Robert Kushner (Pasadena, California, 1949) is one of the major figures of the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s. His series of collages uses historical musical scores to decorate and ground his compositions. Here, he incorporates pages of musical notes with the poem “The Minstrel” drawn from the 1839 volume of Ladies’ Cabinet Fashion, Music & Romance, which begins “Some suppose that music lingers/Only in the flight of fingers/Others that it ‘sticks i’ the throat/On the quavering of a note.” These drawings of figures, elaborated on collages of antique sheet music and book pages, continue his exploration of drawing images in ink and oil paint over found historical papers. The printed pages that Kushner has used span the globe and the centuriesmany were collected on his travels or were gifts from friends. Kushner draws from the models in his studio, directly onto his collage of pages, introducing gold leaf and areas of color. With classically-inspired figures influenced by the drawings of Matisse, Kushner’s finished works are deeply romantic, and offer several layers of possible interpretation: there is both the literal reading of the underlying text and the opportunity to decode the compositional and spatial logic of the patterned and gilded elements.