Mother and Child

Gregorio Prestopino

This work is done after his painting, created in 1957, which would later be used for the December 17, 1964 cover of The Reporter magazine. Other impressions of this silkscreen with hand-applied color vary greatly, including different colors in the pattern of the mother's blouse, to one without any added color, to another with an all-black background. This image was a part of the Harlem series he focused on in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during which period the 1957 film Harlem Wednesday, by John and Faith Hubley and featuring Prestopino's paintings used as a kind of still-life animation, would debut. (Mother and Child shows at minute 5:13.)

Inspired by the artists of the Ashcan school, social realism, and his own life as the son of working class Sicilian immigrants, Gregorio Prestopino illuminated the lives of everyday people and situations that might otherwise be considered benign, unattractive, or unworthy of deeper consideration. He created a variety of domestic scenes of mothers and children, sometimes just children, that preserve particular moments captured simply, without too much detail in the overall composition. Here, a mother feeds her child at her breast with a look of calm and introspection on her face; a stove in the background is the only suggestion of an interior.