Swann Galleries spring 2024 African American Art sale

  Swann Galleries spring 2024 African American Art sale will take place on Thursday, April 4, with a standout selection of house favorites from Hughie Lee-Smith, Jacob Lawrence and more, and features a special evening session to benefit the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation.

The sale is led by a significant, mid-career oil painting by the great Hughie Lee-Smith—his Ball Player, 1970, a powerful painting, that epitomizes the artist’s evocative depictions of African American youth in desolate urban settings. Ball Player has been widely exhibited and was in the personal collection of the artist before being acquired by the current owners. The work is expected at $150,000 to $250,000. 

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  Lot 35
  HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Bather.
  Estimate$75,000-$100,000

Also on offer by Lee-Smith is Bather, oil on board, 1954 ($75,000-100,000), and Untitled (Study of a Woman in a Landscape), oil and pencil on canvas, 1991 ($30,000-40,000).

Lee-Smith’s figurative work is offered alongside 

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  Lot 117
  KERMIT OLIVER (1943 - ) Hay Rolls.
  Estimate$100,000-$150,000

Kermit Oliver’s Hay Rolls, acrylic on board, 1983 ($100,000-150,000), a significant mid-career by this important Texas artist. Further works of note include a vibrant scene of a carousel from 1953 by Philadelphia artist Paul F. Keene, Jr. ($30,000-40,000), Benny Andrews’s Time for Church, oil with painted canvas, lace collage and staples on canvas, 1999 ($50,000-75,000), and Charles L. Sallée Jr.’s Swingtime, oil on canvas, 1985 ($20,000-30,000).

The house is excited to bring to auction—for the first time since 2008—a complete set of Jacob Lawrence’s masterwork in printmaking, The Legend of John Brown. With this 1977 portfolio, Lawrence translated his series of John Brown paintings into 22 stunning color screenprints. The complete portfolio comes to auction at $100,000 to $150,000.

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  Lot 27
  NORMAN LEWIS (1917 - 1979) Tenement.
  Estimate$120,000-$180,000
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  Lot 48
  SAM GILLIAM (1933 - 2022) Untitled.
  Estimate$80,000-$120,000
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  Lot 104
  HOWARDENA PINDELL (1943 - ) Skowhegan Series: Lake Lillies for Karen.
  Estimate$75,000-$100,000
• Abstraction is represented by an example of the earliest abstractions by Norman Lewis with Tenement, oil on board, 1947 ($120,000-180,000), as well as Howardena Pindell with Skowhegan Series: Lake Lillies for Karen, mixed-media, 1980-81 ($75,000-100,000), and Untitled (#72), mixed-media including punched graph papers, 1975 ($30,000-50,000). Also of note is Sam Gilliam’s 1967 acrylic, dye pigments and metallic powder work on canvas ($80,000-120,000), and Alvin D. Loving, Jr.’s Wild Goose Lake, acrylic on canvas, 1981 ($25,000-35,000).

Sculpture spans from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary, with works by Augusta Savage, Richmond Barthé, Simone Leigh, and Wangechi Mutu. Highlights include Savage’s Head of a Young Black Man, painted plaster, 1931-35 ($35,000-50,000), and Gamin, plaster painted gold, circa 1929 ($10,000-15,000); Barthé’s Black Majesty, bronze with a brown patina, 1969 ($50,000-75,000); two glazed terracotta vessels circa 1990s by Leigh ($50,000-75,000, apiece); and a striking pair of assemblage sculptures by Wangechi Mutu—Untitled (Bottle People Series), mixed media and glass sculptures, 1997 ($20,000-30,000).

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

  

Exhibition Dates: February 25–July 28, 2024 
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 999

 

Image: William Henry Johnson (American, 1901–1970). Woman in Blue, c. 1943. Oil on burlap. Framed: 35 × 27 in. (88.9 × 68.6 cm). Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Permanent Loan from the National Collection of Fine Art,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism from February 25 through July 28, 2024. Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.   

A significant percentage of the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper on view in the exhibition come from the extensive collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), including Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art. Other major lenders include the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The exhibition will also include loans from significant private collections and European museums.

