African American Art
Officers
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
nfreeman@swanngalleries.com
212 254 4710 ext. 33
Corey Serrant
Cataloguer
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(212) 254-4710 ext. 29
Shanell Kitt
Administrator
skitt@swanngalleries.com
(212) 254-4710 ext. 56
George S. Lowry
Chairman
Nicholas D. Lowry
President, Principal Auctioneer
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Andrew M. Ansorge
Vice President & Controller
Alexandra Mann-Nelson
Chief Marketing Officer
2030704
Todd Weyman
Vice President & Director, Prints & Drawings
1214107
Nigel Freeman
Vice President & Director, African American Art
Rick Stattler
Vice President & Director, Books & Manuscripts
Administration
Andrew M. Ansorge
Vice President & Controller
aansorge@swanngalleries.com
Ariel Kim
Client Accounting
akim@swanngalleries.com
Diana Gibaldi
Operations Manager
diana@swanngalleries.com
Kelsie Jankowski
Communications Manager
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Shannon Licitra
Shipping Manager
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Modern
MAY HOWARD JACKSON (1877 - 1931) (after)
Slave Boy .
Bronze with a dark brown patina, mounted on a wooden base, 1899. 406x330x203 mm; 16x13x8 inches, not including the base. Cast in the 1980s. Incised with the maker's cypher, "5" and "©" at the rear lower edge.
Illustrated: The Catalogue of the Barnett-Aden Collection , the Museum of African American Art, Tampa, FL and the Florida Education Fund, another cast, p. 26.
This handsome bust is a posthumous work made when director Adolphus Ealey had bronze casts fabricated after works in the Barnett Aden collection - it was not cast from an original mold. Other similar casts of Slave Boy are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Kinsey African American Art Collection and the William C. Robinson Family Collection.
May Howard Jackson is one of the earliest African American female artists, alongside Edmonia Lewis (c. 1843 - 1912) and Meta Warrick Vaux Fuller (1877 - 1968). Born in the same year, Jackson and Fuller both came from privileged families that embraced fine art and studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Jackson won a scholarship to attend in 1895, the year before Fuller - becoming the first African American woman to attend. She married in 1902, and moved to Washington, DC, establishing a studio there and exhibiting at the Corcoran Gallery. In 1912, she exhibited busts of F. J. Reverend Grimke and W. E. B. Du Bois at the Verhoof Galleries in Washington, DC, which received critical acclaim. Nevertheless, she was rejected by the Washington Society of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design. She later joined the faculty at Howard University, where she taught with James A. Porter, and continued to exhibit her artwork at the Harmon Foundation and the Barnett-Aden Gallery. Farrington pp. 72-74; St. James p. 266.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Henry ossawa tanner (1859 - 1937)
The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water .
Etching on cream wove paper, circa 1905-15. 184x244 mm; 7¼x9⅝ inches, full margins. Signed by the artist’s son, Jesse O. Tanner, and numbered 61/120 in ink, verso. With the artist’s estate ink stamp, verso.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
William a. harper (1873 - 1910)
Untitled (Farm House) .
Oil on thin wood panel, circa 1903-05. 117x193 mm; 4⅝x7⅝ inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, Decatur, IL (circa 1922), thence by descent, private collection, Virginia. 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. The painting is numbered 19 in pencil on the verso and has a number 19 label on the frame back.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
William a. harper (1873 - 1910)
Untitled (Landscape with House on Horizon) .
Oil on canvas mounted on thick cardstock, circa 1907. 320x396 mm; 12⅞x15⅝ inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: estate of the artist; private collection, Decatur, IL (circa 1922), thence by descent, private collection, Virginia. 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.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
James a. porter (1905 - 1970)
Untitled (Male Nude) .
Charcoal on cream laid paper, 1925. 635x483 mm; 25x19 inches. Signed and dated “Oct. ‘25” in charcoal, lower right recto. With an unfinished figure drawing on the verso.
Provenance: the artist; Dorothy Porter Walker; Constance Porter Uzelac; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection.
James A. Porter drew this academic figure study as an undergraduate student at Howard University. Porter entered Howard’s School of Applied Sciences on an art scholarship in the fall of 1923, studied under the tutelage of James V. Herring, the founder of the university’s new art department, and graduated in 1927.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1993)
Builders .
