?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
ALBERT ALEXANDER SMITH (1896 - 1940) Spinning a Yarn.
Pencil and graphite on paper, 1930. 171x254 mm; 6 3/4x10 inches. Signed in pencil, upper right * Etching on cream wove paper, 1930. 165x241 mm; 6 1/2x9 1/2 inches, wide (full ?) margins. Signed and numbered 10/50 in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, France; Hôtel Drouot, Paris, lot 195 (as Scène de Vendanges), November 7, 1991; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York (2000); John Axelrod, Boston (2001); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011).
Exhibited: African-American Art, 20th Century Masterworks, VII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, January 13 - March 4, 2000.
Illustrated: African-American Art, 20th Century Masterworks, VII, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, p. 51.
After graduating from the National Academy of Design in New York, Albert Alexander Smith was one of the few known African-American printmakers working in the early 1920s. Through the 1930s, Smith made many etchings, including a series of portraits of great black leaders at the request of his patron Arthur Schomburg, as well as lithographs of other Southern scenes, such as Spinning a Yarn. His artwork was also featured on the covers of the periodicals Crisis and Opportunity at the time. Leininger-Miller pp. 210-11.
