Light and Shadow

John Warner Nortons Light and Shadow from around 1924 is an oil painting that exemplifies the Chicago-based artists approach to mural decoration translated into the easel painting format, combining the decorative clarity and architectural sense of mural painting with the intimacy of a cabinet-sized canvas. Norton, who was one of the most accomplished mural painters in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, developed a style that combined the lessons of Italian Renaissance fresco with American Scene subject matter and a modernist approach to color and composition. Light and Shadow, with its allegorical title and its treatment of natural phenomena as decorative elements in a carefully organized composition, demonstrates the mural painters habit of thinking in terms of broad areas of color and clear spatial relationships rather than the more intimate focus of conventional easel painting. The year 1924 places this work in the period when Norton was establishing his reputation as a muralist through commissions for the Logan Square post office, the ceiling of the dining room at the Cliff Dwellers Club, and other public spaces in Chicago, and the decorative clarity of Light and Shadow clearly reflects the compositional habits developed in these large-scale projects. The oil on canvas medium allows Norton to achieve the chromatic richness and surface quality of his mural work in a format that can be appreciated at close range, making the public art of mural painting available to the private viewer.

Nortons easel paintings demonstrate the influence of mural painting on American art in the 1920s and 1930s, a period when public art was a major force in American culture. Light and Shadow exemplifies the decorative clarity and architectural sense that mural painters brought to easel painting, influencing the development of American muralism and the Federal Art Projects of the 1930s.

An oil painting by Norton from around 1924 demonstrating the decorative clarity and architectural sense of mural painting translated into easel format, with allegorical treatment of light and shadow in the compositional habits of a practicing muralist.