Untitled (Blue Man on Red Object)
Folk and Self-Taught Art

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Untitled (Blue Man on Red Object)
Artwork Details
Artist/Maker
Bill Traylor
American, 1854–1949
American, 1854–1949
Date
ca. 1939–1942
Medium
Poster paint and pencil on cardboard
Accession #
1982.93
Dimensions
Please contact the Museum for more information.
Location
Currently Not on View
Description
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.
Credit
Purchase with funds from Mrs. Lindsey Hopkins Jr., Edith G. and Philip A. Rhodes and the Members GuildImage Copyright
Photo by Mike Jensen