African American Art
Officers
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
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Cataloguer
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Chairman
Nicholas D. Lowry
President, Principal Auctioneer
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Vice President & Controller
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Chief Marketing Officer
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Todd Weyman
Vice President & Director, Prints & Drawings
1214107
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
Rick Stattler
Vice President & Director, Books & Manuscripts
Administration
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Client Accounting
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19th Century & Harlem Renaissance
Henry ossawa tanner (1859 - 1937)
Head of a Sheep.
Oil on canvas, mounted on board, circa 1880-81. 248x229 mm; 9¾x9 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, with estate blue ink stamp and the ink signature of Jesse O. Tanner, on the frame back; Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, with the label on the frame back; the artist Harry Andrew Jackson; thence by descent, private collection, Wyoming.
Tanner painted Head of a Sheep early in his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts when he seized on the speciality of painting animals. With the support of his parents and inspiration from the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, Henry Ossawa Tanner enrolled at the Academy in December of 1879. A year later he began life drawing classes under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. After an interest in maritime painting, Tanner settled on painting animal subjects, with his stated desire “to become an American Landseer.” According to Anna O. Marley, “Tanner was so devoted to animal painting that he bought a sheep to serve as a model for his pastoral compositions.” This small study has clear ties in subject to Tanner’s 1881 Boy and Sheep Under a Tree. But its bold passages of painterly brushwork are closer to his naturalist study of lions, Pomp at the Zoo, circa 1880, and Lion Licking its Paw, 1886. Marley p. 19; Mosby pp. 74-75.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
Edward m. bannister (1828 - 1901)
Crossing the Bridge before Sunset.
Oil on linen canvas, 1893. 406x660 mm; 16x26 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Benjamin E. Perry; thence by descent, private collection, Connecticut.
Exhibited: Edward M. Bannister 1828 - 1901: A Centennial Retrospective, Roger King Gallery, Newport, RI, October 21 - November 30, 2001; Kenkeleba House, New York, NY, December 12, 2001 - February 9, 2002.
Illustrated: Corrine Jennings and Roger H. King, Jr. Edward M. Bannister 1828 - 1901: A Centennial Retrospective, p. 23.
This landscape is an excellent example of Edward M. Bannister's mature landscape painting, representing both the natural beauty of rural Rhode Island and man's place in it. Bannister began to explore more atmospheric and tonal painterly effects in his late 1880s and early 1890s landscapes. His Crossing the Bridge Before Sunset displays a beautiful overall golden hue and painterliness; the fading light of the day, filtered through an atmospheric sky, traverses a rich and verdant countryside. Bannister draws the viewer into the scene by placing the horse drawn cart moving into the center of the composition.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
James bolivar needham (1850 - 1931)
Untitled (Chicago River Scene).
Oil on linen canvas, mounted on wood panel, 1905. 191x254 mm; 7½x10 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Inscribed within a diamond “7½x10 inches” and “55” and “1905” in blue paint on burlap mounted on the verso.
Provenance: the Center for African American Decorative Arts, Atlanta; private collection, New York.
This charming nautical scene is a wonderful and scarce example of the painting of early Chicago artist James Bolivar Needham. Painted on the scene, these small paintings are Needham’s immediate observations from the city’s lakeside docks. Needham was born in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, a terminus point of the Underground Railroad. He left at the age of 14 and worked his way to Chicago on lumber schooners, via Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. His brother Will Needham recalled that he spent some time at the Chicago Art Institute - yet there are no records to support this claim. Needham has only had one documented exhibition - in a Central Art Association show in 1895. He worked in obscurity throughout his lifetime. A retrospective was held at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago, February 28 - March 20, 1998, and several of his paintings from the collection of the Chicago Historical Society were included in the 2004 exhibition Chicago Modern 1893 - 1945 at the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago. Schulman pp. 132-34.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
William a. harper (1873 - 1910)
Untitled (Landscape).
Oil on thick cardstock, circa 1907. 324x387 mm; 12¾x15¼ inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, Decatur, IL (circa 1922), thence by descent, private collection, VA. The owner’s great grandmother acquired this painting from the Harper family in Decatur. A number of oil paintings by William A. Harper were exhibited at the Decatur Art Institute in January of 1922 .
