Deer and Cactus

The Danish-born modernist Kai Gotzsche painted this work in the American Southwest, where he spent time in the 1920s, often in the company of the writer D. H. Lawrence and a fellow Danish painter, Knud Merrild, at the Taos home of the art patron Mabel Dodge. Abstracted in a decorative manner, with simplified forms and echoes of a few key shapes, the composition is in keeping with the elegant Art Deco style that was internationally popular by the mid-1920s, particularly in architecture, decorative arts, and graphics.