THIS PAINTING IN THE GALLERY COLLECTION AND NOT FOR SALE AT THIS TIME.
After McCloy completed his military service in 1945, he returned to teach at the University of Wisconsin (1946-1948). This painting was completed at that time - upon McCloy's return from war, and a stark and dramatic change of direction from his pre-war. mild, and comfortable, regionalist subjects.
This painting symbolizes The great Divide or "The Partition" that went on in India during 1947/48. (More can be read about the Partition online - or in the description of McCloys painting "The Partition" below.)
Bold, powerful, encaustic painting on masonite with perfectly complimentary, original period frame.
Exhibition Label verso, as well as Wm. A. McCloy signature, and UW Art Department indications.
Deaccessioned from Slater Museum, Norwich, CT in Oct. 2008 (what were they thinking?).

About the Old Northwest Territory Art Exhibition:(label on back)
Open to professional artists in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, the Old Northwest Territory Art Exhibit began as a juried show (1947–49) and became invitational (1950–51), with cash prizes awarded every year. While originally inviting oil painting, watercolors, prints, sculpture, and ceramics, by the second year exhibit organizers limited entries to oil painting, watercolors, and prints, though in 1950 drawings were also included. Jurors—Max Weber among them—were selected from around the country and from different areas of the arts: practicing artists, critics, teachers, curators, architects, and art historians.

About the Partition:
"In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered."