Queer Fish

Queer Fish is Mabel Dwight's gently humorous caricature of ogling aquarium visitors and the objects of their interest, which seem to return their stares. Peering intently at each other through the glass barrier of a tank's wall, a well-dressed, portly bald man confronts a large, rotund, bug-eyed grouper with its mouth agape. Each appears not only amazed by the other's physical oddities but shocked by a sense of recognition: clearly, Dwight's title refers equally to the actual fish and to the man. At left, shown from behind and silhouetted against the illuminated tank, a lanky gentleman wearing a fedora and an older couple gaze into the watery world at a swooping ray. The woman's position as she leans over the low railing emphasizes her ample curvaceous posterior, the most prominent of a host of round forms found throughout the composition. Dwight exploited the soft tonalities of the lithographic crayon to emphasize these shapes against contrasting background tones.

Dwight regularly observed people in public places as subjects for her prints. Among her favorite settings was the New York Aquarium, a popular attraction located at the southern tip of Manhattan until it closed in 1941. Her sympathetically humorous interpretations of human nature brought her widespread recognition. Queer Fish was among the first prints published by American Artists Group, a greeting card company dedicated to popularizing American art by publishing fine reproductions of original artworks. It became Dwight's best-known lithograph, especially after it appeared in the annual publication Fine Prints of the Year. In 1939, an impression of this print was shown in the New York World's Fair art exhibition, a survey of contemporary American art. The following year, Gordon Grant made a similar image of aquarium visitors silhouetted against lighted fish tanks The Aquarium (TF 1996.81).

(Re)Presenting Women, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 16, 2001–January 13, 2002.

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2008.Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

 

Kraeft, June. Great American Prints, 1900–1950: 138 Lithographs, Etchings, and Woodcuts. New York: Dover Publications, 1984. Pl. 43.

Johnson, Deborah J. Whistler to Weidenaar: American Prints, 1870–1950. (exh. cat., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design). Providence, Rhode Island: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1987. Pl. 18.

'30s America: Prints from the Milwaukee Art Museum. (exh. cat., Milwaukee Art Museum). Milwaukee, Wisconsin: The Museum, 1991. Pl. 15, p. 23.

Henkes, Robert. American Women Painters of the 1930s and 1940s: The Lives and Works of Ten Artists. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1991. Text pp. 110–11; ill. p. 110.

Robinson, Susan Barnes and John Pirog. Mabel Dwight, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Lithographs. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Text pp. 3, 15, 35, 36, 116–17; pl. 80, p. 117.

An American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum. New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 2001. Text p. 230; ill. p. 229.