Untitled (Mother Playing with Baby),
c. 1950
Lithograph

Gift of Mrs. Archibald Craig
1983.25.2

Intelligently and touchingly appraising her child, a mother dangles a ribbon before it. A self-taught artist, Fletcher Martin had been a lumberjack and professional boxer before turning to socially conscious paintings, murals, and prints. Like many other American artists of his time, he developed his own charmingly naive Picassoid brand of art. His twentieth-century mother and child remind one just a little of Canuti's celestial Madonna and child, where a rosary almost seems like a child's play thing. Can a toy be sacred? Can the sacred without blasphemy be a toy? Mary and her divine Child are of course a paradigm for any mother and child. Can we understand or deal with such power?