William A. Harper likely painted this beautiful landscape on his second trip to Paris when he studied with Henry Ossawa Tanner. Like landscape painters Edward M. Bannister and James Bolivar Needham, William Harper was also born in Canada. His family moved from Cayuga to Illinois in 1885, and Harper attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1895-1901, working as a night watchman and janitor to pay for his tuition. He studied in Paris first from 1903-1905 at the Académie Julian like Tanner. In 1905, the talented Harper earned the Municipal Art League’s blue ribbon at the Art Institute of Chicago for nine of his paintings. Harper’s career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis only a few years later at the age of 36. The Art Institute held a memorial exhibition in Harper’s honor, showcasing 60 of his works. His paintings are found today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Tuskegee University and Dr. Walter O. Evans.
Thank you to Janet Nussbaum for her assistance with this painting with her extensive research of William A. Harper and the provenance of his paintings. Barnwell p. 157; Kennedy p. 119.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
James vanderzee (1886 -1983)
Shoe Store Salesman and Customer.
Silver print, circa 1925. 240x190 mm; 9½x7½ inches. Printed in the 1920-30s.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York; private collection, New York, acquired from Swann Galleries, Feburary 17, 2009.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Untitled (Portrait of a Boy in a Sailor Suit).
Silver print, 1927. 171x127 mm; 6¾x5 inches. Signed and dated in pencil with Vanderzee’s “G.G.G. Photo Studio, Inc., 109 West 135th St.” ink stamp, verso.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg/Photofind, New York, with the gallery label on the mat; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Eighteen Photographs.
Portfolio of 18 mounted silver and sepia-toned silver prints, 1905-1938. Each approximately 184x241 mm; 7¼x9½ inches, loose as issued.
Edition of 75 numbered copies. Each signed and numbered I-XVIII and 75/75 in pencil on the mount, recto. Printed by Richard Benson, New York. Published by Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. Folio-size gray cloth slipcase.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, private collection, New York.
Titles include: Couple, Harlem, 1932 * Nude, Harlem, 1923 * Mrs. Turner, Lenox, Mass., 1905 * Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Va., 1907 * The VanDerZee Men, Lenox, Mass., 1908 * Kate and Rachel VanDerZee, Lenox, Mass., 1907 * Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem, 1915 * Marcus Garvey and Militia, Harlem, 1924 * Garveyite Family, Harlem, 1924 * Dancer, Harlem, 1924 * Portrait of an Actor, Harlem, 1929 * Swimming Team, Harlem, 1925 * Wedding Day, Harlem, 1926 * Black Jews, Harlem, 1929 * Atlantic City, 1930 * Portrait of Two Brothers and Their Sister, 1931 * The Heiress, Harlem, 1938 * Daddy Grace, Harlem, 1938.
A handsome portfolio, published by Harry Lunn, Jr., with iconic images from VanDerZee’s photographic career. It includes various subjects of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as studies of Marcus Garvey, Daddy Grace, and formal family portraits.
Estimate
$40,000 – $60,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Swimming Team.
Silver print, 1925. 64x236 mm; 2½x9⅜ inches. Signed and numbered XI and 70/75 in pencil on the mount. Printed and published by Richard Berson and Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. From Eighteen Photographs.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Wedding Day, Harlem.
Silver print, 1926. 236x178 mm; 9⅜x7 inches. Signed and numbered XII and 70/75 in pencil on the mount. Printed and published by Richard Berson and Graphics International Ltd., Washington, DC in 1974. From Eighteen Photographs.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Untitled (Woman in Fur Holding Cat).
Silver print, 1935. 171x127 mm; 9⅜x7⅝ inches.
Provenance: Howard Greenberg/Photofind, New York, with the gallery label on the mat; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Richmond Barthé & Feral Benga
Feral Benga is an iconic artwork of the Harlem Renaissance. It represents the culmination of Richmond Barthé’s study of the figure in sculpture, anatomy and dance in the 1930s, and his pioneering realization of an ideal male nude. According to Barthé scholar Margaret Rose Vendryes, Feral Benga, Barthé’s “signature piece,” was completed within a few months of seeing the Folies Bergères dancer Benga perform on stage during his first visit to Paris in 1934. Vendryes describes how Benga was an exotic celebrity–a Senegalese cabaret dancer known in Parisian and Manhattan gay circles, who had performed on stage with Josephine Baker and had even appeared in a Jean Cocteau surrealist film. Barthé used postcards, photographs and his memory to recreate a life-like representation of the dancer. The raised sword pose also recalls the muscular nudes of the famous Mannerist engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men, circa 1470.
