Untitled, 1938

This large abstract painting from April 1938 represents an early and brief foray into expressionism. Despite the fleeting nature of this shift in Ray’s style, the philosophy of expressionism, namely to depict the subjective emotions or experiences that objects excite within a person, remained important to her. Ray’s later work with children, which aimed to facilitate their free expression, shows her sensitivity to the psychological complexity of interacting with objects. Her teacher Hans Hofmann believed that an artistic medium—painting, drawing, sculpture—was the means by which ideas and emotions are given visible form. When Ray left for Florida to care for her mother, she left the painting at the Hofmann School of Fine Arts due to its large size. During Hofmann’s popular Friday night lectures, this painting would have been viewed by the avant garde painters of New York, including Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Clement Greenberg.