Fugue

Hughie Lee-Smith worked for the WPA in Cleveland, where he produced black-and-white prints. It was not until he entered the Brandywine Workshop at the age of seventy-eight that he experimented with color printmaking and offset lithography. Since he was used to manipulating colors in his oil and acrylic paintings, he worked closely with Allan Edmunds to understand how to strategically organize and register fixed layers of colored ink. Thanks to Edmunds's guidance, Lee-Smith achieved a painterly expression of form in 'Fugue'. While "fugue" can refer to a type of musical composition, it is also a dreamlike state of consciousness in which a person begins a new life after suffering memory loss. Lee-Smith appears to allude to this surreal experience by placing two figures against a bizarre setting of red curtains, twisted trees, a geometric building, and a vivid purple-blue sky,