With the latter's cenobites, his most enduring contribution to popular culture2,
consider that Barker's
vision of an
alternate, infernal reality shimmering just beneath the surface of the mundane has its roots in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos — a dimension of Elder Gods lurking behind the doors of perception.
Moreover, if one
considers the
alternate history of Schapiro's having continued to work in this vein of geometric abstraction, given the typical narratives of the time, her career would likely have plateaued in relation to a colleague like Held, in part because he was a male artist, with all the privileges that brought, and in part because he was, in that mode, perhaps a stronger artist: as impressive as «Byzantium» is, it can't compete with the impact of Held's paintings as paintings, their literal physicality — the extra thick stretchers and larger size and the paint handling, which manages to be worked even when flat — and their composition, which bends
vision into sci - fi space but also retains the power of the overall ground.