R. Buckminster Fuller invited Emerson Woelffer, along with several other faculty members from the Institute of Design in Chicago, to spend the summer of 1949 teaching painting at Black Mountain College. In this work, a group of loosely depicted personages appear to link arms and shift their gazes in ways that form an elaborate circle. In addition to the high-keyed palette's evocation of pleasure and happiness, Last Internment is notable for the way in which it combines biomorphic figuration with allover composition, seemingly brokering an arrangement of European and American modernism.
Emerson Woelffer, Last Internment, 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas. Courtesy of Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles.