Stagnation
Gouache on paper
20 x 26 3/8 inches
1948
After joining the faculty at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, Gregory Ivy became known as a non-conformist. He encouraged his female students to challenge the status quo and invited several members of the avant-garde to campus as visiting artists.
Ivy’s painting style was as modernist as his educational philosophy. Stagnation has a surreal quality with its sense of limitless space and ambiguous forms. Are the brown cylindrical shapes references to tree trunks? Are the blue ones puddles? The painting is dated 1948, perhaps a bleak statement on the recent world war?