A Merry Christmas from John

In this postcard, John Banting sends his holiday wishes to Mary Reynolds, a Surrealist bookbinder whom he’d befriended upon moving to Paris in the 1930s. Banting’s drawing depicts a mother and child still connected by an umbilical cord, with halos emanating rays like a cartoon sun floating above their disjointed bodies—perhaps a nod to the sacred origins of Christmas, the birth of Christ. Bearing the hallmarks of a quick sketch, the anatomy of the figures is bulbous and distorted in a monstrous fashion, leaving us to wonder if Banton was playing with abstraction in a formal sense or approaching this topic with some irreverence. Perhaps both interests are at play.