Literature:

Charles C. Hill, Canadian Painting in the Thirties, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1975, page 95 and page 108, plate 68, for the 1937 canvas of this subject (collection of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

Mary E. MacLachlan, Paraskeva Clark, Paintings and Drawings, Dalhousie University, Halifax, 1982, pages 26-28 and Fig.14, reproduced.

Jane Lind, Perfect Red: The Life of Paraskeva Clark, Toronto, 2009, pages 111-114 and Plates 19-20 for the canvas and the pen drawing for a canvas of Petroushka.

Note:

This painting was instigated by a newspaper account of the murder of five strikers by the Chicago police and, as Hill notes, depicts a puppet show in which a puppet policeman, egged on by the ‘Capitalists’, beats a fallen worker while the audience naively laughs. Hill mentions that “The Futurist arrangement of the apartment houses, like a theatre backdrops, heightens the drama of oppression and resistance.”

MacLachlan reproduces this lot and writes that: “In two studies for Petroushka the evolution of the final composition can be traced. In the first (Fig.14) Paraskeva has established the basic design: the apartment quarters loom up at extreme angles with their axes converging at the central puppet stand. The policeman and capitalist puppets incline in the same direction in this version and behind them is a distant view of neighbouring courtyards and green trees.”