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Lot Essay
With its considerable size, three-dimensionality, vibrant colors and arresting imagery, this assemblage stands as one of the quintessential works produced by Dial during this important period of his career.
Born in 1928 in Emelle, Alabama to a thirteen year old single mother, Thornton Dial left school at the age of nine to start working, eventually settling in Bessemer, Alabama, where he was hired by the Pullman-Standard Rail Car Manufacturing Company. He would remain with the company for thirty years, during which time he learned about every factory-manufacturing job required to fabricate and assemble a rail car. Dial's friend and fellow artist Lonnie Holley (b. 1950) believes that his experience with railcars led him to be so comfortable working in scales that would overwhelm other artists. Dial himself commented on his experience at the Pullman manufactory and how it influenced his second career as an artist, saying, "I have learned a whole lot about drawing from my work at the Pullman Factory. Designs was punched out in the iron and steel works: big, beautiful pieces of steel start out with a little design. They drawed out the designs for the templates on paper, then make them on wood, then bring them to be punched into iron to go on the train car. I got to seeing how things you draw out can be the design for everything. When I went to making art on plywood, I drawed it out first with a pencil, and after that I put on the other materials, stuff I find or stuff I have, like the steel, carpet and old tin, and then I paint it. After while I just went to building my pieces right on to the board. I didn't need to draw them out. Cutting out tin and carpet and stuff come natural like drawing. The mind do the imagining. I got where I could bend and twist the old materials as beautiful as I could draw it out with a pencil" (Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf, eds., Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial (New York, 2011), pp. 32, 35).
Dial's assemblages, often comprising scraps of metal, fabric, rope and other objects plucked from trash heaps and roadsides, are rooted in traditions developed by those living far from cosmopolitan city centers, particularly the elaborate and creative yard shows found in many rural African American communities in the South. Claiming that he only cares to use items that have been abandoned by others, Dial creates works that are a complex combination of meanings, those associated with the past uses of the discarded scraps, as well as those that arise with his subsequent appropriation. It is tempting to cite as sources for the artist's assemblages famous twentieth century masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Joseph Beuys and Pablo Picasso, who all used found objects during their careers. Perhaps the most similar parallel can be drawn to Dial's near contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, who, like Dial, was born in the rural South and whose Glut series from the 1980s was created with items found near his Texas hometown. However, having never visited a museum, it appears that Dial's inspirations are rooted firmly in a distinctly vernacular tradition, drawing an interesting parallel between academic and folk, or Outsider, art (Cubbs and Metcalf, eds., p. 57; Joanne Cubbs, Mark Lawrence McPhail, and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr., "The Aesthetics of (In)Visibility: Thornton Dial and the Politics of Art," Thornton Dial in the 21st Century (Atlanta, 2005), p. 63).
Depicting a tiger embracing a large fish, Oh What a Big Fish employs the theme of the tiger, one revisited countless times throughout Dial's career. The tiger is a self-reflective figure loosely based on Thornton's own life and the challenges facing African American men in the South and the ever-present desire for social progress. The 'cat' is an identity used with some frequency in African American rhetorical tradition (as in the 'hepcat' Jazz musicians), but a likely more personal inspiration for Dial was a local hero named Perry L. 'Tiger' Thompson, a former prizefighter, radio personality and labor organizer who had also worked at the Pullman-Standard factory. In the 1950s, Thompson attempted unsuccessfully to run for lieutenant governor of Alabama against one of the state's most notorious racists (Cubbs and Metcalf, eds., pp. 38-39). In 1993, the same year that the present lot was painted, the tiger was the subject of a groundbreaking exhibition, Image of the Tiger, that was held currently in New York at the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Born in 1928 in Emelle, Alabama to a thirteen year old single mother, Thornton Dial left school at the age of nine to start working, eventually settling in Bessemer, Alabama, where he was hired by the Pullman-Standard Rail Car Manufacturing Company. He would remain with the company for thirty years, during which time he learned about every factory-manufacturing job required to fabricate and assemble a rail car. Dial's friend and fellow artist Lonnie Holley (b. 1950) believes that his experience with railcars led him to be so comfortable working in scales that would overwhelm other artists. Dial himself commented on his experience at the Pullman manufactory and how it influenced his second career as an artist, saying, "I have learned a whole lot about drawing from my work at the Pullman Factory. Designs was punched out in the iron and steel works: big, beautiful pieces of steel start out with a little design. They drawed out the designs for the templates on paper, then make them on wood, then bring them to be punched into iron to go on the train car. I got to seeing how things you draw out can be the design for everything. When I went to making art on plywood, I drawed it out first with a pencil, and after that I put on the other materials, stuff I find or stuff I have, like the steel, carpet and old tin, and then I paint it. After while I just went to building my pieces right on to the board. I didn't need to draw them out. Cutting out tin and carpet and stuff come natural like drawing. The mind do the imagining. I got where I could bend and twist the old materials as beautiful as I could draw it out with a pencil" (Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf, eds., Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial (New York, 2011), pp. 32, 35).
Dial's assemblages, often comprising scraps of metal, fabric, rope and other objects plucked from trash heaps and roadsides, are rooted in traditions developed by those living far from cosmopolitan city centers, particularly the elaborate and creative yard shows found in many rural African American communities in the South. Claiming that he only cares to use items that have been abandoned by others, Dial creates works that are a complex combination of meanings, those associated with the past uses of the discarded scraps, as well as those that arise with his subsequent appropriation. It is tempting to cite as sources for the artist's assemblages famous twentieth century masters such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Joseph Beuys and Pablo Picasso, who all used found objects during their careers. Perhaps the most similar parallel can be drawn to Dial's near contemporary, Robert Rauschenberg, who, like Dial, was born in the rural South and whose Glut series from the 1980s was created with items found near his Texas hometown. However, having never visited a museum, it appears that Dial's inspirations are rooted firmly in a distinctly vernacular tradition, drawing an interesting parallel between academic and folk, or Outsider, art (Cubbs and Metcalf, eds., p. 57; Joanne Cubbs, Mark Lawrence McPhail, and Eugene W. Metcalf, Jr., "The Aesthetics of (In)Visibility: Thornton Dial and the Politics of Art," Thornton Dial in the 21st Century (Atlanta, 2005), p. 63).
Depicting a tiger embracing a large fish, Oh What a Big Fish employs the theme of the tiger, one revisited countless times throughout Dial's career. The tiger is a self-reflective figure loosely based on Thornton's own life and the challenges facing African American men in the South and the ever-present desire for social progress. The 'cat' is an identity used with some frequency in African American rhetorical tradition (as in the 'hepcat' Jazz musicians), but a likely more personal inspiration for Dial was a local hero named Perry L. 'Tiger' Thompson, a former prizefighter, radio personality and labor organizer who had also worked at the Pullman-Standard factory. In the 1950s, Thompson attempted unsuccessfully to run for lieutenant governor of Alabama against one of the state's most notorious racists (Cubbs and Metcalf, eds., pp. 38-39). In 1993, the same year that the present lot was painted, the tiger was the subject of a groundbreaking exhibition, Image of the Tiger, that was held currently in New York at the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.