Lloyd Moylan created several paintings of Pueblo women performing domestic chores—each in a different artistic style. While cultural documentation was the professed agenda of many early 20th-century Western American artists, with regard to this specific subject, Moylan appears more interested in the composition he is creating than the story he is telling. Notice the simplified and monumentalized shapes of the women in Household Duties. Here, Moylan was perhaps influenced by the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (some records suggest he may have visited Mexico and seen Rivera’s murals in the 1920s).