Linoleum cut on cream Japan paper, 1929. 368x273 mm; 14x10¾ inches, wide margins. Artist's proof, from a later printing of an unknown edition size. Signed, dated and inscribed "AP" in pencil, lower margin. Another impression dated 1929 is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Exhibited: James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years of Art , curated and organized by Richard Powell and Jock Reynolds, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, DC, December 4, 1986 - January 24, 1987, then traveled to The Studio Museum in Harlem, spring and summer 1988 (another impression).
Illustrated: Richard Powell and Jock Reynolds, James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years of Art . p. iii (another impression).
Builders was created by Wells the year he began teaching printmaking at Howard University in Washington, DC. In Builders, Wells portrays the everyday experience of African Americans at labor in this bold, graphic composition.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Richmond barthé (1901 - 1989)
Boy with a Broom .
Painted plaster, 1929. Approximately 533x330x280 mm; 21x13x11 inches. Incised signature and date on the base.
Provenance: acquired at the Southside Community Art Center, Chicago (1940); private collection, Atlanta; thence by descent to the current owner, Georgia.
The owner's mother was gifted this work by Peter Pollack, the director of the Southside Community Art Center in 1940. While cleaning out their building's basement, she found this sculpture abandoned at 3831 S Michigan Avenue. Previously, the home was built in 1892 for George A. Seaverns, Jr. and his family. In the early 20th century, as wealthy white families moved away, the grand house was eventually converted into apartments in the now African American neighborhood.
Illustrated: Samella Lewis, Barthé: His Life in Art p. 37, reproduction of a photograph in the artist's archives; Margaret Vendryes, Barthé: A Life in Sculpture , fig. 2.22, p. 46, reproduction of a photograph in the magazine Mission Fields at Home , September 1931.
Exhibited: An Exhibition of Portraits and Sculpture by Richmond Barthé , The Woman’s City Club, Chicago, June 7 - 21, 1930. This exhibition of 38 works, included the sculptures Jubilee Singer, Deviled Crab Man, Blackberry Woman, Black Narcissus, West Indian Venus and Breakaway . Exhibition of the Work of Negro Artists, the Harmon Foundation, New York, February 16 - 28, 1931. Boy with a Broom was one of five artworks by Barthé in his second showing at the Harmon Foundation; The Wisconsin Union, University of Wisconsin, April 7 - May 1, 1931. It included 17 artworks; one sold for $50; Women’s City Club, 22 Park Ave, New York, June 7 - 21, 1931. It included Boy With a Broom along with several others from the earlier Harmon Foundation exhibition.
Boy with a Broom is an exciting discovery - an extremely scarce example of a large plaster sculpture surviving from Richmond Barthé's early career. Most of the early plaster works from Barthé's first two Harmon Foundation exhibitions, like West Indian Girl , 1929 are only known today from reproductions. In 1928, Barthé also made a series of historical African American figures in busts including Henry Ossawa Tanner and Touissant L'Ouverture; from this series, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Booker T. Washington are now in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This charming, life-size portrait was likely made in New York as Barthé arrived in Harlem in February of 1929 and did not return to Chicago until the summer of 1930. While Barthé was the toast of the town in Harlem, he was also preparing for his first solo exhibition sponsored by the Woman's City Club of Chicago planned for June of 1930. He brought back to Chicago 24 sculptures, six oil paintings and eight drawings, including Boy with a Broom . It was such a success that soon after Barthé successfully applied for a Rosenwald Foundation scholarship to return to New York.
We would like to thank art historian and Barthé expert Margaret Rose Vendryes for sharing her notes detailing the sculpture's exhibition history. Vendryes pp 39-46; Schulman p. 84.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Sargent johnson (1888 - 1967)
Divine Love .
Etching on cream wove paper, circa 1930. 152x114 mm; 6x4½ inches, wide margins. Signed, titled and dated "33" in pencil, lower margin.
Another impression dated 1930 is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Illustrated: Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins, San Francisco Museum of Art, Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist, plate 7, p. 48 (another impression printed in brown from a 1935 printing).
This scarce print is a beautiful example of Sargent Johnson’s interest in both Modernism and African sculpture. While working on a small scale, Johnson’s imagery elevated the depiction of African American women in fine art to a new level in the 1930s.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
William edouard scott (1884 - 1964)
Untitled (Man with Child Holding Basket) .