“This landmark exhibition reframes the Harlem Renaissance, cementing its place as the first African American–led movement of international modern art,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “Through compelling portraits, vibrant city scenes, history paintings, depictions of early mass protests and activism, and dynamic portrayals of night life created by leading artists of the time, the exhibition boldly underscores the movement’s pivotal role in shaping the portrayal of the modern Black subject—and indeed the very fabric of early 20th-century modern art.”

“We are very pleased to present this wide-ranging exhibition that establishes the New Negro cohort of African American artists and their allies—now known as the Harlem Renaissance—at the vanguard of the portrayal of modern Black life and culture in Harlem and other new Black cities nationwide at a time of rapid expansion in the first decades of the Great Migration,” added Denise Murrell, The Met’s Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large. “Many New Negro artists spent extended periods abroad and joined the multiethnic artistic circles in Paris, London, and Northern Europe that shaped the development of international modern art. The exhibition underscores the essential role of the Harlem Renaissance and its radically new modes of portraying the modern Black subject as central to the development of transatlantic modern art.”

 

"This landmark exhibition celebrates the brilliant and talented artists behind the groundbreaking cultural movement we now know as the Harlem Renaissance," said Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. "I thank the dedicated team at The Met and applaud Denise Murrell for her vision and thoughtful curation of this vibrant collection of paintings, sculptures, film, and photography that gives a powerful glimpse into the Black experience in the early 20th century."

 

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will open with galleries that explore the cultural philosophy that gave shape to the New Negro movement of art and literature, as the period was known at inception, using a term defined and popularized by the movement’s founding philosopher, Howard University professor Alain Locke, in dialogue and debate with W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and influential literary and music figures including Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson. At the core of the exhibition are the artists who shared a commitment to depicting the modern Black subject in a radically modern way and to refusing the prevailing racist stereotypes. 

Although united in their shared objective to portray all aspects of modern Black life and culture, individual New Negro artists developed widely varied representational styles, ranging from an engagement with African and Egyptian aesthetics and European avant-garde pictorial strategies to a commitment to classicized academic tradition. Featured artists include Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas, Meta Warrick Fuller, Palmer Hayden, Bert Hurley, William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Jr., Winold Reiss, Augusta Savage, James Van Der Zee, and Laura Wheeler Waring.  

The exhibition will continue with galleries devoted to genre scenes and portraiture that capture all aspects of Black city life in the 1920s–40s as seen in vibrant paintings, sculpture, and film projections as well as photography from The Met’s recently acquired James Van Der Zee Archive and artists’ cover illustrations for books and periodicals, including the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Monumentally scaled allegorical history paintings and portraits of luminaries will provide compelling vista views.

Galleries featuring paintings by New Negro artists who lived and worked in Europe during extended periods of expatriation will present their work in direct juxtaposition with portrayals of the international African diaspora by Black and white European artists including Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso, as well as Germaine Casse, Kees van Dongen, Jacob Epstein, and Ronald Moody.

The New Negro era’s fraught approach to social issues including queer identity, colorism and class tensions, and interracial relations will be the subject of a gallery featuring paintings, ephemera, and photography animated by film clips. The exhibition will conclude with an artist-as-activist gallery spotlighting artists’ treatment of social justice issues as the New Negro era comes to a close on the cusp of the 1950s civil rights movement. A coda will feature Romare Bearden’s 15-foot-wide series of collages, The Block (1970), from The Met collection, which evokes a town house row in mid-century Harlem and that sustains the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

In preparation for the exhibition, The Met undertook extensive archival research, original photography, technical imaging, and conservation treatment of important but seldom seen works of art. For example, archival research by the curatorial team resulted in the first-ever dating of two Laura Wheeler Waring portraits from her family’s collections: Girl with Pomegranate (ca. 1940) and Girl in Pink Dress (ca. 1927). 

The Met has an extended history of collecting and displaying works by artists active during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1940s, the Museum acquired several early works by gift from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), such as Jacob Lawrence’s Pool Parlor (1942) and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr.’s Self-Portrait (ca. 1941). 