Grander in scale than its actual size, Feral Benga was one of the artist’s major achievements in his life-long body of work, a natural and sensual representation of the male nude, made at the height of his career. The sculpture was first shown at the 1937 Dance International exhibition at Rockefeller Center, and was later featured and illustrated in Alain Locke’s seminal survey, The Negro in Art. The figure is also important as a groundbreaking evocation of both male and homosexual sexuality in early 20th century American Art. Vendryes pp. 66-69.
Carl Van Vechten and ©Van Vechten Trust. Richmond Barthé, and his sculpture, Feral Benga, 1937. Carl Van Vechten Papers Relating to African American Arts and Letters. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Feral Benga.
Bronze with a dark brown patina, modeled in 1935, cast circa 1960. Approximately 483 mm; 19 inches high (not including the marble base). Cast by the Modern Art Foundry, Long Island City, NY. Signed at the base edge.
Provenance: the artist; Samella Lewis, Los Angeles; Dr. Linda F. Rankin, New Jersey (1988); William Watson Hines III, thence by descent, private collection, New Jersey. Hines was a business writer, art dealer and collector who lent many works from his collection to the Art In Embassies Program of the US State Department.
Illustrated: Cedric Dover. American Negro Art, plate 70 (another impression).
Feral Benga represents the culmination of Richmond Barthé's study of the figure in sculpture, anatomy and dance in the 1930s, and his pioneering realization of an ideal male nude. According to Barthé scholar Margaret Rose Vendryes, Feral Benga, Barthé's "signature piece," was completed within a few months of seeing the Folies Bergères dancer Benga perform on stage during his first visit to Paris in 1934. Vendryes describes how Benga was an exotic celebrity--a Senegalese cabaret dancer known in Parisian and Manhattan gay circles, who had performed on stage with Josephine Baker and had even appeared in a Jean Cocteau surrealist film. Barthé used postcards, photographs and his memory to recreate a life-like representation of the dancer. The raised sword pose also recalls the muscular nudes of the famous Mannerist engraving by Antonio Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men, circa 1470.
Grander in scale than its actual size, Feral Benga was one of the artist's major achievements in his life-long body of work, a natural and sensual representation of the male nude, made at the height of his career. The sculpture was first shown at the 1937 Dance International exhibition at Rockefeller Center, and was later featured and illustrated in Alain Locke's seminal survey, The Negro in Art. The figure is also important as a groundbreaking evocation of both male and homosexual sexuality in early 20th century American Art.
Thank you to Margaret Vendryes for her assistance with the cataloguing of this cast. This is only the second mid-career cast of this bronze sculpture to come to auction--there are only two bronzes known to exist from the first 1935 casting. Under the supervision of the artist and the Richmond Barthé Trust, an edition of 10 numbered casts and a small number of artist's proofs of Feral Benga were made in 1986. Vendryes pp. 66-69.
Estimate
$75,000 – $100,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Head of a Dancer (Harald Kreutzberg).
Bronze with a brown patina, mounted on a white marble base, 1937. Approximately 311 mm; 12¼ inches high (not including the base). A later casting, from an edition of 25. Signed, inscribed “xxx” and number stamped “25” along the upper edge, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Washington, DC.; the estate of Allan O. Hunter, Jr., acquired at Swann Galleries, October 4, 2018.
This contemplative but powerful head by Richmond Barthé is his well known portrait of the Czech-born German dancer Harald Kreutzberg (1902 - 1968). Kreutzberg is an important figure in German ballet and modern dance whom Richmond Barthé befriended when he performed in New York in the 1930s. Barthé made several sculptures of the expressive dancer in busts and figures. Barthé himself had studied Martha Graham dance techniques in an effort to more fully understand the movement and form of dancing figures.
A plaster cast of this head was exhibited and illustrated in the 1974 Anacostia Museum catalogue The Barnett-Aden Collection. A similar bronze casting, the same size as this head, is illustrated in the 1995 The Catalogue of the Barnett-Aden Collection and dated “circa 1973.” Other bronze casts of this head are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, the David C. Driskell Collection, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the Kinsey Collection of African-American Art and History. Kinard p. 40; Auzenne, p. 42.
Estimate
$15,000 – $25,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1992)
Group of 5 linoleum cuts.
Each on cream thin Japan paper, circa 1930. 387x273 mm; 15¼x10¾ inches (sheet), full margins.
