A59 Artist Unknown, poster announcing Art Peau-Rouge d’aujourd’hui, 1935. Tempera on paper, 20 in. x 13 in. Courtesy of the Musée du quai Branly, 7AP/16 – Archives privées: Fonds Paul Coze et DA000199/32288 : Archives du Musée de l’Homme, Série C : Manifestations organisées par le MH 1930–1980. Based on the style and subject, this poster was almost certainly painted by Mary Ellen (Diné, dates unknown). Dorothy Dunn wrote that Ellen often painted, “side by side in a single scene, the temporal personages of the Navajo world and the extremely conventionalized plants of the sandpaintings. By intensifying colors of the plants and rooting them to earth, while lowering the color value sand immobilizing the action of the human figures, she approached compatibility in such diverse components” (301).