In 1969, the Museum presented the exhibition “Harlem on My Mind”: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which was met with great controversy for excluding works of painting and sculpture by Black artists and instead presenting a social narrative of Harlem told through reproductions of newspaper clippings and photographs of prominent leaders and anonymous Harlem residents—in large-scale dioramas more similar to ethnographic or natural history museum displays than to art museum galleries. 

For the nearly 50 years since that exhibition, The Met has expanded its holdings of works produced during the Harlem Renaissance—notably in 2021 with the establishment of the James Van Der Zee Archive in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem—and through the acquisition of paintings including by Aaron Douglas, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles Alston it continues to be an area of focus. The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism will provide an art and artist centered celebration and investigation into the Harlem Renaissance as a trailblazing, pivotal period within the art of the 20th century. 

Credits 

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is organized by The Met’s Denise Murrell, PhD, Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Office of the Director, in consultation with an advisory committee of leading scholars.

Catalogue

A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue on the vibrant history of the Harlem Renaissance will accompany the exhibition. It will feature essays that explore how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism. The catalogue is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press; it will be available for purchase from The Met Store.   
 

Images:

https://yrbmag.com/the-harlem-renaissance-and-transatlantic-modernism-february-25-through-july-28-2024/

WINFRED REMBERT,

 Shannon's Fine Art Auction October 26, 2023 

76: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, Family in the Cotton Field, dye on carved and tooled leather, 12 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches (31.1 x 21.6 cm.), Frame: 13 3/4 x 1 x 10 in. (34.9 x 2.5 x 25.4 cm.)

Estimate: $60,000 - $80,000

Starting Bid: $30,0000 Bids

77: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, Uncle Lonnie's Place, dye on carved and tooled leather, 16 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches (42.5 x 49.5 cm.), Frame: 17 3/4 x 3/4 x 20 3/4 in. (45.1 x 1.9 x 52.7 cm.)

Estimate: $40,000 - $60,000

Starting Bid: $20,0000 Bids

78: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, The Boy in a Dress, dye on carved and tooled leather, 8 1/4 x 11 inches (21 x 27.9 cm.), Frame: 10 3/4 x 1 x 13 1/2 in. (27.3 x 2.5 x 34.3 cm.)

Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000

Starting Bid: $10,0000 Bids

81: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, First Date, dye on carved and tooled leather, 28 x 22 1/2 inches (71.1 x 57.2 cm.), Frame: 28 1/2 x 3/4 x 23 1/4 in. (72.4 x 1.9 x 59.1 cm.)

Estimate: $15,000 - $25,000

Starting Bid: $7,5000 Bids

79: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, Couple, dye on carved and tooled leather, 9 x 7 1/4 inches (22.9 x 18.4 cm.), Frame: 10 1/2 x 1 x 8 1/2 in. (26.7 x 2.5 x 21.6 cm.)

Estimate: $12,000 - $18,000

Starting Bid: $6,0000 Bids

80: WINFRED REMBERT, American 1945-2021, Reading Stories, dye on carved and tooled leather, 11 3/4 x 8 inches (29.8 x 20.3 cm.) (sight), Frame: 13 3/4 x 1 x 10 in. (34.9 x 2.5 x 25.4 cm.)

Estimate: $12,000 - $18,000

Henry Taylor

 

For more than thirty years, the Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor (b. 1958) has portrayed people from widely different backgrounds—family members, friends, neighbors, celebrities, politicians, and strangers—with a mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness. His improvisational approach to artmaking is hinted at in this exhibition’s title, Henry Taylor: B Side, which refers to the side of a record album that often contains lesser-known, more experimental songs. 

