Although his figure paintings often focused on the common laborer, Kirk’s still lifes presented a more refined world, usually depicting works of art, oriental porcelains, and textiles arranged around large floral bouquets. In Rhapsody the artist included a print, a covered lacquer dish, a book, and a large arrangement of dried flowers and leaves in a gleaming copper pitcher. The highly varied palette of deep hues contributes to the painting’s rich elegance. Kirk’s tabletop arrangements were in the tradition of the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) but took on a rigidly standardized format. He repeatedly used the same objects, viewed them from an elevated viewpoint, and only slightly varied their positions within a triangular arrangement before a wall. For example, the same arrangement and bouquet in Rhapsody are found in Tropical Leaves, n.d. (unlocated, reproduced in Weinper, Kirk, p. 59). It is primarily his use of texture and color that distinguishes one still-life painting from another. According to labels on the back of the canvas and stretchers, the painting was widely exhibited under the titles Rhapsody and Tropical Leaves, but attempts to verify these exhibitions have been futile or resulted in contradictory information.

The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception. A modern age marked by technological wonders had begun, and the United States was to be its focal point. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most brilliant thinkers, explained that, unlike Europe, “the New World expanded the human imagination.” Young American students still traveled to Europe, especially Paris, for their initiation to art, but the progressive new ideas of cubism, futurism, and surrealism that they imbibed only found their true home in the United States.
As demonstrated by the first generation of modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, American artists rarely abandoned referential ties to the physical world completely. The simplification of form, multiple perspectives, and ideas about the fourth dimension that radical proponents of cubism espoused would find their most compelling American expressions in the fishermen of Marsden Hartley, and the animal bones and skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. To these artists, abstraction meant the synthesis of personal experience.
The introduction of psychological ideas, first in the form of Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and later in the writings and art of the surrealists, found an enthusiastic audience in America. Such new concepts not only expanded ideas about the human mind but also encouraged the liberation of social conduct, in particular, sexual mores. Women increasingly became involved in creative aspects of the new modern age. In 1934 the Los Angeles artists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued the only surrealist manifesto to appear in the United States, thereby demonstrating that in a relatively short time California had seriously challenged New York as the leader of the brave new world.