Untitled 1939

Ralston Crawford made this mixed media collage on paper in 1939, and it’s such a trip! Crawford layers geometric planes of color, like that deep blue and crimson, and then BAM, he throws in a grayscale photo of a building, windows busted, and a woman looking out. What a way to scramble your brain! I love the yellow triangles that are painted over the photograph. They look like modernist afterthoughts, like he's not quite sure what to do with it either. I wonder what he was thinking? Was he looking out his window, too, trying to make sense of things? Was he looking at other artists and thinking about ways to combine photography with painting and collage? It makes me think of other artists who work between mediums like Sherry Levine, who works between photography and appropriation, or someone like James Welling who works between abstraction and photography. This little collage feels like it's part of that conversation. A cool moment of experimentation that makes my brain hum.