Taylor’s paintings, executed quickly and instinctually from memory, newspaper clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings, are variously light-hearted, intimate, and somber. In them, he combines flat planes of bold, sensuous color with areas of rich, intimate detail and loose brushstrokes to create paintings that feel alive. Guided by a deep-seated empathy for people and their lived experiences, Taylor captures the humanity, social milieu, and mood of his subjects, whose visceral presence is heightened by their closely cropped, often life-size images. In working from personal experience and shared history, Taylor offers a view of everyday life in the United States that is grounded in the experiences of his own community, including the incarceration, poverty, and often deadly interactions with police that disproportionately affect Black Americans. Deeply steeped in art history, his work forms a continuum with the expressive figurative painting and politically engaged work of European and American artists from Max Beckmann to Bob Thompson, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel.      

Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura, California, Taylor grew up nearby in Oxnard. While studying art at Oxnard Community College and later the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he worked at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital as a psychiatric technician on the night shift. After graduating from CalArts in 1995 and moving to downtown Los Angeles, Taylor became a mainstay of the burgeoning art community there and a leading influence on the rise of figurative painting.                   

Organized thematically, Henry Taylor: B Side presents the artist’s paintings along with a selection of his assemblage sculptures, rarely exhibited early drawings, a large grouping of painted objects on recycled cigarette packs and other everyday supports, and two new installations, one made specifically for this exhibition.                                

This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), in Los Angeles, and curated by Bennett Simpson, Senior Curator, with Anastasia Kahn, Curatorial Assistant, at MOCA. The presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator at the Whitney, with Colton Klein, Curatorial Assistant, and Caroline Webb, Curatorial Assistant.

Works by Artists of African Descent

The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) has more than doubled its collection of American works by artists of African descent with 55 important works on paper from the collection of Robert and Jean Steele. The works created between 1976 and 2014 examine cultural memory, social justice, politics, war, Black history, resilience and diversity of the American experience through the lens of the African diaspora. HoMA will present the works, many of which have never been on display, in “Forward Together: African American Prints from the Jean & Robert Steele Collection,” opening Jan. 18, 2024.

       “We are honored that Robert and Jean chose the Honolulu Museum of Art to care for their important collection. These incredible works will enhance HoMA’s ability to educate its community about the enormous contributions of African American artists, the medium of printmaking and the artistic styles and themes of the late-20th and early-21st centuries,” said HoMA Director and CEO Halona Norton-Westbrook. “Bringing these works into the collection also aligns with HoMA’s diversity and inclusion goals and advances the Museum’s ability to share relevant stories through art from our time.”

       Twenty-six artists are among the new acquisitions and bolster HoMA’s holdings by notable artists such as Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence and Faith Ringgold. The recent acquisitions also introduce artists who are new to HoMA’s collection, including Emma Amos, David C. Driskell, Barkley L. Hendricks, Curlee Raven Holton, Joyce Scott and others. The works represent various printmaking and media techniques along with several stylistic approaches, including figuration, abstraction, dynamic line, expressive color and black and white.

       For more than four decades, the Steeles have amassed an impressive collection of works that highlight motifs of cultural memory, modernist aesthetics, the African diaspora, religious observances and figurative representation. Supporting notable and emerging creators, as well as their mentors and students, has always been at the core of their collecting practice. They have also been intentional about making purchases from artists and authorized printmaking workshops that were founded by and focused on African American artists and art fairs, auctions, nonprofit arts organizations, college and university fundraisers and galleries that represented African American artists. 

       When the Steeles relocated to Honolulu in 2016 to be closer to their daughter and Jean’s family home, they recognized HoMA’s commitment to sharing works by artists of color. They were especially moved by HoMA’s presentation of “30 Americans,” a 2020 exhibition drawn from the collection of the Rubell Museum (Miami) featuring works by 30 contemporary artists who are connected through their African American cultural history. After seeing the exhibition, the Steeles decided to gift a portion of their collection to help diversify the museum’s holdings and further their ability to present a full scope of American art.

       “Over the years, we have devoted ourselves to Black artists’ rich and overlooked contributions to the field of American art,” said Robert Steele. “It is our great hope that these works, selected by HoMA, will be well cared for and shared with our adopted Honolulu community while expanding the Museum’s collection of African American art to include a greater representation of African American artists.”