This illustrative series is a very scarce example of printmaking from the Harlem Renaissance era. James Lesesne Wells’s early career as a printmaker is characterized by his easy mastery of block prints. Wells also was very successful in having this graphic work widely published in leading black periodicals like The Crisis and Opportunity; his illustrations accompanied the writing of the likes of writers Alain Locke, Marianne Moore, Willis Richardson and Carter Woodson.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Modern Art
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
Way Down in Egypt’s Land.
Pen, brush and ink on cream illustration board, 1937. 432x305 mm; 17x12 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
This large, beautiful drawing by Crite impressively illustrates the second verse of the refrain from the spiritual Go Down Moses, popularized by Fisk University Jubilee Singers: “Go down, Moses! Way down in Egypt’s land. Tell old Pharoah. Let my people go!”
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Frederick d. jones (1914 - 2004)
Go Down Moses.
Wood engraving on cream wove paper, circa 1937-40. 178x127 mm; 7x5 inches, wide margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A very good, dark impression of this scarce, early print.
Estimate
$1,200 – $1,800
Loïs mailou jones (1905 - 1998)
Untitled (Street Scene in Cabris).
Gouache and pencil on artist’s gesso board, 1938. 406x305 mm; 16x12 inches. Signed and dated in gouache, lower right recto. Inscribed “Lois M. Jones Cabris” in pencil on the verso.
Provenance: Parrish Gallery, Georgetown, Washington, DC, with the gallery label verso; private collection, Florida; private collection, North Carolina.
This charming street corner scene is an unusual example of a gouache from Loïs Mailou Jones’s oeuvre. Cabris is a picturesque village in the Alpes-Maritimes department of southeastern France, and was the hometown of her close friend Céline Tabary. Jones first visited the town in 1937 during her first year of studies in Paris, and returned numerous times over a period of some 50 years. Jones and her husband Pierre-Noël were also married there in 1953.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
Three Men.
Etching on wove paper, 1939. 114x152mm; 4½x6 inches, full margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin.
This scarce etching is based on Claude Clark’s same-titled 1939 painting of soldiers carrying their wounded compatriots during the Spanish Civil War. Clark also made a carborundum mezzotint entitled Three Men in Spain of the same subject.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
William e. smith (1913-1997)
War Fatigue.
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 1940. 304x254 mm; 12x10 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 7/10 in pencil, lower margin.
Another impression of this very scarce print is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
William E. Smith, alongside artists Hughie Lee-Smith, Elmer Brown, Charles Sallée, and others, formed the influential circle of African American artists who trained and exhibited at the WPA-funded Karamu House art center in Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1930 and early 1940s. Smith’s important, early linocuts were exhibited nationally throughout his lifetime. After his service in WWII, Smith settled in Los Angeles where he worked as both as an artist and cultural activist. He helped found the group Art West Associated in 1960, an organization formed to promote African American artists in California.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
Medal of Honor.
Crayon and graphite on printed cream wove paper, 1944. 127x203 mm; 5x8 inches. Signed in pencil, lower edge.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
This image on a reclaimed page from a book is a scarce example of an interracial wartime image of American soldiers. Troop integration did not occur in basic training camps until after World War II when President Harry Truman reluctantly integrated the Armed Forces in 1948.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
John n. robinson (1912 - 1994)
A Black Man at the White House.
Oil on canvas board, 1943. 292x292 mm; 11½x11½ inches (image); 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches (board). Signed, titled and dated in felt tip marker and blue ink, verso. With a pencil sketch of the artist John Farrar, and inscribed with Farrar’s Washington, DC address on the verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, with the artist’s typed label on the verso; private collection, Washington, DC. (circa 1979-80), acquired from Aldous Ealey and the Barnett-Aden Gallery, Washington, DC.
Exhibited: John Robinson: A Retrospective, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, June 18 - July 30, 1976.
Illustrated: Adolphus Ealey, John R. Kinard and Roy Slade, John Robinson: A Retrospective, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in cooperation with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, p. 31. The catalogue notes quote Robinson: “this (painting) was done for a mural competition at the Recorder of Deeds Office; it depicts Senator Pomeroy introducing Frederick Douglass to President Lincoln”.
Frederick Douglass famously visited President Abraham Lincoln in August of 1863, without an appointment. On the way to the White House, Douglass met Samuel C. Pomeroy, a senator from Kansas, who introduced him to the President. The artist’s typed description reads; “A Black Man at the White House. In 1863, during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass visited President Lincoln at the White House to ask that Negores be enlisted in the Union Army. This resulted in the forming of the two Negro regiments, the 54th and the 55th from Boston, Massachusetts. The First Negro Soliders in the Union Army.”
