Mother and Child

Pauline Simon began painting in 1964 at the age of seventy. She had raised a family and managed her husband’s dental office when she enrolled in a painting class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Simon soon became involved with her local community art center—the Hyde Park Art Center—which had launched the group known as the Chicago Imagists. The Imagists, who often depicted figurative imagery in densely worked forms, identified similar qualities in Simon’s paintings, which they collected and promoted.

Although she is considered a largely self-taught artist, Simon was well informed about modern art. A lifetime member of the Art Institute of Chicago, she stated a love for Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Gustave Klimt (1862–1918), and her work shows influence of other artists she viewed in the Art Institute’s collection. Mother and Child is built up out of dynamically opposed swatches of colored patterns. Stripes and dots compose both clothing and wallpaper—figure and ground—collapsing the two in the manner of painters such as the French pointillist Georges Seurat (1859–1891).