Still Life with Buddha Head

Within a shallow, crowded space, a vertically slanted table pitches forward, and a group of objects threatens to tumble out of the picture. In this painting, Stanton Macdonald-Wright revisits a method of geometric abstraction he encountered during his early years in Paris called Cubism. The collage of color forms and the play between the illusionistic surfaces of recognizable objects and abstract flat color planes are hallmarks of "synthetic" Cubist still life composition during the 1910s. During the 1940s, Macdonald-Wright temporarily put aside the palette of brilliant colors of his early paintings in order to work with a broader, sometimes duller, palette. The artist's Zen philosophy may be at work here too, creating an experimental fusion of European Modernism through cubism and Buddhist subject matter.