This historical scene is an early, significant painting by John N. Robinson, a great artist whose work rarely comes to auction. This native Washington, DC painter should be considered a significant modern portrait artist alongside Archibald M. Motley. Robinson excelled at warm depictions of African American friends and family, in addition a series of striking self-portraits. Despite a long career and museum exhibitions, Robinson’s work went largely unheralded outside of Washington, DC during his lifetime. Robinson received recognition for his painting late in his career with a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1976, and a retrospective at the Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture in 1983. His paintings are found today in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Anacostia Community Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Howard University Gallery of Art.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Gordon parks (1912 - 2006)
American Gothic, Washington, D.C.
Silver print, 1942, printed circa 1970s. 241x165 mm; 9 1/2x6 1/2 inches (image); 254x203 mm; 10x8 inches (sheet). Signed (twice) in ink, lower edge verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, New York; private collection, New York, acquired from Swann Galleries, February 21, 2008.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (New York Park Crowd).
Watercolor, ink and gouache on cream wove paper, 1943. 356x508 mm; 14x20 inches. Signed and dated “7-21-43” in ink, lower left recto.
With an unfinished city scene in watercolor, pen and ink on the verso.
Provenance: private collection, Maryland.
This exceptional modernist watercolor by Norman Lewis shows his increasingly abstract approach to his city subjects. These two different locales depicted on each side of the sheet of paper are from Lewis’s summer in New York. Ruth Fine wrote that in 1943 Lewis won a competition to design a war relief poster, and had a supervisory dock job working in Vancouver where he encountered fierce discrimination from workers. Upon returning to New York, he held a job tending to housing project lawns. Then in the fall, Norman Lewis began teaching painting at the new progressive George Washington Carver School in Harlem, where he joined an impressive staff, including Ernest Crichlow (painting), Charles White (drawing), and Elizabeth Catlett (sculpture). Lewis taught there through 1944. Fine p. 252.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Henry w. bannarn (1910 - 1965)
Rowhouses, Charleston, SC.
Oil on canvas board, 1943. 454x606 mm; 17⅞x23⅞ inches. Signed "P.F.C. H. Bannarn", inscribed "Charleston S.C." and dated "19[4]3" in oil, lower left recto. Signed and inscribed "This is the one that Mike gave [illeg.]" in pencil, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection, New York (2017).
Exhibited: Menconi+Schoelkopf, New York; Conner & Rosenkranz, New York, with the gallery labels on the verso.
Born in Wetumpka, OK, Bannarn moved with his family to Minneapolis when he was a child. There Bannarn studied at the Minneapolis School of Art (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). He won two first place prizes in sculpture at the Minnesota State Art Fair and showed at the Harmon Foundation in New York in 1933. With a grant from the Minneapolis philanthropist James Ford Bell, Bannarn moved to New York in 1934. There Bannarn and Charles Alston rented the studio which became the Harlem Workshop or the "306", a creative center and meeting place for artists, musicians and poets. Bannard also taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, where he worked alongside Norman Lewis and Charles Alston, and mentored Jacob Lawrence.
Rowhouses, Charleston, SC is a scarce example of Bannarn's modernist painting made during his wartime service in the US Army. Bannarn was inducted around 1940, and his painting skills were soon put to use in the Army’s Special Services Division. In Camp Plauche, Harahan, Louisiana, he created a series of murals depicting soldiers on furlough in various theaters of operation. Later at the Charleston Port of Embarkation, South Carolina, he completed murals depicting American soldiers on leave around the world, and recruitment and war bond posters, painting some of the the first service and support images to depict African American soldiers as a fighting men. Bannarn continued to paint his own work at the time, and returned to his studio practice in New York in 1949.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Untitled (Georgia Landscape).
Watercolor on paper, mounted to cardstock, circa 1940. 470x635 mm; 18½x25 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Massachusetts.
This vivid watercolor is an excellent example of the landscapes of the eroded, wooded rural hills that Hale Woodruff painted around Atlanta in the late 1930s and early 40s.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Santa Ana Winds, Ariz. (Arizona).
