On the Death of My Father

Shelly Terman Canton's On the Death of My Father is an allegory of American life and death consisting of strange creatures of the imagination arranged on an irregular cruciform shape. At the center, a skeletal figure astride a monstrous mount appears about to plunge a needle-like lance downward into the distorted body of an aged man, perhaps symbolizing the artist's father, whose bowed bald head, folded wings, and leg bones visible as if through transparent flesh suggest the death state. Fantastic creatures, half-human and half-animal, clamber along his side like agents of coming decomposition, and similar beings cavort on the right "arm" of the composition. On the left, a masked creature exhibits a wheel-like body and a series of sketchy legs suggesting the relentless routine motion of a machine. Triumphant above the assemblage of grotesqueries is the stumpy figure of a grinning embodiment of patriotic fervor; wearing a paper hat that resembles a veteran's cap, he bears a tiny American flag in his outstretched hand, above which a stylized arrow points downward toward the spector of apocalypse he rides.

The death of the artist's father, businessman Mandel A. Terman, in 1968 coincided with a period of profound political and social turmoil across the United States. Terman believed deeply in liberal ideals and the betterment of the world, and brought liberal activists such as artist Rockwell Kent and actor Paul Robeson to his home. Canton embraced her father's ideals and devoted much of her art-making to satirizing injustice and denouncing humanity's capacity for evil. On the Death of My Father records her grief at her father's passing and her passionate concern for contemporary events. The flag-waving figure at the top of the image, for example, caricatures the entrenched patriotism of supporters of the Vietnam War, which in 1968 reached a crisis of military failure in the field and popular disaffection at home, while the wheel on the left may represent the blind power of the military machine. Moreover, Mandel Terman's death occurred within the few short weeks between the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. While Terman was Jewish, these national leaders' deaths are suggested in the cruciform composition, with its evocation of Christian sacrifice. Canton's reflections on the death of her parent draw on this larger context and a national mood of conflict, questioning, and dread.

Canton's delicate lines, selective use of dense dark areas, and fantastic symbolic vocabulary link her to such printmaking contemporaries as Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) and to Mauricio Lasansky (born 1922), with whom she briefly studied early in her career. On the Death of My Father is one of several prints in which Canton also drew directly on the works of Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), who satirized human vanity and sin in allegorical scenes peopled by grotesque creatures that combine objects and human and animal body parts. For Canton, the catastrophes of 1968 warranted an updated interpretation of the biblical apocalypse.

Shelly Canton 1930/1987 [sic]: Drawings and Prints. (exh. cat., Fairweather Hardin Gallery). Chicago, Illinois: Fairweather Hardin Gallery, 1987. [This impression no. 8/25 illustrated on page accompanying the conclusion of the catalogue's biography of the artist]