Spring Fete

Dan Lutz
Spring Fete
Gouache and ink on paper, 1944
22 x 28 inches
Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation
1980.048

Spring Fete exhibits the sober lyricism that characterized Dan Lutz’s work. He uses luminous color to heighten the rhythm of form and to intensify the fundamental organization of the painting, a black outline to define free brushwork, strong contrasts of light and dark, and the use of single sweeps of a brush to build-up form in the manner of the School of Paris. The painting nevertheless seemingly looks back to the turn-of-the century neo-paganism of the American Symbolists Charles Stetson and Frank DuMond. It was not the perceived world that motivated Lutz, but rather, his emotional response to internal visions, placing his work well within the tradition of American imaginative or visionary painting.