Goauche and watercolor on wove paper, 1944. 305x457 mm; 12x18 inches. Signed, dated and titled in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: Bill Hodges Gallery, New York (then A.F.T.U. Gallery), with the label on the frame back, private collection, New York
This dramatic watercolor of a storm over an Arizona valley shows Charles Alston’s modernist approach. Alston and his friend Hale Woodruff made similar landscape studies and sketches of the West during a later exploratory trip to California in 1948. Both artists were preparing for the pair of large historical murals they would complete the following year for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in Los Angeles.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Loïs mailou jones (1905 - 1998)
Untitled (Geraniums).
Watercolor on thin cream laid paper, circa 1940s. 305x305 mm; 12x12 inches. Signed in watercolor, lower right.
Provenance: Merton Simpson, New York; private collection, North Carolina.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
The Plow.
Oil on burlap canvas, 1944. 505x610 mm; 20x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and tited in ink, upper stretcher bar verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, with his typed label on the verso; the estate of the artist, Oakland, CA.
Exhibited: Artists of the 1930s and 1940s, California Afro-American Museum (CAAM), 1984, with the label on the frame back.
The Plow is a significant, modernist painting by Claude Clark, made during his most innovative period as a young artist living in Philadelphia. After winning a 4 year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art., he was supported by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who gave him access to his famous collection at the Barnes Foundation from 1939-1944. In 1944, his painting Cutting Pattern was just the second art work by an African-American artist accepted into the Barnes Foundation, after one by Horace Pippin. Clark also was a colleague of Dox Thrash and Rayond Steth in the WPA Printmaking Workshop from 1939-1942, where he helped Thrash develop his innovative carborundum etching technique. Clark’s paintings and prints are in many institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the De Young Museum. Messenger p. 48.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
Head.
Carved limestone, 1943. Approximately 343x241x184 mm; 13½x9½x7¼ inches. Incised initials at rear lower edge.
Provenance: Charles White, New York; private collection, New York; thence by descent, private collection, New Jersey.
This impressive carving of a young man's head is an important sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett. It is one of only a few known stone sculptures made by the artist, and the only work from her seminal 1940s period whose location is known today. The only other recorded 1940s stone work is Mother and Child, her 1940 University of Iowa MFA thesis project. The 35 inch high carving in limestone is now sadly missing from the University's collection. In Samella Lewis's monograph, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett, Lewis catalogued just two works for the year 1943: "Abstract Forms, plaster" and "Head, stone". Catlett primarily worked in plaster and terracotta in the late 1930s and 1940s. All four works included in her I am the Negro Woman solo exhibition at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1947, Negro Woman, Tired, Pensive and Frustration, were terra cotta.
Elizabeth Catlett's Head stone shows her synthesis of her studies and interest in depicting modern African American subjects in the early 1940s. Melanie Herzog describes Catlett's education at the University of Iowa, and how in her second year of graduate studies, she focused on sculpture - learning several techniques in bronze, stone, wood, terra cotta and plaster. But it was Mother and Child, the centerpiece of her 1940 thesis project, that crystallized many of her interests; as Catlett wrote in her thesis, "stone imposes a certain discipline which cannot be ignored." Her work won First Award in Sculpture in the 1940 American Negro Exhibition in Chicago, and caught the interest of James A. Porter who included an image and description of Mother and Child in his 1943 Modern Negro Art. Porter wrote "it is a pity that this young woman has had so few opportunities to continue her work in stone." In 1942, Herzog describes how after moving to New York, Catlett also studied with the French-Russian emigre and modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine - taking private lessons from him that summer, while working in terra cotta. Zadkine was also a stone carver, and helped her develop a modernist sense of abstraction in her work by simplifying the forms of the human figure. Head displays Catlett's emerging modern approach to an African-American subjects in the 1940s. Herzog pp. 19-21, 30-34; Porter p. 132; Lewis p. 188.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Joven (Youth).
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1946. 343x273 mm; 13½x10¾ inches, wide margins. Proof, from an edition of unknown size. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right. Printed by the artist at El Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
An impression of this scarce print can be found in the collection of Clark Atlanta University, illustrated in Le Falle/Collins’s In the Spirit of Resistance. According to Lucinda Gedeon, another impression is illustrated in the album El Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico, published in 1949. Gedeon Ea7.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Girl).
Oil on masonite, 1949. 290x230 mm; 16x12 inches. Incised signature and date in oil, upper left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, Detroit, MI; thence by descent, private collection, California..
