Confused Memory
Artist
Cady Wells
(American, 1904 - 1954)
Date1946
Mediumwatercolor on paper
DimensionsImage: 14 1/4 × 10 1/2 in. (36.2 × 26.7 cm)
Support: 15 × 11 1/8 in. (38.1 × 28.3 cm)
Mat: 28 × 21 in. (71.1 × 53.3 cm)
Frame: 29 5/8 × 22 11/16 × 1 5/8 in. (75.2 × 57.6 × 4.1 cm)
Support: 15 × 11 1/8 in. (38.1 × 28.3 cm)
Mat: 28 × 21 in. (71.1 × 53.3 cm)
Frame: 29 5/8 × 22 11/16 × 1 5/8 in. (75.2 × 57.6 × 4.1 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineMuseum acquisition, before 1951
Object number100.23P
DescriptionBlack ground with sinuous linear forms, some suggestive of figures. Washes of red, orange, blue and green.eMuseum Notes
Wells returned from World War II in 1945 unable to paint, complaining of what he called the “damn octopus of readjustment.” He also grew increasingly preoccupied by Los Alamos National Laboratories and its atomic experiments only miles from his home, just north of Santa Fe. Wells’s growing fears drove him to Taos to stay with a friend, Rebecca James, and to places as far as the Virgin Islands. As Wells’s socio-political anxieties grew, his forms began to morph. His paintings took on increasingly darker tones and abstract forms with smaller geometric, amoebae-like, or surrealist components. Confused Memory epitomizes these changes.
On View
Not on view