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1931. 768x508 mm; 30¼x20 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of Claude A. Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett, Chicago. Etta Moten Barnett (1901 – 2004) was a popular African American actress and vocalist, who was best known for her signature role of Bess in Porgy and Bess. She married Claude Albert Barnett (1889 – 1967) in 1934. Barnett was an influential and trailblazing national figure - an important media entrepreneur, journalist and one of the principal organizers of the Chicago Negro Exposition in 1940. Barnett is also known as the founder of the Associated Negro Press in 1919, the first Black news service in the country, connecting Black newspapers across the country.
This depiction of a Haitian man and a boy crossing a street is a beautiful and scarce example from William Edouard Scott's early Haitian period. Scott, born in Indianapolis, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1904-09. After winning several painting scholarships and awards at the Institute, he travelled to Paris, where he studied with Henry Ossawa Tanner and enrolled at the Académie Julian. When he returned in 1912, he received many mural commissions, including for the Chicago World's Fair of 1933 and for the Federal Art Project of the WPA in Chicago. While Scott's time in Paris had a profound effect on his early work, the year Scott spent in Haiti shaped the rest of his career.
Scott was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Foundation scholarship in 1931 to study and paint the African beliefs and customs that had survived in the culture of this independent island nation. Scott left for Haiti that year, and did many plein air sketches around the docks and streets of the capitol city Port-au-Prince. These studies were later translated into larger canvases in the artist's rooftop studio of the Excelsior Hotel in Port-au-Prince. With his extensive experience painting murals, Scott specialized in large multi-figure scenes, but painted moving portraits as well. Others include Blind Sister Mary and Kenskoff, Haiti, both circa 1931, collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. Schulman p. 86; Taylor/Warkel figs. 17-18, p. 35.
Estimate
$25,000 – $35,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Head of Old Woman.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, circa 1930s. 101x154 mm; 4x6 inches, full margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A good, early impression of this scarce print.
Another impression is in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Sunday Promenade .
Linoleum cut on imitation Japan paper, circa 1935. 240x200 mm; 9¾x7¾ inches, wide margins. Artist proof. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Artist's Proof" in pencil, lower margin. A later impression, printed circa 1975.
Additional impressions are in the collections of the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
Sunday Promenade portrays the everyday experiences of African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia during the Great Depression. Woodruff explored the pervasive violence of lynching and the mundane suffering of poverty through his works in this series. Here, he conveys liveliness and beauty in a procession of women dressed in their Sunday's best. This linoleum cut is part of a group made over a fifteen year period while Woodruff was teaching at Spelman College from 1931-46.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Hale woodruff (1900 - 1980)
Returning Home .
Linoleum cut on imitation Japan paper, 1935. 240x200 mm; 9¾x7¾ inches, wide margins. Artist's proof. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Artist's Proof" in pencil, lower margin. A later impression, printed circa 1975.
This linoleum cut is part of a group made over a fifteen year period while Woodruff was teaching at Spelman College from 1931-46. There are additional impressions in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Joseph delaney (1904-1991)
Pair of Drawings.
Both brush and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1930s. Both 266x190 mm; 10½x7½ inches. Both signed in ink, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New Orleans.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Hughie lee-smith (1915 - 1999)
Untitled (Sketch of a Boy) .
Charcoal on thin buff wove paper, 1937. 281x228 mm; 11⅝x9 inches. Signed and dated "Nov. '37" in charcoal, lower right. With numerous artist's notations in pencil at the sheet edges.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection.
This intimate drawing of a seated boy appears to be a preliminary study for Hughie Lee-Smith's 1938 oil painting Portrait of a Boy . It is a scarce example of a drawing from his Cleveland period of the late 1930s when Lee-Smith was studying at the Cleveland School of Art and developing an interest in social realism.
Estimate
$6,000 – $9,000
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 studied Martha Graham's dance techniques in an effort to 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
$10,000 – $15,000
James vanderzee (1886 - 1983)
Portrait of Two Brothers and Their Sister .
Silver print, 1931. 191x241 mm; 7½x9½ inches. Signed and numbered XV 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)
The Heiress, Harlem .
Silver print, 1938. 191x241 mm; 7½x9½ inches. Signed and numbered XVII 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)
GGG Photo Studio .
Silver print, circa early 1940s. 219x140 mm; 8½x5½ inches. Printed in the 1940s, with the artist’s GGG Photo Studio ink stamp, verso.
