Untitled VI
This conversation is connected to Untitled VI.
Brush and ink on paper; black sumi-style marks on a cream ground. A vase of flowers is just barely legible: round blooms on curving stems, a circular vessel at the bottom, and what might be a windowframe suggested by two heavy right-angle strokes at the upper left. The brushwork is fast and calligraphic, closer to Asian ink painting than to anything typically associated with early American modernism. Saÿen studied under Henri Matisse in Paris from 1907 to 1908, and this kind of gestural reduction shows Matisse's influence filtered through a scientist's instinct for economy.