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Banana Tree

Maker Henrietta Shore (American, 1880 - 1963)

Collections

American Print Selections

ClassificationsPRINTS

Daten.d.

Mediumlithographs

Dimensions7 9/16 x 6 in. (19.2 x 15.2 cm.) sheet: 8 x 9 in. (20.3 x 22.9 cm.)

InscribedSigned: Banana Tree / 25 Henrietta Shore

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of the Ledler Foundation

Status

Not on view

Label TextIn 1933, Henrietta Shore wrote that "to be true to nature one must abstract. Nature does not waste her forms." In keeping with her theory, she reduced the banana tree in this print to its elemental forms-a pinwheel of the tree's fronds and a cluster of curvilinear bananas that seem to emerge from the trunk.

After 1913, Shore did not date her work. Believing that an artist should grow, she felt that dates allowed art critics to reduce an artist's stylistic development to an assigned period. However, she could not have created Banana Tree before 1927 because that was the year that she began making lithographs.

Object number86.7.35