Claudette Colbert (1903–1996)

Mary Sully, born Susan Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and the 1940s, created groundbreaking works informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. Working without patronage, in near obscurity, and largely self-taught, Sully produced some two hundred intricately designed and vividly colored drawings that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art. They mix meaningful aspects of her Dakota heritage with visual elements observed from other Native nations and the aesthetics of urban life. Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion inspired some of her most striking works, which she called “personality prints”—abstract portraits arranged as vertical triptychs. Together, Sully’s works offer a fresh, complex lens through which to consider American art and life in the early twentieth century.



With its seasonal holiday character, this depiction of the popular French-born stage and film actress Claudette Colbert is among Sully’s more unusual portraits. Known for her work in screwball comedies of the Depression era and moving World War II family dramas, Colbert is cast here in a Christmas context. Sully rendered her in the top panel as a stylized tree ornament, extending the colorful design geometrically in the central and bottom panels. The portrait’s holiday theme may refer to the actress’s star turn in the 1944 home-front movie Since You Went Away. For her portrayal of a woman caring for two daughters while her husband is away at war, Colbert earned a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards.