Purple Horse

Purple Horse reveals Bill Traylor’s mastery over space, his subject matter and his media. After a lifetime on a plantation, former slave Traylor moved to Montgomery, Alabama. There, from a doorstep on Monroe Street, he rendered starkly modernist images of lively animals, vibrant landscapes and active people. The present work is executed on a repurposed Granger Pipe Tobacco poster which contextualizes the world and culture which Traylor observed and the visual vocabularies he encountered. Purple Horse exhibits classic trademarks of Traylor’s work: The animal's torso is drawn as a geometric box and the legs are made with a straightedge, while Traylor has used the body as an opportunity to experiment color and mass. This work is unique and engaging because Traylor treats the torso of the animal as a palette, mixing red and blue to create different tones directly on the card. The horse is a reoccurring icon in Taylor’s oeuvre and examples are depicted ‘from neutral to cool in emotional tone’ (Leslie Umberger, Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (Washington, D.C., 2019), p. 232). Although reductive in its form, Traylor is able to effectively express his intimate understanding of the animal through its expression and relationship in space. The power of this horse emerges in part in scale – he almost completely fills the card and his ears and hooves graze its edges, imparting a feeling of authority and grandeur.

For a similar work in color and composition, see ibid., p. 272, pl. 96.