This charming portrait is a scarce example of Hughie Lee-Smith’s painting from his early years in Detroit from the late 1940s. In 1938, Lee-Smith graduated from the Cleveland School of Art with honors, where he studied under Clarence Carter, and won a scholarship to continue studying for a fifth year. He also attended Karamu House in Cleveland, joining Charles Sallée, Elmer Brown, and William E. Smith. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1953. Lee-Smith also worked in Detroit automobile factories in 1945 and 1947 between teaching stints. In 1949, he exhibited paintings both at the Detroit Arts Market and the Karamu House Art Gallery, Cleveland.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Postwar Art
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Figure Study).
Pen and ink with wash on wove paper, circa 1940s. 229x159 mm; 9x6¼ inches. Signed “Norman Lewis/OBL” in ink, lower right, posthumously by the artist’s widow Ouida Lewis.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection, New York.
Illustrated: Norman W. Lewis: Works on Paper, 1935 - 1979, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, p. 66.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Three Figures).
Pen and ink on cream thin wove paper, circa 1940s. 184x121 mm; 7¼x4⅞ inches.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, New York.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Gate Composition).
Oil on masonite board, 1947. 356x457 mm; 14x18 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right. Also incised “To Dorothy, Leonard, Glenn” in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; Margradel and Leonard Hicks, New York (1960s); thence by descent, private collection, Vermont.
This striking abstraction is a scarce example of Norman Lewis’ early exploration of form and technique in the late 1940s. Norman Lewis made several of these modernist paintings on masonite board between 1946 and 1947. They share a central abstract composition with a rich variety of surfaces, including graffito and scrapings, surrounded by a halo of deep monochromatic color. Norman Lewis found these particular abstract forms in the iron work of New York doors and gates. Two very similar works Gate, graphite on paper, and Harlem Gate, oil on canvas, both circa 1950, were included in his 2016 retrospective Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis organized by Ruth Fine. Fine plate 14, fig 27; pp. 42-43.
Estimate
$60,000 – $90,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Procession Composition).
Oil, pen and ink with wash on cream wove paper, 1949. 610x483 mm; 24x19 inches. Signed and dated ‘49 in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
This striking work on paper is one of the earliest examples we have located of a processional composition by Norman Lewis. This descending calvacade predates his inventive calligraphy of small figures of the early 1950s - figures that will inhabit his paintings and works on paper for over a decade.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1950-51. 991x610 mm; 39x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; Margradel and Leonard Hicks, New York (1960s); thence by descent, private collection, Vermont.
This elegant, modern painting is a very fine example of Norman Lewis’s abstraction of the early 1950s. Lewis painted thinly on linen canvas to created subtle, atmospheric effects to represent natural phenomena. At the same time, in addition to his well-received 1950 and 1951 solo exhibitions at the Willard Gallery, Lewis began to achieve greater public recognition. He was included in the important 1951 group exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York where his 1950 painting Urban was hung alongside works by Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Man Ray. Fine p. 256.
Estimate
$150,000 – $250,000
Robert blackburn (1920 - 2003)
Untitled (Reclining Nude).
Pen and ink on buff wove paper, circa 1945-1950. 305x445 mm; 12x17½ inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey; private collection, New York, acquired at Swann Galleries, February 17, 2009.
This early and fine ink drawing by Blackburn shows the influence of Picasso and Matisse on the young artist.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
John woodrow wilson (1922 - 2015)
Green Checked Table Cloth.
Tempera on cream wove paper, 1949. 610x457 mm; 24x18 inches. Signed and dated in red ink, lower right recto. Titled in blue ink, lower left verso.
Provenance; private collection, Massachusetts.
This remarkable and very scarce work on paper is from John Wilson’s time in Paris, and is unequivocally inspired by Fernand Léger. In 1947, John Wilson won the James William Paige Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and moved to Paris, where he worked in Fernand Léger’s studio. Wilson adapted many of his mentor’s modern techniques of abstracting forms, developed more modernist compositions, and added to the social and political consciousness of his art. After returning to the US in 1950, Wilson earned the John Hay Whitney Fellowship and moved to Mexico City.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Merton d. simpson (1928 - 2013)
Untitled (Portrait of a Young Woman).
Oil on masonite, circa 1950-52. 502x248 mm; 19¾x9¾ inches. Signed in ink, lower left recto. With a partial figure sketch on the verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York.
