Hey Good Looking, What's Cooking?

Today is Cook Something Bold and Pungent Day!

How about some radish stew (with sauerkraut on the side, of course) from artist Ivan Albright's Farmer's Kitchen?

The old woman, her manic cat, and her stove are scrunched together in the jumbled corner of a barely glimpsed kitchen. The picture space closes unrelentingly on her, with her legs and the stove cropped by the frame.…

With an overall color scheme of blue, gray, pink, and red, Albright creates a confusion of patterns that badger the eye, from the conflicting designs of the floor coverings, to the floating flowers of the wallpaper, to the white-spattered dress and floral apron of the figure.… In the midst of this, the farm woman's hands and face are relentlessly described, a painstaking record of furrows and creases and arthritic swellings.

In this work Albright's morbidity sounds a note of social commentary, for it was painted during the Depression, under the sponsorship of a federal art program in Illinois. The despondent, resigned old woman and her not-so-genteel poverty are poignant signs of the time.

Source: William Kloss. Treasures from the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

Pictured: Ivan Albright, 1897–1983, The Farmer's Kitchen, about 1934, oil, 36 x 30 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.