Bill Traylor

During the final years of the Great Depression in Montgomery, Alabama, a retired field hand in his eighties named Bill Traylor began drawing extraordinary images on pieces of discarded cardboard. The radically simplified forms of Traylor's drawings seem to echo the reductive tendencies of modernism. Nowhere is the ebullience of Traylor's work more apparent than in his multi-figures compositions, wherein negative space is fragmented by the angles of outthrust legs and arms. This full-colour catalogue presents approximately sixty drawings by Traylor, along with two scholarly essays. This major publication of Traylor's work will appeal to readers who appreciate both modernism and outsider art.