Girl Painting at Kitchen Table, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Girl Painting at Kitchen Table, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girl Painting at Kitchen Table, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-22A86C

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A girl in a teal sweater and navy skirt sits hunched over a chrome-edged kitchen table, working a small watercolor set with a thin brush and the total concentration that adults reserve for tax forms. The kitchen belongs to the 1950s in every detail: chrome-and-yellow vinyl dinette chairs, patterned linoleum floor, curtains printed with the stylized utensil motifs that designers of that decade considered a sophisticated nod to the room's function. Someone has tied an orange ribbon in her hair, which signals that this is an occasion of some kind, or simply that it was a Sunday. The watercolor set is the flat plastic kind sold at dime stores, with a half-dozen dried cakes of color that produce, under the best conditions, something between mud and a pale echo of the intended shade. In 1950s America, giving a child a watercolor set and a kitchen table was considered a complete arts education, and no one who held that belief felt any doubt about it.

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