While Perkins was devoted to an art based on appearances, his interest in abstraction is evident in a number of examples, including Mother and Child (fig. 15), completed in the late 1940s. This piece retains the voluptuous forms of his female figures of the late 1940s, but its masses are conceived with a more formal geometry. Moreover, here Perkins defined the facial features with line rather than volume. An intriguing untitled work of about 1947 (fig. 16) may show the beginnings of this trend toward abstraction. The pose of the kneeling figure, with its head nestled in the crook of its wrist, resembles a famous crouching, sixteenth-century écorché figure once given to Michelangelo (Berlin, Staatliches Museen; Paris, Ecole des beaux-arts). Yet, the machinelike, geometric forms of the figure’s arm and leg are reminiscent of works by Henry Moore, the pre-eminent sculptor of his generation. Perkins would have observed firsthand Moore’s typical synthesis between abstraction and naturalism at the English artist’s first major exhibition in the United States, which came to the Art Institute in the spring of 1947. 37

Stylistic Maturity

Perkins’s formal experimentation found resolution in a totally original, emotionally powerful series of heads and figures that date from the late 1940s and signal his mature style. One of the first may have been exhibited at the Art Institute’s 1947 “Chicago and Vicinity” exhibition. Perkins, who had rarely been mentioned in the white press, was given a huge boost by Chicago’s best-known artist at the time, Ivan Albright, in his review of the show in the Chicago Herald-American. Albright mentioned Perkins’s Negro Woman as the highlight of the sculptures on display and praised it at the expense of a respected local sculptor and teacher (and perennial exhibitor), Sylvia Shaw Judson, whose sentimental sculpture Lambs was also in the show:

• Up and beyond the rest of the sculpture rises the pure art in the marble head of “Negro Woman” by Perkins. A former newsboy, he chiseled this head out of a piece of stone from a torn down building at 37th and Indiana. It carries the burning humbleness of centuries in his work. There is no shout. It is such fine art that the two bleating lambs standing and mushing on the ground next to it by Sylvia “Boo Peep” Judson could be taken out immediately to the nearest toy counter for child consumption. 38

While Negro Woman cannot be positively identified, it may be the Art Institute’s Portrait of Eva (fig. 3), unmistakably a stylized depiction of Perkins’s wife, with her planar face and prominent cheekbones. The calm perfection of the surface and facial features gives this piece an hypnotic effect. It represents a new phase in Perkins’s work. 39

The year 1947 was a watershed in Perkins’s career. As noted above, IBM purchased Figure at Rest; he exhibited at the Art Institute; and he was the subject of several newspaper articles. This last achievement was perhaps the work of Pollack, who had left the SSCAC to assume the post of public-relations counsel at the Art Institute. The Chicago Tribune reproduced several works (fig. 17), one of which is lost (a monumental portrait of Frederick Douglass). The article shows Seated Figure (fig. 12) and establishes a date for the SSCAC’s kneeling figure (fig. 16), which Perkins is shown carving in the courtyard behind his home at the Ida B. Wells project. 40