A 1956 Anna Walinska Painting Turns Up in Fox's Best Medicine

A black-and-white abstract painting from 1956 now hangs on the wall of a fictional doctor's office in Fox's medical drama Best Medicine. The work is The Earth Bears Witness by Anna Walinska, and it appears in season 2 of the show, according to The Art Newspaper.

The painting is in the office of Martin Best, the lead character played by Josh Charles. The show follows a blunt but brilliant surgeon who becomes the general practitioner, or family doctor, in a quaint fishing village. Fox streams the available episodes of season 2. Episode 2, "Breakin' In is Hard to Do", aired on September 29 and runs 43 minutes.

The painting has a second screen history. It was slated to appear in the HBO miniseries White House Plumbers, which premiered in 2023, but it was edited out of the final version. It later made its way into Best Medicine. The show's production designer is Diane Lederman.

Walinska (1906–1997) was a Modernist painter who worked in New York, Paris and Burma. She was also a gallerist, a person who runs an art gallery, and a teacher. The Art Students League of New York describes her contributions as shaping the cultural life of twentieth-century New York.

The Earth Bears Witness was first shown in 1979 at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. It was displayed with 92 other Walinska works made in response to the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of six million Jews. In 2024 the painting entered the permanent collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, a museum that keeps works for the long term rather than for temporary display.

Rosina Rubin, the niece of Walinska, is steward of her aunt's estate. The estate is the body of property and rights a person leaves behind, and a steward looks after it. The Art Newspaper describes Walinska as an overlooked Abstract Expressionist, a term for a mid-century American movement of large, non-representational paintings.

For viewers, the painting is easy to spot. It is one of the few bold, dark-and-light compositions in a set otherwise filled with ordinary medical-office furniture. For the artist's family and estate, a television appearance can bring a name to people who have never seen her work, and it sits alongside the museum collection and the 1979 show as another way her paintings reach the public.

Season 2 of Best Medicine is available to stream on Fox's website and app.