Feb 16, 2012 - Sale 2268

Sale 2268 - Lot 131

Price Realized: $ 72,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
ALMA THOMAS (1891 - 1978)
March on Washington.

Oil on canvas, 1964. 762x990 mm; 30x39 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right recto. Signed and inscribed with the artist's 15th Street address in pencil, upper right verso.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private Washington, DC collection.

Illustrated: Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings, pl. 15, p. 86.

This important Civil Rights painting is one of Alma Thomas's few representative works from the early 1960s. Thomas incorporates her 1960s bright palette of primary colors with a flattened, abstracted view of the crowds and their placards. She participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, which clearly made a lasting impression, as she returned to figuration to record the historical event in her work. The painting did not travel to her 1998 Fort Wayne Museum of Art retrospective, but it was included and illustrated in the Pomegranate catalogue. Gibson p. 43.