Fashion 1955

Media - 2016.38.37 - SAAM-2016.38.37_2 - 141146
Copied Edwin Lawson, Fashion 1955, 1973, colored pencil and graphite on paper, sheet and image: 23 5⁄8 in. × 18 in. (60.0 × 45.7 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson, 2016.38.37

Artwork Details

Title
Fashion 1955
Artist
Date
1973
Location
Dimensions
sheet and image: 23 5⁄8 in. × 18 in. (60.0 × 45.7 cm)
Credit Line
The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson
Mediums Description
colored pencil and graphite on paper
Classifications
Keywords
  • Figure female — full length
Object Number
2016.38.37
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2016.38.37

Artwork Description

Little is known about Edwin Lawson, but his images invite questions about the stories that live within artworks after an artist is gone. Lawson’s widow found a cache of artworks showing a masculine-looking figure presented in glamorous feminine attire, hairstyles, and makeup. Despite the difference between her husband’s everyday appearance and that shown in the drawings, she understood them to be self-portraits. Lawson’s self-reimaginings present a moment in which empathy becomes an imaginative act, a foray into the soul-searching of a person whose physical body and interior identity remained at odds in a society that stigmatized and punished alternative gender identities.
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)

Exhibitions

Media - 2016.38.43R-V - SAAM-2016.38.43R-V_2 - 126225
We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection
July 1, 2022–March 26, 2023
Smithsonian American Art Museum
We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, their creativity and bold self-definition became major forces in American art. The exhibition features recent gifts to the museum from two generations of collectors, Margaret Z. Robson and Douglas O. Robson.