John Murray classes week of July 8, 2013

Great work that answers many questions about art!

The Shape of the World Passing Before His Eyes

Bill Traylor Finally Gets a Spotlight in New York.... Shape of the World Passing Before His Eyes Bill Traylor is the subject of two exhibitions at the American Folk Art Museum. 

One day Traylor picked up a stub of pencil and a scrap of cardboard and began to draw. Over the next three or four years, alternating between memories of sharecropping and what he saw before him, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings that rank among the greatest works of the 20th century. Traylor was a natural stylist and a born storyteller who pushed images of the life around him toward abstraction with no loss of vivacity. At once modern and archaic, his art offers proof of Jung’s collective unconscious but also of an indelible individual talent.

Traylor’s efforts exist because within days of making his first drawing, he acquired a devoted admirer: Charles Shannon (1914-96), a young white artist from Montgomery who began visiting him every week, bringing art supplies, buying some drawings and taking others for safekeeping, since it was apparent that they would otherwise not survive.

One is grateful to Charles Shannon’s keen eye and devotion when viewing the side-by-side shows of Traylor’s work at the American Folk Art Museum. “Bill Traylor: Drawings From the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts,” a traveling exhibition making its final stop, includes nearly all of the Traylors owned by the two institutions of its title. (The 29 from the Montgomery museum were a gift from Shannon.) “Traylor in Motion: Wonders From New York Collections” in an excellent in-house effort organized by Stacy C. Hollander, the American Folk Art Museum’s chief curator, and Valérie Rousseau, its new curator of self-taught art and Art Brut, who have also overseen the guest exhibition’s stop here.

The first in-depth examination of Traylor’s achievement in a New York museum, these shows present a total of 104 drawings and paintings in combinations of graphite, pencil, colored pencil, crayon, ink, watercolor  and poster paint, on salvaged cardboard and paper. They offer total immersion in his late-life burst of genius, albeit under crowded conditions that sometimes inhibit full appreciation.

Traylor’s images depict mostly black people but also some whites, capturing a world that seems eternally fraught: the animals alert, the people wary. The mood is tightly wound, sometimes antic.

One possible source for his sharp-edged, implicitly geometric figures is weather vanes, although his silhouettes are considerably enlivened with distinctive textures, expressive button eyes, a sense of fluid movement and bright color. His characters include elders who sit in chairs or walk with canes, younger folk who dance, cavort on rooftops, raise barns, drink from flasks or argue. There are assorted dogs that snarl or just nose around, and lots of birds and livestock, especially bulls, horses, mules and pigs that are seen in profile, posing for markedly affectionate portraits. Sometimes Traylor’s figures perch, climb or even merge with abstract shapes that have come to be called constructions and can suggest blacksmiths’ anvils. 

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The self-taught artist Bill Traylor preferred to work on salvaged, sometimes irregularly shaped cardboard, as can be seen in the works on display at the American Folk Art Museum. 

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

The self-taught artist Bill Traylor preferred to work on salvaged, sometimes irregularly shaped cardboard, as can be seen in the works on display at the American Folk Art Museum. 

See you next week. john.