This intimate, modernist portrait was painted during Merton Simpson’s first years in New York, when he studied visual art at Cooper Union and at New York University with Hale Woodruff.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Charles white (1918 - 1979)
Gideon.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1951. 565x375 mm; 22¼x14¾ inches, full margins. Edition of 50. Titled and inscribed “Ed. 50” in pencil, lower right. Printed by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York. Gedeon Ea10.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
Margaret burroughs (1917 - 2010)
Sojourner Truth.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1955. 425x311 mm; 16¾x12¼ inches, narrow margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 17/20 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Roy decarava (1919 - 2009)
Bass Player, Small’s, New York.
Silver print, 1956, printed in 1981. 355x279 mm; 14x11 inches. Signed, dated and inscribed “printed in 1981” in ink, left edge verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York (1982), purchased from Witkin Gallery, New York.
Roy DeCarava frequently photographed jazz musicians throughout New York City. DeCarava was interested in documenting the essence, versatility, and talent of both famous and less well-known jazz musicians. The dark basements of jazz clubs and their nocturnal activities were also well suited to his aesthetic. DeCarava here captures the image of a bassist passionately playing the double bass while sweating profusely at Smalls Paradise.
Smalls Paradise (often called Small’s Paradise and Smalls’ Paradise, was a nightclub in Harlem, located in the basement of 2294 Seventh Avenue. It opened in 1925 and was owned by Ed Smalls a nightclub owner throughout the Harlem Renaissance. During the era, Smalls Paradise was the only well-known of the Harlem nightclubs to be African American owned and integrated. It became the longest-operating jazz club in Harlem before it closed in 1986.
Estimate
$20,000 – $30,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled.
Brush and ink on cream wove paper, 1954. 483x610 mm; 19x24 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, private collection; thence by descent, private collection, Texas.
Estimate
$12,000 – $18,000
Charles alston (1907 - 1977)
Untitled.
Gouache, pen and ink on buff, fibrous Japan paper, 1957. 368x317 mm; 14½x12½ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed in pencil, lower right verso.
Provenance: the artist; Kate Keith Field, New York (2006), acquired at Doyle’s, November 8, 2006; private collection, New York; private collection, New York (2011), acquired at Swann Galleries, February 7, 2011.
Exhibited: The Artist’s Gallery, New York, with the ink stamp on the mount verso.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Carnival.
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1958. 1029x1727 mm; 40½x68 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto. Signed and titled in oil across the verso.
Provenance: private collection, New York; Beverly Sacks Fine Art, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection, Los Angeles.
Exhibited: Paintings by Hale Woodruff, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, September 15 - October 4, 1958. This was the third of Woodruff's solo exhibitions at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery of the 1950s which established his New York career as a significant abstract artist.
With its gorgeous jewel-like colors and rich painterly passages, Carnival is an excellent and important example of Hale Woodruff's postwar abstraction, and his largest abstract canvas to come to auction. Carnival is part of Woodruff 1950s body of work in which describes landscape and natural phenomena within the idiom of Abstract Expressionism.
Not seen publicly in over seventy years, this striking canvas shows Woodruff's continued evolution as an abstract painter in the postwar period. By the late 1950s, now a Professor of art education at New York University and an important member of the New York School, Woodruff showed more freedom in his approach, in both color and brushwork. Carnival is related in palette and composition to another large, vertical canvas Blue Intrusion, 1958, in the collection of New York University and the smaller Red Landscape, 1957 (sold at Swann Galleries on Feb. 14, 2013) - both were included with Carnival in his 1958 solo exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery. Dore Ashton in her New York Times review wrote: (Woodruff's) "large abstractions are often based on impressions of landscape. They are done with emphatic, broad strokes, and colors are bright and cleanly handled. The free swinging brush movements have enabled Woodruff to clarify his ideas of the implied movements of nature - hills, trees, sky." Additionally, Arts magazine review of his exhibition mentioned Carnival as one of his large paintings which engage on the level of its title "with an excitement, rhythm, progression of swift angular, broken shapes and beautiful color". Woodruff continued to use landscape as the structure of his abstract painting through the late 1960s - see in such later works as Primordial Landscape, 1967, (sold at Swann Galleries on April 22, 2021) with similar jewel-like colors.
Estimate
$250,000 – $350,000
Walter h. williams (1920 - 1998)
Sunflowers.
Color woodcut on thin imitation Japan paper, 1959. 431x558 mm; 17x22 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 127/200 in pencil, lower margin.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
