Commuter's Fantasy - from the "Fantasies" series

Lamar G. Baker

This Depression-era lithograph is from Lamar Baker's series Fantasies. A clock's hour hand pointing to nine is attached to a ring in the commuter's nose, like a bull's nose ring used to control the animal. A twisting rail turns into a snake as it loops through a train door. The 3287 locomotive emerges from another clock with numerals VI and VIII.

Lamar Baker, painter, printmaker, and graphic artist, was born in 1908 in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied at the High Institute of Art in Columbus and the University of Georgia under Ben Shute. In 1935 he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League, studying printmaking under Kenneth Hayes Miller, Rico Lebrun, and Harry Sternberg. In 1942, Baker won a Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship that enabled him to travel through Mississippi and Louisiana. He worked as a commercial artist for RKO Pictures in New York until 1951, when he returned to Georgia, where continued to work until his death in Talbotton in 1994.

Baker is represented in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Columbus Museum, Georgia; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; the National Academy of Design, the New York Public Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.