The Sink

1934-5
Type: Painting / Oil on canvas

ES 14

Heckscher
Harn
Naples
Sheldon

After returning from the fall 1934 stay in Yaddo, Slobodkina found work at a polychrome textile factory in Clifton (the job was originally offered to Ilya). She lived with her family in Clifton in an apartment that embodied “lower-middle class mentality” and would go home to the city and Bolotowsky on weekends. It was in this Clifton apartment that Slobodkina produced The Sink. “The only good thing I can credit to the stay in that little apartment, is the first cubist-inspired painting I produced there. I had been silently gathering information about Cubist theories, and left alone one weekend (dreadful snowstorm, I think), promptly produced a fractured image of the sink in the little Clifton bathroom. It was quite a breakthrough for me, on my own. Ilya never took to Cubism in its pure form” (1) .

“The Sink (1934) is a flat, painterly jigsaw puzzle of simple, interlocking shapes describing a sink, basin, faucet, and pipes amid a patter of earth-toned trapezoids and scoop shapes” (2).

In Exhibit:

Dimensions: H: 27  W: 16   

Exhibition History:

Tufts show, 1992.
Heckscher Show, 2008
Traveling Show, 2008-2010

Catalog #: SF_0924