       Steele purchased his first work in 1968 as a graduate student in Harlem. Robert Blackburn, the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions in New York, encouraged Steele to connect with Lou Stovall—who printed for Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, David C. Driskell and others—and Allan Edmunds at the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia. Steele later acquired a lithograph by Ron Adams of Blackburn in the Chelsea workshop he opened in 1948. The print, titled “Blackburn,” presents a rich, detailed look at the artist working in a space that is heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and Social Realism, with nods to Mexican muralists and European and American modernists. “Blackburn” will be featured in HoMA's upcoming exhibition.

 

       HoMA will also present Jacob Lawrence’s “Forward Together,” a silkscreen that inspired the exhibition title. In the 1997 work, Lawrence uses his signature color palette to pay homage to Harriet Tubman, offering an abstract depiction of her efforts to shepherd enslaved people from captivity in the South to freedom in the North.

 

       Because of his growing collection and expertise in the field, Robert Steele served as the second executive director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts & Culture of African Americans & the African Diaspora from 2002-2012 following a career as a professor and dean in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. Over the years, the Steeles have shared portions of their collection with institutions across the county, making gifts of art to David C. Driskell Center (College Park, Maryland); Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, Alabama); Morehouse College (Atlanta, Georgia); William & Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia); and Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut).

 

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About the Honolulu Museum of Art
A vital part of Hawaiʻi’s cultural landscape, HoMA is a unique gathering place where art, global worldviews, culture and education converge in the heart of Honolulu. In addition to an internationally renowned permanent collection, the museum houses innovative exhibitions, an art school, an independent art house theatre, two cafés and a museum shop within one of the most beautiful, iconic buildings in Hawaiʻi.    

The museum inspires and uplifts the community through transformative art experiences that celebrate creativity, cultivate wonder, foster empathy and enhance knowledge in order to deepen our connections with one another and the world we share.

 

Jacob Lawrence (American, 1917 – 2000)
"Forward Together," 1997
Screenprint
Partial gift of Robert and Jean Steele; partial purchase with funds from the John V. Levas Trust, 2023 (2023-06-06)
© 2023 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 

Romare Bearden (American, 1911 – 1988)
"Girl in the Garden," 1979
Screenprint
Partial gift of Robert and Jean Steele; partial purchase with funds from the John V. Levas Trust, 2023 (2026-06-05)
© 2023 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
 

Ron Adams (American, 1934 – 2020)
"Blackburn," 2000
Lithograph
Partial gift of Robert and Jean Steele; partial purchase with funds from the John V. Levas Trust, 2023 (2023-06-01)
 

Faith Ringgold (American, b. 1930)
"Wynton’s Tune," 2004
Screenprint
Partial gift of Robert and Jean Steele; partial purchase with funds from the John V. Levas Trust, 2023 (2023-06-04)
©2023 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York

 

Forward Together: African American Prints from the Jean & Robert Steele Collection

Honolulu Museum of Art

Jan. 19, 2024-Jan. 19, 2025

HoMA’s collection made a giant leap forward with the recent major gift of the Jean & Robert Steele Collection—54 works on paper and a painting by 26 influential African American artists. The exhibition of this notable collection of late 20th-century and early 21st-century artworks celebrates the enormous contributions three generations of these artists have made to American art, Black visual arts culture and the printmaking field at large. Forward Together highlights how the Steele gift vastly increases HoMA’s representation of art by women and artists of color, adding new perspectives to the Museum.

The gift includes prints by iconic Americans Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence and Faith Ringgold, who are all represented in HoMA’s collection. It also adds artists new to HoMA’s collection, such as Ron Adams, Emma Amos, Oletha DeVane, Annette Fortt, Barkley L. Hendricks, Robin Holder, Curlee Raven Holton, Varnette P. Honeywood, Margo Humphrey, Lois Mailou Jones and Valerie Maynard.

Renee Cox

 

Renee Cox (b. 1960, Colgate, Jamaica; active New York, NY), “The Signing,” 2018, printed 2020. Inkjet print, 121.9 × 213.4 centimeters. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Kathleen Compton Sherrerd Fund for Acquisitions in American Art (2021-38) © Renee Cox.