Untitled (Free!)

James Castle

after 1960

Color of unknown origin and soot on off-white wax-coated cardboard with roughened surface (commercially printed Home Dairies vanilla ice cream carton)

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Castle’s fascination with text and commercial advertising included a fondness for isolating single words within a composition. Here, he highlights a common marketing refrain—Free!—an enticement that Castle likely chose for both formal and conceptual reasons. With the word centered on the sheet, Castle adds an unusual compositional structure, a fractured, Cubist-like pictorial space that mimics the effect of a kaleidoscope, an optical instrument that alters visual images into abstract geometric arrangements of colored elements. Castle was intrigued by the kaleidoscope from childhood, and, according to family members, possessed severa