Marionette Clown c. 1936

Lillian Stahl’s Marionette Clown is a watercolor painting on paper. There’s a real feeling of the artist feeling her way through the medium, letting the watery paint do its thing, and allowing the figure to emerge through the puddles of color. It's like Stahl is painting with her eyes closed, or at least half-closed, feeling the weight of the brush in her hand, the drag of the paper, the way the pigment blooms and settles. Look at the way she renders the clown's costume in loose, flowing washes of yellow and purple. There's a transparency to the paint that gives the fabric a shimmering, almost ethereal quality. I think of artists like Florine Stettheimer, who also embraced a kind of playful, decorative sensibility in her work. Both artists seem to invite us to revel in the sheer pleasure of looking, without getting too hung up on meaning or interpretation. Ultimately, it’s that sense of openness, that willingness to embrace ambiguity and contradiction, that makes art so endlessly fascinating.