Old South

Bill Traylor, the subject of a stunning retrospective at the Smith sonian American Art Museum, in Washington, D.C., Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, was about twelve years a slave, from his birth, in Dallas County, Alabama, in 1853 or so, until Union cavalry swept through the cotton plantation where he was owned, in 1865.

- Peter Schjeldahl

Sixty-­four years later, in 1939, homeless on the streets of Montgomery, he be­ came an extraordinary artist, making magnetically beautiful, dramatic, and utterly original drawings on found scraps of cardboard. He pencilled, and later began to paint, crisp silhouette figures of people and animals— feral­seeming dogs, ominous snakes, elegant birds, top­hatted men, fancily dressed women, ec­ static drinkers—either singly or in scenes of sometimes violent interaction. There were also hi­ eratic abstractions of simple forms—such as a purple balloon shape above a black crossbar, a blue disk, and a red trapezoidal base—symmetrically arrayed and lurkingly animate. Traylor’s style has about it both something very old, like prehistoric cave paint­ ings, and something spanking new. Song like rhythms, evoking the time’s jazz and blues, and a feel for scale, in how the forms relate to the space that contains them, give majestic presence to even the smallest images. Traylor’s pictures stamp themselves on your eye and mind.