Existing comment:
Traylor sometimes made paintings on both back and front of a paperboard support. For this particular artwork, the two images may relate to a single topic. Here, a black man argues heatedly with a white woman; his clothes are strikingly similar to hers and to those of the man (perhaps her husband) shown on the other side. She points in his face but he gestures to something behind him -- the past perhaps, a time when his clothes might not have been as fine as a white man's. Although the reality of the Jim Crow South would have made such an encounter dangerous for him and therefore unlikely, Traylor depicts the man standing up for himself. |