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Michael @mdstamper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

“Escape to Nowhere” by Pat Trivigno (American) - Oil on masonite / 1946 - Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, Louisiana) #WomenInArt #PatTrivigno #PasqualeTrivigno #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #ModernArt #AmericanModernism #Trivigno #Expressionism #OgdenMuseum #OilPainting #art #artText #arte

$Painted in 1946, “Escape to Nowhere” belongs to a pivotal moment in Pat Trivigno’s life. Born Pasquale Trivigno in New York City in 1922 to Italian immigrant parents, he earned his M.A. from Columbia University that same year and soon moved to New Orleans, joining the art faculty at Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1947. He would teach there for more than four decades and become an important influence on generations of artists. Tulane describes his work as combining disciplined structure and brilliant color with influences ranging from Cubism and Mexican art to Surrealism and emerging abstraction. In this oil painting, an elongated figure rushes across a fiery field of orange, rust, red, and gold. The female body twists upward while one long leg thrusts dramatically to the right, giving her the momentum of running, leaping, or desperately fleeing. Her torso is fragmented into jagged planes of turquoise, blue, green, cream, and black that seem to break apart as she moves. Both arms rise above her head, with long angular hands overlapping. Her head tilts backward, partly concealed by the hands, intensifying a sense of strain or alarm. On either side of the woman, clusters of much smaller pale figures also appear to hurry through the landscape. Rough brushwork, scraped lines, and overlapping patches of pigment make the entire surface feel unstable and charged with motion. The blend of modernist styles amplify the urgency of the woman rather than dissolve it. Her fractured body seems almost unable to remain intact as it races forward, while the tiny surrounding figures echo the larger figure’s flight. Painted immediately after World War II by an artist who had recently returned from wartime military service, the title “Escape to Nowhere” makes the motion especially unsettling. Escape implies hope for somewhere safer, yet “nowhere” denies that destination with a woman propelled forward through a world that offers no obvious refuge.$

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