American Art Collaborative

Reflecting Langlais’s training as a painter, this early wood relief is a classic presentation of figure and ground. The larger, dark wood pieces read as an indefinite, receding space, while the numerous lighter segments are jammed together to create the definable details of the subject. For a 1960s audience Langlais’s title, Have Gun Will Travel, would have summoned a humorous “portrait” of Paladin, the gunslinging protagonist of a popular television show with the same title.