?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
AARON DOUGLAS (1899 - 1979) O, Lord!
Woodcut on tissue-thin Japan paper, circa 1926. 178x127 mm; 7x5 inches, wide (full ?) margins. Proof, with no known edition. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: the estate of Jean F. Herksovits, New York; private collection, MA (2024).
Jean Frances Herskovits (1935 – 2019) was a research professor of history at the State University of New York at Purchase specializing in African (particularly Nigerian) history and politics. Herskovits taught at Brown University, Swarthmore College, City College of the City University of New York and Columbia University. She held a D. Phil. in African history from Oxford University.
This woodcut is an extremely scarce print by Aaron Douglas - a proof impression of a Harlem Renaissance print, and one that we have not found reproduced or located in any institutional collection. Douglas's signature and the age of the paper strongly suggest this is a contemporaneous printing.
This woodcut is an intriguing variant of Surrender, one of several woodcuts and the final image used to illustrate Emperor Jones in the volume Plays of Negro Life: A Sourcebook of Native American Drama, edited by Alain Locke and first published in 1927 by Harper & Collins, New York. Locke assembled an anthology of contemporary playwrights who were addressing the African American experience. The image is also the central figure on the books' graphic cover, a composite of Douglas's woodcuts. It represents the final moments of Emperor Jones in a tropical Haitian forest. - the character is surrendering himself as a sacrifice to the evil spirits, conjured up by a witch doctor in the form of a giant crocodile. This version of the woodcut differs from the published version - it has a different foliage design with only the head of the crocodile included.
