A man and a woman mid-step on a bare wooden floor, locked into each other the way you only get in tango — his right hand at the small of her back, her left arm extended like she's pointing the way out of the room. He's in black and yellow, she's in magenta and bright blue, and neither of them is looking anywhere but at the other. Off to the right, a small white cat sits perfectly still, watching the whole thing with the calm authority of someone who has seen this dance before and is not impressed.

That's the picture. Two people and a cat. A wooden floor. No background to speak of — just blank paper above the floorboards and a faint gray rectangle that might be a window or might be nothing at all. The whole scene floats in white space, which is exactly right, because Oscar de Mejo understood that a picture doesn't need to explain where it's happening. It just needs to show you what matters.

De Mejo was born in Trieste in 1911, trained as a lawyer in Padua and Siena, composed film scores during the war, married the actress Alida Valli — Italy's answer to Garbo — came to Hollywood with her in 1947 at David Selznick's invitation, stayed in America after the marriage ended, and somewhere in the middle of all that discovered he was a painter. Self-taught. He drew on Giotto and Rousseau and Haitian folk art and came out the other side with a style the critic Robert C. Morgan called "naive surrealism" — pictures that look simple until you notice the parts that don't quite make sense, the little irrational details that pull you in.

No background to speak of — just blank paper above the floorboards and a faint gray rectangle that might be a window or might be nothing at all.

The New York Times named him one of the ten best illustrators of children's books three times. Selden Rodman, the dean of American folk art criticism, called his work "an antidote to all that is tiresome and banal in American art." He showed at the Grand Palais in Paris, at Nahan Galleries in New York and Tokyo. His paintings hang in the Butler Institute of American Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Alexandria Museum of Art, and the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown.

This is a hand-colored lithograph from an edition of forty-five. Each impression was individually colored by de Mejo, so no two are exactly alike. Signed in pencil lower right. Numbered 10/45. The hand-coloring is bold and clean — the magenta of her dress, the stripe of yellow on his jacket, the blue of her skirt, the warm brown of the floorboards. The lines are thick and sure, drawn the way a child would draw if a child had fifty years of looking at Giotto behind the pencil.

Framed in a dark wood frame with a woven texture. Ready to hang.