Study for the Saint and the Sinner #4 - Fables series

June Claire Wayne

In the mid-1950s Wayne and UCLA's philosophy department head Abraham Kaplan began a suite of fables, for which Kaplan would write the fables and Wayne would create lithographs as illustrations. However, Kaplan's work was interrupted, and Wayne abandoned the project to begin new ones.

This early, rare drawing was done utilizing a "Flit gun", a hand-pumped insecticide sprayer used to dispense Flit, a brand-name insecticide widely used against flies and mosquitoes.

Wayne comments on this image on page 116 of her raisonné: "The fable is a good one: a sinner is caught off guard by the arrival of the Messiah at the gates of the city. He mounts his donkey and flees in the opposite direction."

Though it was exhibited in four major venues in the late 1950s, this drawing is not illustrated in the catalogue raisonné. Cataloger Robert Conway notes: "Despite it having been exhibited in four important venues, this drawing has not been located. It was most likely destroyed by the artist. Since it and the following entry are numbered in a series of five, we can assume that at least three other unrecorded studies are also lost."

The drawing was exhibited at the deYoung Museum, 1956; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1958; L.A. County Museum, 1959.

When a surprised June Wayne saw this again at the gallery in January of 2011 she commented that she had also done a painting of this subject which was destroyed by water from a leak in her studio and this drawing was the only record of the study. The drawing had been in the collection of Santa Barbara Museum director and Wayne's dear friend Donald Bear.