Study for "Crime Meets Crime"

Associated with the Surrealist movement, Onslow-Ford depicted visionary landscapes in limitless space to suggest inner worlds and the unconscious. His background in science and a ten-year stint in the British navy account for some of the characteristics of the imagery he developed while in Paris in the late 1930s, such as the suggestion of multidimensional space and the use of connecting lines reminiscent of navigational charts. Onslow-Ford moved to New York in 1940. The following year, he gave a series of lectures on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research, which had a major influence on Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and the development of Abstract Expressionism. The present work is a study for a painting of the same name (collection of Lucid Art Foundation).