Lullaby is a tempera on paper painting by Lois Bod-ge-tah Smoky, Kiowa. The date this painting was created is in question, as will be discussed, since the year of its origin is important to understanding the painting’s significance within Smoky’s body of work.
At first glance, the work may be seen as a simple portrait of mother and child. However, through a closer inspection of this intriguing piece one can both understand how it attracts the viewer’s attention and why it, unlike many of the works by Oklahoma’s Kiowa Five, including Smoky’s earlier pieces, compels the viewer to speculate upon the narrative which engendered its creation. In this painting, the combination of subject matter, technique, and presentation offer the viewer a more meaningful representation than The Five were taught to produce.Lullaby is comprised of two figures, a woman in profile and a child facing the viewer in a cradleboard. The two are connected by the woman’s upraised arms. In keeping with the style of the Kiowa Five, of which Smoky was an original member, there is no background or foreground depicted leaving the flatly painted figures surrounded by negative space. The mother figure is slightly to the right of center, thus providing sufficient space for the infant’s form on the left. Beginning with the subtle slant at the hem of her billowing skirt, then climbing to the flowing locks of hair that separate to form an inverted U at her shoulders, the elements of the form gently coax the viewer’s eye upward. This is reinforced by the slanted position of the cradleboard and the upward tilt of the mother’s head so that the view’s eye comes to on the mother’s upturned gaze accentuated by her raised eyebrow. Here Smoky creates a configuration that gives the painting a stronger dynamic than the vertically arranged figures in her painting Mother and Babe.
Following the training she received from Oscar Jacobson, director of the University of Oklahoma School of Art, Smoky employs a technique that, as Les Kruger explains, “uses sharp,well-defined outlines filled in with solid, flat paint” dramatically separating the figures from the ground. Lines themselves are seldom visible apart from the child’s facial features, the outline of the woman’s eyes, and her raised eyebrow all of which are painted stark black, drawing the viewer’s attention to them. Smoky’s Kiowa Family makes a similar use of line to carefully define facial features, particularly the detail of the eye.
Yellow is the predominant color used in this image. The central figure, the woman, is wearing a yellow-gold dress, and both forms are placed against a solid yellow-ochre background. This choice of yellow on yellow seems to recall Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907/8). (Note: Although it is commonly known that Oscar Jacobson eschewed the influences of European art for his Indian students, Smoky had previously studied art with Willie Baze Lane who had encouraged European methods and materials and may well have exposed her students to European artworks as well. Therefore, it is not beyond reason to conjecture that Smoky had seen a print or other rendering of Klimt’s iconic work.) Lullaby’s additional colors are basically red and blue, forming the primary triad, the neutrals: black and white, and a mid-range brown skin tone. Intriguingly, these are the color choices Klimt uses for his two figures in The Kiss. Smoky’s brown appears to be burnt umber and is similar to the brown used in her other 1930s pieces in contrast to the lighter shade she used in her earlier work. It is said that Jacobson insisted his students use the brown of the paper on which he had them working as the skin tone during their time in the University of Oklahoma art department. This could account for the difference in the hue between her late 1920s works and those she produced in 1930.
Value is also important in this piece. Overall, the lighter, more saturated yellow of the woman’s dress makes her figure stand out from the darker, muted gold background. And, most importantly, the extreme opposite values of the black and white that define both figures’ eyes in juxtaposition to the dark shade of the skin pulls the viewer’s gaze away from the surrounding mixture of primary mid-tones in much of the piece. This emphasizes the eyes and their respective expressions: the child looking at its mother, the woman looking upward.
But it is the presentation of the subject matter in this painting that demonstrates Smoky’s growth as a painter and reveals her progression toward a more expressive style than she was taught in Jacobson’s classroom. It is fortunate that Lullaby can be viewed in conjunction with Mother and Babe, about which Jacobson reflected in 1950, “[It] represents her finest work…archaic angularity of the old Kiowa painting; at the same time, it is very modern.” Painted during the single semester Smoky spent in Jacobson’s classes in 1928), despite similar coloration and decoration, the figures in Mother and Babe are less realistic than those in Lullaby. The mother’s features in Mother and Babe are barely visible and the child’s face is hidden in its cradleboard, while the expression on the mother’s face and the direction of the child’s gaze in Lullaby are important elements to the overall significance of the painting.
At this point in the discussion, it becomes important to determine when Lullaby was executed. It is unfortunate that the Gilcrease Museum has provided only a very general period, “Mid-20th Century”, for the painting. In attempting to pinpoint a more specific timeframe, biographical information on Smoky provided by Gunlog Fur states that she left the University of Oklahoma in 1928 to raise a family and, perhaps more importantly, when she left, she gave up painting to pursue beadwork because it was a more acceptable art form for Kiowa women of that era. However, both Indian Worshipper and Kiowa Family (Figs. 3 and 4) are dated 1930 in Smoky’s own writing, and the museums that currently own them (McNay Art Museum and GilcreaseMuseum, respectively) accept it as a valid date. From this, it can be surmised that Smoky did continue to paint, at least for a time, after she left UO and the tutelage of Oscar Jacobson. Finally, based on the paint colors, particularly the deep brown of the skin tones, and the more representational drawing of the figures in Indian Worshipper, Kiowa Family and Lullaby, it can be conjectured that Lullaby was created in that post-Jacobson period as well. Therefore, Lullaby, along with the others, can be regarded as an example of the artistic progress Smoky made after she ended her formal training.
Although all three of these later works appear to have more realistic elements than Mother and Babe, it is the expression of emotion present in Lullaby that sets it apart from all of the other examples of Smoky’s work offered here. The woman’s upraised arms, the beseeching expression on her upturned face, especially the eyes that Smoky, through configuration and color choices has manipulated to be a focal point in this work combine to convey that emotion.
Surely, there is more happening in this painting than the singing of a simple, soothing lullaby. The viewer cannot help but wonder who the woman is looking at so intently and what she is seeking from that being. In this work, Smoky seems determined to break free of the patterned and predictable methodology Jacobson espoused to say something to the viewer about the people she portrays, to say that their lives were about more than rites and dances and customs. It is in this endeavor that Smoky takes definite steps toward a more meaningful style of painting, toward art that, in both method and content, goes beyond the depiction of Native traditions she had been trained by Jacobson to fashion.
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