Photo By Gail

The ghostly scaffolding, swooping calligraphic lines, and blue and yellow washes of The Town Of The Poor (1951) most likely depict the view from Sonya Sekula’s downtown New York studio, which she shared with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. “Looking outside my window,” wrote this Swiss painter in poet, an immigrant to the United States, “I think of all the contemporary American poets and artists who represent their outlook on this strange country and I find myself beginning to realize that I saw in one of them. I should begin to speak of … a future that we begin to feel underneath the current of war and strife and uncertainty.”

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.