This scarce photograph shows the artist’s studio on the ground and first floors at 272 Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Wilmer jennings (1910 - 1990)
Shack .
Wood engraving on cream wove paper, circa 1938. 127x101 mm; 203x139 mm; 8x5½ inches, wide margins. Signed, titled and numbered 7/25 in pencil, lower margin.
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, printmaker and designer Wilmer Jennings attended Morehouse College and studied under Hale Woodruff, who introduced him to the principles of modernism. Under the Graphic Arts Division of the WPA in 1934, they worked together on two notable murals that represented the African American experience: The Negro in Modern American Life: Agriculture and Rural Life, Literature, Music, and Art and The Dream. Unfortunately, both murals were destroyed.
After graduating from Morehouse College, Jennings moved to New England to attend the Rhode Island School of Design (1933). Hired by the Rhode Island WPA in 1935, he created works that portrayed the economic hardships of African Americans during the Depression. The subjects of his later work included landscape and social realist scenes of his community. After injuring his right hand in 1957, Jennings began to train himself to draw and paint left-handed, which he continued to do up until the time of his death. Wilmer Jennings's artwork is in the permanent collections of the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Wilmer jennings (1910 - 1990)
Iris .
Wood engraving on cream wove paper, circa 1938. 127x101 mm; 5x4 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled and numbered 6/25 in pencil, lower margin.
A similar wood engraving by Wilmer Jennings, Growing Corn, 1938 is in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
Steal Away Home, I Ain’t Got Long to Stay Here .
Pen, brush and ink on cream illustration board, 1937. 432x305 mm; 17x12 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, New Jersey.
This large and beautiful ink drawing by Allan Rohan Crite impressively illustrates the chorus from the spiritual Steal Away (Steal Away to Jesus), one of the many spiritual songs popularized by Fisk University Jubilee Singers.
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
Alone in the Big, Wide World (Boy, Girl, Bicycle)
Watercolor, pen and ink on cream wove paper, circa 1939. 381x279 mm; 15x11 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto. Signed and inscribed with the artist’s Boston address in pen and ink, lower right verso. Titled in pencil, lower right verso.
Provenance: acquired from Anderson Fine Arts, Jersey City, NJ; private collection (1988).
Estimate
$7,000 – $10,000
Allan rohan crite (1910 - 2007)
The Annunciation .
Brass plaque, with plaster and bronze backing, 1940. 178x140 mm; 7x5½ inches. Inscribed signature and date, lower right recto. With the artist’s typed label on the frame back, signed and numbered (3) in ink.
Provenance: collection of the artist, Boston; the Ness Oleson Trust. The late Frannie Ness and Gary Oleson were the proprietors of Waiting for Godot Books of Hadley, MA, which specialized in rare American and English books, including African American literature.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Richmond barthé (1909 - 1989)
Untitled (Etta Moten Barnett) .
Pastel on cream wove paper, circa 1940. 685x558 mm; 27x22 inches. Signed in pastel, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of Claude A. Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett, Chicago.
Illustrated: Langston Hughes. The Negro Speaks of Rivers. As Sung by Etta Moten. Music by Margaret Bonds, Words by Langston Hughes. New York: Handy Brothers Music, 1942, cover illustration. This drawing is reproduced on the cover of this printed sheet music. A photograph of this drawing is also located in Photographs of Prominent African Americans, James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Etta Moten Barnett (1901 - 2004) was a popular African American actress and vocalist, who was best known for her signature role of Bess in Porgy and Bess . She married Claude Albert Barnett (1889 - 1967) in 1934. Barnett was an influential and trailblazing national figure - an important media entrepreneur, journalist and one of the principal organizers of the Chicago Negro Exposition in 1940. Barnett is also known as the founder of the Associated Negro Press in 1919, the first Black news service in the country, connecting Black newspapers across the country. By 1950 Barnett's news organization had became an influential international news source. The Barnetts travelled the world together - he frequently to report on African events for the ANP. In March 1957, Moten Barnett interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Accra, Ghana, when the Barnetts, along with Vice President Richard Nixon, attended the celebration of Ghana's independence from Great Britain.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Richmond barthé (1909 - 1989)
Untitled (Etta Vee Barnett) .
Pastel on cream wove paper, circa 1940. 685x558 mm; 27x22 inches. Signed in pastel, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of Claude A. Barnett and Etta Moten Barnett, Chicago.
