Man's Hat c. 1937

Here is an image by Creighton Kay-Scott, called 'Man's Hat'. Isn’t it something, the way a simple object can hold so much? You see this hat, rendered in gentle brown washes, and you think about the person who wore it. What were they thinking, what world did they inhabit? It feels so proper, this hat. I’m guessing that Kay-Scott was making some kind of observation about class structures, about the expectations placed on men. Notice, also, the fainter outline of another hat in the corner—it’s like he was trying to trap something elusive, a feeling, a memory. It’s the kind of doubling that suggests art isn’t so much about getting it right the first time as it is about iteration, about going back and forth between what’s there and what’s imagined. You see a lot of that among the more figurative artists, like Fairfield Porter, or Alex Katz. They get something from it, that’s for sure. And so, by looking, do we.