Top Man

May Stevens

1975

Acrylic on canvas

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Top Man is a powerful example from May Stevens’ Big Daddy series featuring a grotesque caricature of her father, Ralph Stanley Stevens. The pasty, doughy, bald male figure is seated nude with his arms crossed, cloaked only in an American flag that is draped over his shoulders. Seated on Big Daddy’s lap is his pet bulldog, whose folds of pale skin reiterate the wrinkled man’s face, and whose tongue is clearly a stand-in for the aged man’s phallus. The character of Big Daddy, created at the height of the Vietnam War, is intended to be an embodiment of ignorance, bigotry and racism in America at the time. Top Man and the Big Daddy seri