Records for Charles Alston, Wadsworth Jarrell, Augusta Savage and More in African American Art

 -----at Swann

The December 10, 2020, sale of African American Art was met with enthusiasm from collectors. The sale saw nine auction records set, as well as an auction debut from contemporary artist Tyrone Geter. The auction total reached $2.8 million bringing the house’s African American Art sale totals for the year to $9.2 million.

 

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Charles Alston

 

Charles Alston, Black and White #8, oil on canvas, 1961. Sold for $197,000, a record for the artist.

 

Leading the December sale was Charles Alston’s Black and White #8, oil on canvas, 1961. The largest of the artist’s works yet to come to auction, the stunning abstraction came from an important series of eight works painted between 1959 and 1961. Black and White #8, earned a record for the artist at $197,000.

 

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Abstract Works

 

Sir Frank Bowling, Repose for SO, acrylic on canvas, 1976. Sold for $93,750.

 

Additional abstract works included Sir Frank Bowling’s Repose for SO, acrylic on canvas, 1976, an example of Bowling’s trailblazing mid-1970s series of “poured paintings,” which brought $93,750. Kenneth Victor Youngand Thomas Sills returned to the Swann auction block after stellar outings in the January white-glove sale of the Johnson Publishing Company’s art collection. Young was present with a circa-2000 acrylic-on-canvas abstraction in fuchsia and blue, which sold for $81,250, and Sills was featured with New Born, oil on canvas, 1958, at $50,000. A 1972 acrylic-on-paper in dark blue-black and deep pink by Alma Thomas earned $62,500; and a 1978 color pastel, dry pigment and pencil work from Ed Clark’s Louisiana Series realized $60,000.

 

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Augusta Savage & Sculpture

 

Augusta Savage, Gamin, plaster painted gold, circa 1929. Sold for $112,500, a record for the artist.

 

Augusta Savage earned a new auction record with the sale of her iconic 1929 sculpture Gamin. The work was acquired directly from the artist before it made its way across the auction block, selling for $112,500. Also representing sculptural works was Simone Leigh with Head, a 2004 glazed and painted fired stoneware work that brought $93,750.

Related Reading: Fine Sculpture by African-American Artists

 

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Figurative Works

 

Wadsworth Jarrell, Subway, acrylic on canvas, 1970. Sold for $125,000, a record for the artist.

 

Figurative works included Wadsworth Jarrell’s Subway, acrylic on canvas, 1970, which brought a record for the artist at $125,000. Another record was earned with John N. Robinson’s 1952 oil-on-canvas portrait of his wife Gladys at $81,250. Romare Bearden was present with two collage works: Woman and Child, 1968, which sold for $173,000, and The Last of the Blue Devils, 1979, which sold for $100,000. Also of note was Emma Amos’s Water Baby, a 1987 acrylic and fabric collage with Kente cloth borders of from Amos’s body of work depicting women bathers, crossing the block at $100,000, the second-highest price at auction behind Let Me Off Uptown, which sold at Swann in 2019 for $125,000.

Related Reading: A Brief History of AfriCOBRA

 

“Despite the turbulent year, I am thrilled to see the continued growth of our sales, and the rising recognition of the great artists featured: from Harlem Renaissance masters Augusta Savage and Charles Alston to prized postwar painters Wadsworth Jarrell and John N. Robinson. We had a tremendous level of interest in the sale overall with an increasing diverse audience of individual collectors and institutions from around the world.”

Nigel Freeman, Director, African American Art

AFRICAN AMERICAN ART 

Sale 2554; December 10, 2020

Sale total: $2,761,105
Estimates for sale as a whole: $2,220,000–$2,229,500 
We offered 211 lots; 174 sold (82% sell-through rate by lot)
All prices include Buyer’s Premium.

Quote from Director of African American Art Nigel Freeman: “Despite the turbulent year, I am thrilled to see the continued growth of our sales, and the rising recognition of the great artists featured: from Harlem Renaissance masters Augusta Savage and Charles Alston to prized postwar painters Wadsworth Jarrell and John Robinson. We had a tremendous level of interest in the sale overall with an increasing diverse audience of individual collectors and institutions from around the world.”


