The Dybbuk

Chicago-born artist Robert Natkin rose to prominence in the late 1960s with improvisational abstract paintings that juxtapose shapes and letters against textured fields of muted tones and patches of dots. The Dybukk, whose title refers to the dead souls of Jewish folklore that attach themselves to the bodies of living people, is a prime example of Natkin’s scattering of textures, patterns, and shapes that combine the playfulness of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky’s work with the palette of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard’s paintings.