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.
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.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin October 8, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin October 8, 2018 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
Consolation
Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before.
THE INSTIGATOR
How Miranda July starts again.
A CRITIC AT LARGE - OFF THE LEASH
The wacky and wonderful world of the Westminster Dog Show.
LOADED
We used to think the rich had a social function. What are they good for now?
BLAME GAME
“Baby Reindeer” and Under the Bridge.”
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Zemlinsky, Schulhoff; and other neglected Jewish composers of Central Europe.
BOOKS - FORGET IT
A neuropsychologist says that we're thinking about memory all wrong.
A REPORTER AT LARGE - CONVICTION
Lucy Letby, the most notorious nurse in Britain, was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it?
PERSONAL HISTORY - TABULA RASA
THE WORDLE PHILOSOPHY
NEIGHBORLY
My name is Margaret Jo Stinson, and I’d like to share my own perspective on this sort of thing.