The feminist New York printmaker and avant-garde painter Minna Citron had an exhibition in London in May 1958 at the Drian Gallery. This exhibition anticipated Jackson Pollock's posthumous and highly influential exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery that September. Our painting is from that period, but was apparently purchased in New York.

In the early 1940s, Citron had joined Atelier 17, a printmaking school and studio in New York, to whence the school had moved from Paris during World War Two. There, she encountered Chagall, André Masson, and Jacques Lipchitz. Jackson Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko also attended. Citron began experimenting with new styles and innovative techniques, embracing chance, spontaneity, and mistakes in her work and relying on improvisation or automatism, a method consistent with the work of other artists at Atelier 17 and perhaps influenced by Citron's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and the unconscious, which she had become familiar with in the 1920s. In 1945, she said of her early feminist representational subjects that 'something was lacking, and i decided to break away from representational drawing to seek more dynamic creative expression in line, form, texture and above all, color.' (Citron Monograph, 1950, Karl Kup). 'My progression from Representational to Abstract Art was consistent with the transition through which many American artists passed in the 1940's. The warp and woof of my efforts, whether verbal or visual, painted, pasted or printed, is people, or the situations in which they find themselves.'