Charles Green Shaw American, 1892-1974

Charles Green Shaw’s Untitled, c. 1934, exemplifies the artist’s lifelong commitment to formal and material experimentation. Drawing new inspiration from his first trip to Paris where he encountered the work of European Modernists Pablo Picasso, George Braque, and Paul Cézanne, Shaw strove to generate a uniquely American modernist aesthetic characterized by a pursuit of pure abstraction.

Composed of a group of two-dimensional, abstract shapes, the present work is evidence of Shaw’s early Cubist investigations that evolved into the “plastic polygon” style that defined his work for the remainder of the decade. Many of Shaw’s paintings from this period depict household objects, including telephones, guitars, and still lifes—subjects also popular with Picasso, Braque, and Cézanne. In the present work, the colorful polygons form a figure evocative of a teapot, composed of a bipedal stand, angled handle, and hinged-open lid. Shaw paired fine black and blue lines with rounded shapes, finding parallels in other developments in European and American abstraction, including Joan Miró’s Surrealist experiments with line and biomorphic form and Alexander Calder’s kinetic mobiles connecting a network of wire to flat geometric elements. Shaw not only pushed the boundaries of form and style but also incorporated unusual materials—in this case, sand—into his pieces. Here, the sand serves as a framing device, anticipating further experimentations the artist would later conduct to efface the space between painting and sculpture.