Minnie Evans had dreams and visions from age four, but did no art until age 46, and rarely signed, dated or added titles until her sixties or seventies. But she lived to 95, and did go back through her work, adding signatures, dates (or her best guess) and occasionally titles (not many). So dates are helpful in comparing her technique (which grew over the decades) but aren't precise.

This one's especially baffling. Biographer Mary Lyons captioned it thus:

Untitled [atomic bomb]. Shortly before her wedding, Minnie dreamed
of airplanes that she called "mosquito hawks." 11.75" x 9". Courtesy
of Luise Ross Gallery, NY, and the Minnie Evans Estate.

Minnie married 1908/12/16. Planes had recently been invented, in 1903, but not bombs dropped from planes. That particular horror was still nearly a decade away.

Let's discount Lyons and look only at internal clues. The drawing does seem (in a surreal, indirect way) to be about the atomic bomb: the air's full of weird plane-missile-bird-fish-bombs (mosquito hawks?), and the bizarre central structure looks like a mushroom cloud, down to the spreading ring-cloud at the foot, as the shock wave propagates. But the drawing is twice dated Sept. and thrice 1943. The public first learned of the atomic bomb in August 1945.

So what's really going on here? I don't know.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Painting Dreams: Minnie Evans, Visionary Artist, by Mary E. Lyons, p.17

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