ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940) Bilbas, Spain.
Oil on linen canvas, 1927. 508x610 mm; 20x24 inches. Signed, dated and titled in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Albert Alexander Smith; Alfred Renforth Smith, father of the artist (1940s); Reverend Frederick Rickford Meyers, Detroit, MI (1950s); private collection, Michigan (2023).
Exhibited: Exhibit of Fine Arts of American Negro Artists, Harmon Foundation, New York, 1930, with the exhibition number label "29" on the stretcher bars verso.
Illustrated: Fine Arts Exhibit of American Negro Artists, Harmon Foundation, p. 11.
This artwork is part of an incredible trove of artworks by Albert Alexander Smith recently discovered in a large steamer trunk. It belonged to his father Alfred R. Smith who worked as his son's agent in New York. In the 1950s, Alfred Smith shipped this trunk to the Rev. Frederick R. Meyers of Detroit, a fellow World War I veteran and friend of Albert Alexander Smith who had become a minister. The undisturbed trunk was recently purchased from a storage facility in Michigan and unpacked for the first time seventy years later.
Albert Alexander Smith was, after Henry Ossawa Tanner, the embodiment of the early 20th century African American expatriate artist. After graduating from the National Academy of Design, Smith moved to Paris in 1920. Over the next 20 years, he worked and traveled throughout France, Holland, Italy and Spain, making a living as a blues and jazz musician, while developing a large body of etchings, lithographs and paintings. His landscapes focused on the architecture and peoples of European cities, particulary busy market and street scenes.
Smith is also one of the few known African American printmakers working in the early 1920s. He found a patron in New York collector and dealer Arthur Schomburg, who ordered works from Smith for his own collection and for resale. Smith later gained further recognition with his admission to each of the annual Harmon Foundation exhibitions of African American art in New York from 1928 - 1933. Smith died on April 3, 1940, in Paris, France, at the age of 44. Leininger-Miller pp. 224-225.
