Necessity was the mother of Dorothy Hood's invention. You have to realize: this painting is 10 feet tall. It’s a monster in person. But her studio couldn’t accommodate canvases this size, so she painted it sideways—hence the left-to-right drips and streaks that create so much action in Haiti, the first of Hood's monumental “surrealist abstractions.” She didn’t even see it upright until her 1970 career-launching exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. An unusually political statement for Hood, Haiti was inspired by that country’s duality of beauty and tragedy. This is no zombie abstraction, but a virtuosic, heartrending masterpiece.

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