Composition With Women is 50 inches high by 40 inches wide. It was painted in 1966.
I am especially glad that you have acquired
Composition With Women for the Evansville Museum. It is the only painting that still exists from 1966. I destroyed all the other pictures painted that year. This is the sole picture that was acceptable to me. So you have acquired the one picture that exists to show what my painting concerns were in 1966. It is an important picture to me, and marks the turning point between the loose calligraphic style I employed until then and the slower more determined application that you see in
An American Rug.
The quotations in
Composition With Women, reading clockwise from upper left (at eleven o'clock), are:
King Haakon, The King of Norway (who figures also in
The French Rug, painted ... in 1970. ...
Victorine Meurend, by Edouard Manet, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Mrs Robert Scott Moncriefe, by Sir Henry Raeburn, in the Edinburgh Museum
a 19th-century public image, from a cigarette card, English
the horseman from a photograph, a private image.
(George Deem, letter to William Gumberts, October 22, 1975)
Note: George Deem was mistaken in thinking that
Composition with Women is the sole "picture that exists to show what my painting concerns were in 1966."
TradeMarkgeorgedeem.org/works/view/Trade-Mark-1966-01-01is another painting from that year that may be held tomark "the turning point between the loose calligraphic style I employed until then and (a) slower more determined application..."
Trade Mark was immediately purchased when the new painting was consigned to the Henri Gallery in Washington DC in 1966 and not destroyed by the artist with "all the other pictures painted that year." The painting is now in the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut.
