the New York encounter with John Marin's watercolors convinced her that another kind of life was possible.
The Santa Fe she arrived in was a small but unusually intellectually open American art colony, and the New Mexican Pueblo culture she encountered in her first year there became the immediate material of her early work. She attended ceremonials and dances, watched closely, and translated what she had seen into watercolor compositions that distilled forms, colors, and patterns from the directly observed scene. Her marriage to Ernest Knee, an established documentary photographer who would do important work on the Pueblo communities in his own right, gave her a working partnership and a settled life in New Mexico for the next decade.
Her painting moved steadily toward abstraction across the 1930s. She began basing her watercolors less on literal transcription than on what one source has described as "forms arranged without regard to conventional spatial relationships," added gouache and tempera to her watercolor practice, won prizes in regional and national juried exhibitions, and by the late 1930s, when she and Ernest moved to a self-designed house in Tesuque, was widely regarded as one of the most original modernists working in the Southwest. The major American annuals of the early 1940s gave her national exposure of a kind few other Santa Fe modernists of the period received.
Her later life took her in a different geographic direction. Her marriage to Ernest Knee ended, and in 1945 she married the painter Alexander Brook; the couple lived briefly in Savannah, Georgia, and in 1948 moved to Long Island, where she would remain until her death. Her painting continued to develop in this period, and she had her last major moment of public recognition in 1965 with the Newark Museum exhibition.
Her position today is that of a significant but still underrecognized American modernist of the 1930s, whose abstract watercolors of the New Mexican landscape and Pueblo subjects belong to the same broad current of American modernism as Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keeffe, the artists with whom she shared her formative subject matter. Recent scholarship and exhibitions have begun to restore her place within that lineage and within the broader history of American women modernists.