House of Cards
1955 · Color woodcut on buff Japanese paper
75 × 35.3 cm (29 9/16 × 13 15/16 in.)
Art Institute of Chicago
WATTS INDEXThe canonical database of visual culture
Mervin Jules
American, 1912
PaintingRealismFigurationSocial Realism
Representation
None documented
7
Institutional Exhibitions
4
Works in Collection
9
Assets Indexed
3
Authority-backed Facts
0
Publications Referenced
90%
Profile Completeness
Cultural Positioning
Movements
- • Realism
- • Figuration
- • Social Realism
Related Artists
No edges recorded
Influence Graph
No influence edges encoded yet.
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
View all exhibitions →No image
Children's Holiday Fair of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1947–1948
No image
Designed for Children
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1946
No image
New Acquisitions: 12 American Paintings
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1944
No image
Art Shows for U.S.O. Centers
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1943
No image
How Modern Artists Paint People
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1942
About
Why this artist matters now
Mervin Jules was an American painter whose postwar work bridged abstraction and figuration through oil painting. He developed a distinctive compositional approach that engaged modernist formal concerns alongside social realist traditions, creating a visual language that resisted easy categorization. Active from the 1940s through the 1990s, Jules negotiated the divide between gestural abstraction and representational content that defined much postwar American painting.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 26d ago
Graph relationships
Taste overlap and adjacency
Movement
Realism
Medium
Painting
Related Artists
12 in graph
Institutional
Museum Collections
Canonical record
Artworks (4)
Record
Images
Related artists
Adjacent in the graph
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Reuben Kadish
Shared movement
Horst Janssen
Shared movement
Lisa Yuskavage
Also painting
Robert Ryman
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Adolph Gottlieb
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Jasper Johns
Also painting
Neo Rauch
Also painting
Richard Artschwager
Also painting
Record
Movements and affiliations
Institutional
Representation & Collections
In collection
Museum of Modern Art
New York, US
In collection
Art Institute of Chicago
Record