A painter, poet, illustrator, and costume designer, Pavlović-Barili is now considered to be the most important Serbian modernist of her generation. Though she trained at the Serbian academy in Belgrade and in Munich, she was very much the product of international modernism, having traveled to the avant-garde art centers of Europe, including Paris and London, after the outbreak of World War II. In 1939, she joined the many emigré artists who settled in New York.

Barili’s dialogue with surrealist artists such as André Breton and, in particular, Giorgio di Chirico is in clear evidence in this painting, which includes self-conscious emulation of Renaissance art. Like di Chirico, for Barili the classical past was a means of generating the sensation of the airless unlocatability of a dream. Barili’s heightened use of one-point perspective creates a vertiginous effect at the composition’s center, while the three elegantly elongated women arranged in dance-like poses, seem to float against the flat geometry of the downward-sloping city plaza. The flourishing career of the gifted Barili was abruptly ended by a fatal horse-riding accident at the age of 35.