The Desk

In spite of her conservative art education in Boston, Fannie Hillsmith steadily gravitated towards Cubist and Surrealist inspired still lifes and interiors. Marked by a fractured picture plane down the central vertical axis, The Desk highlights Hillsmith’s successful adoption of Cubist principles. Here, the artist skillfully reverses positive and negative space to create an optical illusion, a visual perplexity that is further confounded by the oval doorknob in the upper left-hand corner. Where does the door begin and end? And are we presented with an aerial view or a linear perspective? It was precisely this sort of innovation that prompted Josef Albers to invite Hillsmith to teach painting and composition at Black Mountain College’s summer session in 1945.