Top lots                                                                                                          Prices with buyer’s premium

41†    Charles Alston, Black and White #8, oil on linen canvas, 1961.                                                            $197,000
83      Romare Bearden, Woman and Child, collage of various colored and printed papers and pencil, 1968.          $173,000
73†    Wadsworth Jarrell, Subway, acrylic on canvas, 1970.                                                                         $125,000
11†    Augusta Savage, Gamin, plaster painted gold, circa 1929.                                                                   $112,500
91      Romare Bearden, The Last of the Blue Devils, collage on board, 1979.                                                  $100,000
151*  Emma Amos, Water Baby, acrylic and fabric on canvas with Kente cloth border, 1987.                            $100,000
192    Simone Leigh, Head, glazed and painted fire stoneware, 2004.                                                            $93,750
118    Sir Frank Bowling, Repose for SO, acrylic on canvas, 1976.                                                                $93,750
188    Kenneth Victor Young, Untitled, acrylic on cotton canvas, circa 2000.                                                  $81,250
28†    John N. Robinson, Reclining Woman (Gladys), oil on canvas, 1952.                                                     $81,250
82      Alma Thomas, Untitled (Composition in Dark Blue Black and Deep Pink), acrylic on paper, 1972.             $62,500
119    Ed Clark, Untitled (Louisiana Series), color pastel, dry pigment and pencil on paper, 1978.                       $60,000
15      Norman Lewis, Untitled (Head of a Mule, French Sudan), color pastel on fine sandpaper, 1935.                $60,000
39      Thomas Sills, New Born, oil on cotton canvas, 1958.                                                                          $50,000
60      Bob Thompson, Tancred and Erminia, oil on paper mounted on board, circa 1965.                                  $50,000
154    Hughie Lee-Smith, Man with White Flag, oil on linen canvas, 1987.                                                     $40,000
112    Charles White, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, charcoal and crayon on paper, 1974.                                               $37,500
58      Benny Andrews, Bather on the Horizon, oil on canvas, 1964.                                                              $35,000
122    Dinga McCannon, Black Family, oil, metallic paint and fabric collage on canvas, 1980.                           $30,000
52      Charles White, Little Boy Walking (Child Walking), pen and ink wash on paper, 1966.                             $27,500

Key:   † = Auction Record for the Artist; * = Second Highest Price at Auction

Additional Artist Records: Lot 35 – Edward Loper, Sr., $13,750; Lot 37 – Gloucester Caliman Coxe, $10,625; Lot 144 – Frank Hayden, $10,000; Lot 3 – James V. Herring, $7,500; and Lot 126 – Lev Mills, $5,750

Auction Debuts: Lot 209 – Tyrone Geter, $9,375

 

Additional highlights can be found here.

Captions:
Lot 41: Charles Alston, Black and White #8, oil on linen canvas, 1961. Sold for $197,000, a record for the artist.
Lot 11: Augusta Savage, Gamin, plaster painted gold, circa 1929. Sold for $112,500, a record for the artist.

Benny Andrews

 

Benny Andrews: A life in portraits

Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Portrait of the Portrait Painter (Portraits of... Series), 1987, oil and graphite on two canvas panels with painted fabric collage, 80 x 100 x 3/4 inches / 203.2 x 254 x 1.9 cm, signed.  Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Janitors at Rest, 1957-58. Oil on canvas with paper and painted fabric collage, 50 x 36 inches / 127 x 91.4 cm, signed.

