Untitled 1936

Balcomb Greene made this untitled collage in 1936, and it looks like he was having a really good time with abstraction. It’s an exploration of shapes, colors, and how they play together, kind of like jazz. Look at how the shapes interact; he's got these muted tones, like grays and tans, playing off a solid black field. There's this one gray shape with a biomorphic blobby form cut out of it. That weird shape disrupts the geometry, and it's a bit like when a painter changes their mind and draws the line again. It’s got such a handmade feel, you know? It reminds me a little of Stuart Davis, but maybe more introspective, less jazzy and more like early morning. I love the way it embraces a kind of organized chaos. It feels like he’s really thinking about the architecture of the picture plane. It's like a conversation, an exchange of ideas that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.