Etta Vee Barnett is the youngest daughter of Etta Moten Barnett and her first husband Curtis Brooks. Richmond Barthé was a friend and regular visitor at the Barnett household.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Margaret burroughs (1917 - 2010)
Day Coach .
Lithograph on cream wove paper, circa 1940. 241x342 mm; 9½x13½ inches, full margins. Edition of 10. Signed “Margaret Taylor Goss”, titled and inscribed “10 prints” in pencil, lower margin.
This is the first impression of this scarce print to come to auction.
Burroughs was known as Margaret Taylor Goss when she married the artist Bernard Goss, until they divorced and she married her second husband, Charles Gordon Burroughs, in 1949.
Estimate
$2,000 – $3,000
Henry bozeman jones (1889 - 1973)
Portrait of a Young Boy .
Oil on masonite board, circa 1945. 609x508 mm; 24x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Philadelphia. Presentation plaque on the front of the frame engraved, "Presented by Susan Parrish Wharton Settlement 1945."
Portrait of a Young Boy is a seated portrait of a young boy posed to the right of a sculpture of the same sitter. The painting's plaque shows that it was a gift presented to Susan Parrish Wharton from the Susan Parrish Wharton Settlement in 1945. Susan Wharton Parrish was an advocate of the Settlement movement and early supporter of African American rights. She opened the Whittier Centre for Blacks in North Philadelphia, later renamed the Susan Parrish Wharton Settlement after her death in 1928. The Settlement continued in the twenty-first century as the Wharton Centre.
Henry Bozeman Jones studied at the School of Pedagogy and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1908 - 1910. While earning a living as a children's book illustrator, Jones was a painter, printmaker and a contemporary of Allan Freelon. He exhibited his work in the Harmon Foundation exhibitions of 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1933. According to Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, his work changed from an academic style to a more colorful, modern aesthetic in 1937 after a sketching trip to North Carolina and the Bahamas. Reynolds/Wright/Driskell p. 223.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Vera jackson (1911 - 1999)
Dorothy Dandridge .
Silver print, 1945. 352x279 mm; 13⅞x11 inches. Signed, titled "D. Dandridge", dated "1945", numbered #7/28 in pencil on the over mat. Printed in 1985 with the artist's "Historical Enterprises Vera Jackson" ink stamp on the verso and on the mount back.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection, Virginia (1988), acquired from the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, California.
Vera Ruth (Jackson) was born in 1911 in Wichita, Kansas. After the death of her mother at age 5, Vera and her father relocated to a farm in Corona, California. In 1936, she began taking WPA sponsored photography classes taught by George Manuel. Her first photo job was as an assistant to photographer Maceo Sheffield. She was hired as a staff photographer for the California Eagle in 1945, where she was a pioneer among both female and African American photographers, capturing both the glamour of Black celebrities and the stirrings of the civil rights movement after World War II. She later worked with publisher Charlotta Bass, a leader in the Los Angeles civil rights movement, photographing protests at City Hall. Jackson became a frequent contributor to the letter section of the Los Angeles Times, expressing her view on civil rights.
The artist is best known for her photographs of prominent African Americans of her day, capturing such figures as Billie Holiday, Ralph Bunche, Jackie Robinson, and Dorothy Dandridge in her lens. Between the 1940s and 1950s, Jackson produced a large body of photographic work, and she left the newspaper to pursue higher education. Jackson received her BA in education in 1952 at the University of California at Los Angeles and her MA in 1954 from the University of Southern California. For more than twenty years, she was an educator with the Los Angeles School District. After shifting from full-time photojournalism, Jackson continued to contribute photographs to various magazines, including Black Angelenos, Travel and Art, and Design.
In 1997, Jackson was featured in A History of Women Photographers, a major exhibition that traveled to the New York Public Library and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her works have also been exhibited at the Cinque Gallery, New York, CAAM, the UCLA Gallery, the Riverside Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, the Akron Art Museum and SF MoMA. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Akron Art Museum.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Postwar
Hayward oubre (1916 - 2006)
Entanglement .
Etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 1946. 184x149 mm; 7¼x5 ⅞ inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 2/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed later by the artist, circa 1980.
Hayward Oubre studied etching with Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa while working on his MFA from 1946 to 1948.
Estimate
$1,000 – $1,500
Claude clark (1915 - 2001)
Ritual Dance .
