Untitled (Abstraction) 1948

This John Hultberg piece, Untitled (Abstraction), is a small drawing of big shapes, like a little world made with crayon. It's all black and white, but not so simple; it's more like a conversation between light and dark, form and formlessness. The surface feels worked, you can see the marks of the crayon, the way it catches the paper, and you can feel the artist figuring things out as he goes. In the middle, there's this sort of cross shape, like a little monument, but it's not really there; it's more like a suggestion. Hultberg reminds me of Dove, another artist obsessed with the possibility of abstraction. Like Dove, he seems to suggest that a painting doesn't have to be one thing, it can be a bunch of things at once, and it’s in that ambiguity that it really comes alive.