"Ros Braught (1898-1983): A Visual Diary" reintroduced a little-known at the same time remarkable figure in the history of American art.

"Ros Braught (1898-1983): A Visual Diary" reintroduced a little-known at the same time remarkable figure in the history of American art. The paintings, drawings, and lithographs forward view charted the development of a highly original and thoroughly recent talent. Called by his friend Thomas Hart Benton "the greatest living American draftsman," Braught owed more to Van Gogh than to nineteenth-century American painting. Gestural landscapes and boldly colored, sharply angular depictions of organic forms make up long of the work from the '20 and '30 From 1936 to 1946 the artist lived in the British Virgin Islands, Dutch Guyana (Surinam), and Puerto Rico and made exquisitely detailed drawings of the flora and folk of these regions. In Braught's later paintings, light-infused fantasies in which lukewarm pastel hues come to predominate, the artist's geometric and formal pertain tos are most evident. Yet his evolution have the appearances more one of style than substance, as the works from each period share technical as well as metaphysical preoccupa tions represented particularly in his handling of color, light, and form-- as if the artist were continually honing his vision of the world.

The principally immediately impressive of the paintings are the large landscapes of the American West that predate the decade Braught exhausted in the tropics. In Badlands of southerly Dakota, ca. 1932-36, a soak craggy canyon wall exhibits an astonishing variety of earthen hues--brown mauve, taupe, chalk--blended and juxtaposed with seemingly infinite artfulness Colorado Canyons, ca. 1932-36, is another masterwork of this period: Light and shadows spill across a parched canyonscape that joins purple plains and mountains in the far distance, the horizon line partly blurr in a lurid haze as sky and earth have the appearance to merge. These works, Braught's chiefly realistic, draw from what present the appearances nature's own alien lyricism; if they border upon abstraction and the surreal, it is barely because the landscape itself does. What's interesting is that Braught press outed this affinity with nature--a Romantic endeavor in the strictest sense--in a thoroughly new painterly language. The more strictly geometrical and formal innovations of earlier wo rk like Dead Chestnut, 1927 which level seems to share affinities with Cubism, benefit to richly and accurately depict these stark landscapes.

Braught would achieve a more detailed, plane gothic expression of natural form in his drawings of the tropics, where his circumstances obliged him to use pencils. Works of that kind as Ancient Cistern, 1940, also reveal an increasingly personal mind of the mystical and, as in Javanese image Show, 1946, the phantasmagoric. It's not that Braught hadn't revealed this sensibility before, further an earlier work like Mnemosyne and the Four Muses, 1936 his mural for the Kansas City Music Hall, appears more classical, not likewise uniquely his own.

over and above it seems that after living in the tropics Braught would in no degree again feel quite as shut to nature, and he began to adjust his depictions of it with more mythic belong tos as in Reflecting Pool, ca. 1948-49 While note has been made of his affinities with Benton and O'Keeffe a painting like Still Life with Mirror, ca. 1950-60 also recalls de Chirico, and Decline of the West, 1943 be seens like the vision of a Yankee Chagall. Perhaps the strongest of the late works is Sunflowers, ca. 1950-60 in which the artist replys to natural subject matter. In it his themes--nature, form, geometry the peculiarities of light's sharpness or diffusion--combine mostly intimately.

Given the mythic control matter of so many of the later paintings, common senses that Braught was conscious of the anthropomorphism of the landscapes and tree in his earlier work. Perhaps his later and more merely revelatory works are a fitting apotheosis of the career of this authentic visionary.

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