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In 1970, a painting by William Staples very similar to this one was included in a group exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The show’s name came to define an emerging trend in American painting: Lyrical Abstraction. Through this style, artists moved away from the hard edges of minimalism and geometric abstraction in search of emotion, color, and beauty. With his painting’s sharply defined squares set on an atmospheric background, Staples provided a balance of these tendencies toward hardness and softness, which otherwise might be seen as incompatible opposites. His painting’s numerical title likewise might suggest something as precise as a date or an inventory number, or as poetic as a personal system translating visual compositions into digits.

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