Oil on masonite board, 1946. 430x330 mm; 17x13 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist, Oakland, CA; private collection, New York, acquired at Swann Galleries, February 23, 2010.
Claude Clark was an innovative painter and printmaker whose family moved from Alabama to Philadelphia in 1923. After winning a four-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, he was supported by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, and in 1944, his painting Cutting Pattern was the second work by an African American artist accepted into the Barnes Foundation, after a painting by Horace Pippin. Clark was a colleague of Dox Thrash and Raymond Steth in the Philadelphia Fine Print Workshop of the WPA from 1939 - 1942, where he helped develop carborundum etching. He returned to his native Alabama to give an art workshop at Talladega College, AL in 1949. He stayed and eventually created the art department at the school, where he taught until 1955. His paintings and prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Messenger, p. 48.
Estimate
$5,000 – $7,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
In Other Folks’ Homes .
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1946. 160x55 mm; 6⅜×2⅛ inches, full margins. Artist's proof, aside from the edition of 20. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "AP I" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York, in 1989. From I am the Black Woman series.
Additional impressions are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Elizabeth catlett (1915 - 2012)
I have special reservations… .
Linoleum cut on wove paper, 1947. 162x159 mm; 6⅜x6¼> inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 6/20 in pencil, lower margin. Printed at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop, New York, in 1989. From the I am the Black Woman series.
Additional impressions are in the permanent collections of Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Estimate
$4,000 – $6,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1993)
Interlude .
Oil on linen canvas, 1949. 1016x762 mm; 40x30 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Washington, DC.
Illustrated: Cedric Dover, American Negro Art , plate 64, p. 140.
Interlude is a significant oil painting of James Lesesne Wells - a scarce, large example of his 1940s modernist painting. While known primarily as a printmaker, Wells established himself as a talented modernist painter early in his career. Wells first gained national recognition with the Harmon Foundation award for his 1931 oil painting Journey to Egypt . This painting and Wells’s Journey into the Holy Land were acquired in 1931 and 1935 by the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC - the first African American artist acquired by the collection. Interlude is illustrated in Cedric Dover important 1950 survey American Negro Art and is listed in Cederholm’s Afro-American Artists: Bio-bibliographical Directory . Other oil paintings from 1949 include his Still Life which was once in the Evan-Tibbs Collection, Washington, DC.
In 1949, Wells was in the center of the growing visual artist community in Washington, DC and rose to the position of associate professor at Howard University. He’d taken a sabattical the previous year to study intaglio printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at his Atelier 17 in New York, and began making wood engravings. In 1950, Wells had a solo exhibition, “Paintings and Prints by James Lesesne Wells” at the Barnett-Aden Gallery in Washington, DC from April 1 - May 31.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1992)
Bronze C Street Diana .
Woodcut on imitation Japan paper, circa 1940s. 304x457 mm; 12x18 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled, dated "72" and inscribed "4th imp." in pencil, lower margin. A later impression printed in 1972 of this scarce print.
Inspired by the environs of Washington, DC in the 1940s, Wells made woodcut landscapes of various locales, including River Boat C. & O. Canal, DC and Flower Vendor. Bronze C Street Diana is a view of the fountain honoring the early twentieth-century lawyer, Joseph J. Darlington. The monument, a sculpture of Diana the Huntress, is atop a plinth at Fifth Street and Indiana Avenue in Judiciary Square.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
James lesesne wells (1902 - 1992)
The Awakening .
Woodcut on imitation Japan paper, circa late 1940s. 254x355 mm; 10x14 inches, wide margins. Signed, titled, dated “55” and numbered 7/35 in pencil, lower margin. A later impression printed in 1955 of this scarce woodcut.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Paul f. keene, jr. (1920 - 2009)
Untitled .
Oil on linen canvas, 1949. 609x508 mm; 24x20 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection, Delaware; private collection, PA.
This early oil on canvas by Paul Keene was executed during a formative period of his career spent in Paris between 1949 and 1951. Keene absorbed the lessons of European modernism and enrolled at the Académie Julian. While in Paris, he founded the cooperative Galerie Huit with Raymond Hendler, shared an apartment with Sanford Greenberg, and studied with French modernist painter Fernand Léger. Keene exhibited with Picasso and Léger at the Salon de Mai and through Whitney Fellowships directed courses at the Centre D'Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti between 1952 and 1954.
