About this Book

A monograph on the self-taught artist Bill Traylor's striking drawings, which reveal the witty vitality of his vision. During the final years of the Great Depression in Montgomery, Alabama, a retired field hand in his eighties named Bill Traylor begain drawing extraordinary images on pieces of discarded cardboard. The radically simplified forms of these lively drawings seem to echo the reductive tendencies of modernism. Nowhere is the ebullience of Traylor's work more apparent than in his multi-figure compositions, wherein negative space is fragmented by the angles of the outthrust legs and arms. This full-color catalog presents approximately sixty drawings by Traylor, along with three scholarly essays. This major publication of Traylor's work will appeal to readers who appreciate both modernism and folk art.