UPDATED: Swann Galleries African-American Fine Art auction

Posted on | February 27, 2008 | No Comments

ANOTHER RECORD-SETTING AUCTION OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN FINE ART AT
SWANN GALLERIES ON FEBRUARY 19

Artist Records Set for Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Hale Woodruff and
Other Well-Known Artists

New York—Swann Galleries’ third auction of African-American Fine Art on February 19 was their largest and highest-grossing sale of that category to date, bringing in more than $2.7 million. Once again benchmarks were set for works by important and lesser-known
African-American artists.

The top lot, Building More Stately Mansions, an oil painting by famed Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, sold for $600,000—an auction record for the artist’s work. It was purchased by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum where it will be exhibited in their new galleries of Twentieth Century art and design. The RISD Museum faced fierce competition from other bidders in the auction room and on the telephones, including other museums.

This previously unknown work is a variant of Douglas’s famous larger painting with the same title, which is in the Fisk University collection. It employs the artist’s signature combination of Art Deco and African forms in a visionary scene of soaring architectural achievement. The painting had been purchased directly from the artist by a colleague at Fisk and passed down in the family of the original owner. It had never been on public exhibition.

Another newly discovered work by Douglas in the auction was Emperor Jones, a black gouache drawing from 1926. One of few known studies for the artist’s celebrated woodcut series, it sold to a private collector for $90,000.

Nigel Freeman, Director of Swann’s African-American Fine Art Department, said, “We are thrilled with the results achieved by these important works and others in the sale.”

An auction record price was also set by Elizabeth Catlett’s Torso, Portrait of Joan, a painted terra cotta sculpture from 1960, which brought $216,000. The previous top price for a work by Catlett was for Nude Torso, a 1976 carved mahogany sculpture, which sold at Swann in February 2007 for $120,000.

Also surpassing earlier artist records were Hale Aspacio Woodruff’s Europa and the Bull, oil on canvas, circa 1958, $120,000; Beauford Delaney’s Untitled, a heavily impastoed abstract oil on canvas, circa 1958, $102,200; Ernie Barnes’s Pool Hall, oil on canvas, circa 1970, $19,200; Alexander Skunder Boghossian’s The Bark of the Hanging Tree, acrylic on bark-cloth, 1977, $19,200; and James Denmark’s Untitled, mixed paper, fabric collage and oil on masonite, circa 1980, $24,000.

Highlights among many fine prints included William H. Johnson’s Self-Portrait, woodcut, circa 1930-35, $36,000; Catlett’s Negro Woman, lithograph, 1945, $24,000, a record price for a print by the artist; John Wilson’s Straphangers, lithograph, 1947, an artist record $10,800; Romare Bearden’s Uptown Looking Downtown, photostat print mounted on masonite, 1964, $24,000; and Charles White’s Missouri C., etching, 1972, $24,000, a record for a White print.

Finally, James Van Der Zee’s Eighteen Photographs, a portfolio with 18 mounted photographs, from an edition of 75 numbered copies, 1905-1938, brought a record $26,400.

Once again, the sale presented works by many artists appearing at a major auction for the first time and the strong prices served to establish public benchmarks for them.

For complete results, an illustrated auction catalogue with prices realized is available for $35 from Swann Galleries, Inc., 104 East 25th Street, New York, NY 10010, or online at www.swanngalleries.com.

For further information, please contact Nigel Freeman at 212-254-4710, extension 33, or via email at nfreeman@swanngalleries.com.

# # #

Title: AFRICAN-AMERICAN FINE ART
Date: February 19, 2008
Time: 1:30 PM
Exhibition: Wednesday, Feb. 13, 10-6
Thursday, Feb. 14, 10-6
Friday, Feb. 15, 10-6
Saturday, Feb. 16, 10-4
Monday, Feb. 18, 10-6
Tuesday, Feb. 19, 10-noon

Contact Person: Nigel Freeman
nfreeman@swanngalleries.com

Sale 2136 Lot 45

ROY DECARAVA (1919 – )
Pickets.

Color screenprint on thin wove paper, 1946. 260×325 mm; 10 1/4×12 7/8 inches, 1/8- to 1/2- inch margins. Signed in ink, lower right. Numbered 8 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression with strong colors of this scarce print.

Roy Decarava is known today as an important African-American photographer. But until the late 1940s, he was a painter and printmaker who had trained in screenprinting during the WPA. Another impression is in the collection of the Library of Congress, exhibited in Creative Space: Fifty Years of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop; Blackburn and DeCarava met at the Harlem Community Art Center.
Estimate $3,000-5,000

On Tuesday, February 19 Swann Galleries will conduct the third auction organized by our new African-American Fine Art department. The sale offers 250 paintings, drawings, collages, prints and sculpture by notable African-American artists—from Henry Ossawa Tanner to Faith Ringgold. Many of the works are recognizable because they have been included in important museum exhibitions and illustrated in catalogues and monographs.

Varied sale highlights include three stellar examples of Elizabeth Catlett’s sculptures, among them Sister, a green marble bust of a woman, 1971 (see top illustration); several paintings that span the length of Hale Woodruff’s career and display his varied styles, including the stunning, modernist Woman by the Sea, 1930, painted while the artist was living in France (second illustration); Beauford Delaney’s Portrait of a Youth, oil on canvas, a gift to James Baldwin, painted in Istanbul in the summer of 1966 (third illustration); a monumental charcoal and crayon drawing by Charles White, Lo, I am Black, 1978 (fourth illustration); and Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach II, color screenprint on quilted fabric, 1990-1992 (see final illustration).

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