Exciting Event in Blue: Four Wild Men, Barking Dog, Perched Bird and Construction, 1939-1942

Bill Traylor was inspired by the architecture of Montgomery, Alabama, and research by Fred Baron and Jeffrey Wolf suggests that some of the artist's delineated constructions drew from the 1885 Court Square Fountain by Frederick MacMonnies, visible from the doorstep where Traylor worked (High Museum of Art, Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Atlanta, 2012), p. 25). The abstracted basin-like central element in this piece perhaps references the Court Square landmark. Additionally, the wild, graphite hairstyles of the lower figures in the composition bear a resemblance to those of the figures in Untitled (Man, Woman, and Dog) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (acc. no. 1986.65.199), which has been dated to 1939. The present lot was likely rendered around that same time.