Details

Title

Untitled (Blue Man on Red Object)

Artist/Maker

Bill Traylor (American, 1854–1949)

Date

ca. 1939–1942

Medium

Poster paint and pencil on cardboard

Dimensions

11 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches

Credit

Purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes and the Members Guild

Accession #

1982.93

Location

Currently not on view

Economy of expression distinguishes the drawings Bill Traylor created on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, during the final years of the Great Depression. A retired field hand in his eighties when he began drawing, Traylor invested discarded cardboard with the essence of things seen or remembered. While the radically simplified forms of Traylor’s drawings seem familiar to viewers accustomed to the reductive tendencies of modernism, the witty vitality of his vision is striking. Nowhere is the ebullience of Traylor’s work more apparent than in his multi-figure compositions, wherein negative space is fragmented by the angles of outthrust legs and arms.