Composition 1954

Huguette Arthur Bertrand made this painting called Composition sometime in the 20th century using oil paint. I love the dominant black lines in this painting, like tall grass, and how they offset the rectangles in brown and yellow, offset by verticals in white, brown, and blue. It’s as if Arthur Bertrand built a structure with some kind of system, like a musical score, that makes something solid, yet precarious, maybe even ready to topple. What I love about painting is how the artist is always in conversation with the medium itself, its own logic. I bet that she was thinking about the earlier cubists, like Braque, and how they took apart and rebuilt the world in their paintings. Painting is a dialogue across time, and artists inspire each other to see and think in new ways.