Untitled (Surreal Abstraction) 1936

This is a surreal abstraction, made in 1936 by Thomas Brownell Eldred, using graphite on paper. It's one of those pieces where the making feels really present. You can see the artist feeling their way through the image, almost like a drawing game. Look at the texture, created by the graphite, it almost feels like you could touch it. The shapes are soft and rounded, contrasting with the sharp lines of the grid, which almost looks like a window. There is a tension in this work between the softness of the bodies and the hard lines of the architectural details. There's a cluster of figures piled on top of each other, almost like a family portrait, and at the right, a long haired figure. It reminds me of Picasso's Cubist portraits, where faces are fragmented and reassembled. Like Picasso, Eldred is playing with perspective, inviting us to see the world in a new way. It's like he's saying, "Here's a dream, make of it what you will".