
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
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)