Benny Andrews once defined his artistic ambition as a desire to represent “a real person before the eyes.” The phrase is the subtitle of a momentous exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan. “Benny Andrews: Portraits, a Real Person Before the Eyes” brings together 28 of the artist’s imposing depictions of friends, family and artists, the most ever shown together. Made over the course of 35 years with a technique he called “rough collage,” these riveting, eccentric images combine painted motifs with added pieces of canvas and paper, bits of printed fabric and carefully placed fragments of garments.  Andrews (1930-2006) was the son of an impoverished Georgia sharecropper who taught him to draw as a child. The skill became an essential tool that compensated for the school he missed while helping his father. He learned in part by drawing biology and plane geometry projects and whatever else the teachers asked for. After serving in the Korean War, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and felt the pressure to take up an abstract expressionist style. He wanted to paint representationally, even though he disliked the constant refinement that realism entailed.  One of his instructors, Boris Margo, told him to paint what he knew best and cared about. He took out two birds with one stone, fastening on the school’s janitors, mostly African American, and with whom he was friendly.  “They were the kind of people I came from,” he later said. “They were like my relatives.”  In “Janitors at Rest,” Andrews depicted three men on a break; one reading, the other two perhaps talking. To avoid refinement and introduce a certain rawness, the artist dotted the surface with scraps of paper such as janitors might sweep up. It was his first foray into rough collage.  If painting can be said to have a fourth wall — an invisible partition separating subject and viewer — Andrews broke partly through it. His figures don’t quite step off the canvas, but they don’t quite stay on it either; they hover in an interim zone between canvas and viewer, which can be electrifying and disorienting. They feel uncannily alive while being deliberately made works of art. Arms and legs might be cutout pieces of canvas. Most important are the pieces of recognizable clothing his figures wear; hats or at least their brims are another regular detail. These fragments have seen a lot of use, denoting a life lived like the often weary faces.  By the 1970s, Andrews was laying out the components of his paintings one by one on plain white backgrounds, letting the viewer identify the parts and techniques and put their meanings together.  In “Louie” (1977), a man in a wide-brimmed hat and a striped shirt — both fragments of the real thing — occupies nearly half the canvas. He is speaking, holding two little flowers delicately between his thumb and forefinger. In the background is a beautiful tree, its green leaves and brown twisted trunk painted on their own separate piece of canvas. And farther off, a line of what seem to be naked brown men disappears into the distance — a stark image of sorrow that symbolizes a cultural memory of oppression for generations of people of color in the United States.  Several of Andrews’ paintings are not specific individuals, but portray conditions of marginalization, like the emaciated child in “Famine” (1989), holding a beggar’s bowl, whose face is split between an abstract mask and a visage so ravaged it seems ancient. In contrast, “Portrait of Oppression (Homage to the Black South Africans)” (1985), startles with its understatement. We see part of a figure wearing a denim vest, his hands behind his back as if bound. A chain hangs down into the picture, touching his right shoulder. His face, which is invented, is calm and sensitive. He looks like he could be related to Norman Lewis, the American abstract painter whose debonair portrait greets us near the entrance.  All of Andrews’ portraits are notable for their tenderness, especially those of the people to whom he was closest. In “Portrait of George C. Andrews” (1986), his father relaxes in a red easy chair wearing a tobacco-colored work shirt and a newsboy cap. The wall beside him is unlike anything else here: It’s covered with colorful objects suggesting little paintings, toys, fishing flies — an accumulation of artistry and passion.  It is also worth noting that the artists he admired and depicted — Alice Neel, Howardena Pindell, Ray Johnson, Nene Humphrey (who was also his wife) — seem especially at peace. The joy of being both an artist and a subject is palpable in “Portrait of the Portrait Painter” in which an artist (probably Andrews) sits opposite a beautifully dressed woman; an untouched canvas lies between their feet — on more bare canvas. The scene is suffused with pleasure and anticipation.  In the end, Andrews took Margo’s advice to heart, depicting what he knew and cared about, which — not to oversimplify — came down to art, politics and people: his loved ones and fellow artists as well as human suffering and social injustice, the issues behind his activism. Eventually he portrayed his world and his values, which may be the most you can ask of any artist.  —  'Benny Andrews: Portraits, a Real Person Before the Eyes'  Through Dec. 23 at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Ave., Manhattan, New York, (212) 247-0082, michaelrosenfeldart.com.  © 2020 The New York Times Company