Keene went on to teach painting and drawing at Bucks County Community College from 1968 to 1985, serving as the art department chairperson for three years. He has exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all in PA.
Estimate
$10,000 – $15,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Figure Study) .
Pen and ink on thin buff wove paper, circa 1940s. 184x122 mm; 7¼x4⅞ inches.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection.
Estimate
$1,500 – $2,500
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Untitled (Rhododendrons) .
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1948. 1117x1372 mm; 42x54 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 beautiful, modernist composition is an important early abstraction by Norman Lewis. This large canvas displays the artist's deep investigation of the dark tonalities and form found in the curled leaves of rhododendrons. The painting represents a significant moment, the confluence of Lewis's interest in modernism, black paint and natural forms that characterize his earliest abstract period and on a grand scale.
Reflecting his great love of plants, of which he kept many in his studio, Lewis drew and painted several images of the leaves of rhododendron plants hanging down in the cold of winter. In 1948, Lewis painted the vertical and tonal composition Rhododendrons in Winter, in the Mott/Warsh Collection, which he later included in his first solo exhibition at the Willard Gallery in 1949. Another almost identical but smaller (18x24 inches) painting Three in Spades, 1948, is recorded with a photograph in the estate of the artist. Illustrated in the catalogue Norman Lewis: Black Paintings, 1946-1977, Ann Gibson used this image in her essay Black is a Color: Norman Lewis and Modernism in New York to illustrate how Lewis's interest in the color black began. It goes back to his painting of rhododendrons; according to Lewis, it "started with some rhododendrons...which I painted. I used just black - to convey the form - and I liked that and I went on to try to do other things". Lewis continued to use black and a dark palette through the 1940s to define his abstract forms. In Untitled and City Night, two 1949 paintings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Lewis creates a similar dark silhouette around the central image; Untitled shares this earthy palette of greens and greys.
Estimate
$350,000 – $500,000
Norman lewis (1909 - 1979)
Jazz Quartet .
Oil and ink on cream wove paper, 1952. 483x610 mm; 19x24 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: acquired from Kenkeleba Gallery, NY, private collection, NY.
Estimate
$30,000 – $40,000
William sylvester carter (1909 - 1986)
Untitled (Harlequin Figure) .
Tempera on wove paper, circa 1950. 508x381 mm; 20x15 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Chicago.
A landscape and figure painter, William S. Carter was born in St. Louis in 1909. He moved to Chicago in 1930 and studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Illinois. In cooperation with the Harmon Foundation, in the summer of 1940, Carter was included in a group of young WPA-era artists in the important Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro at the Tanner Galleries, assembled by Alonzo Aden for the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. In 1943, he joined the Illinois Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and worked with artists such as Charles White, Eldzier Cortor, Earl Walker and Charles Davis.
Carter's works are found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the DuSable Museum of African American History and the South Side Community Art Center, all in Chicago, and the Clark-Atlanta University Art Galleries.
Estimate
$3,000 – $5,000
Eldzier cortor (1916 - 2015)
Composition .
Watercolor on wove paper, circa 1949-51. 578x394 mm; 22⅝x15½ inches. Signed in watercolor, lower right. Signed, titled and inscribed "watercolor" and "Haiti" in ink on the cardboard back board.
Provenance: private collection, New York; private collection, Ohio.
This attractive watercolor is a scarce example of Eldzier Cortor's painting from his Haitian period. Cortor traveled there first in 1949 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Then from 1949-51, Cortor was a teacher at Le Centre d'Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, an art center, school and gallery founded in 1944 which became the center of what became known as the Haitian Art Movement.
Cortor is best known for his elegant draughtsmanship and depiction of the beauty of Black women. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916, his family moved to Chicago where he attended Englewood High School with future artists Charles White and Charles Sebree. He studied drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a founding member of the Southside Community Art Center where he taught drawing and worked on murals during the Works Progress Administration. A Rosenwald Fellowship in 1944-45 at Sea Islands, Georgia, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, and teaching at the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1949-51 all increased his awareness of both nature and the African diaspora, which he incorporated in the naturalism of his painting.
Estimate
$8,000 – $12,000
Hartwell yeargans (1915 - 2005)
Untitled (Two Women) .
Oil on linen canvas, 1953. 864x610 mm; 34x24 inches. Signed and dated “53” in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of th