?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
BENNY ANDREWS (1930 - 2006) Hustler.
Collage and oil on thick wove paper, 1990. 760x560 mm; 30x22 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right. From the America series.
Provenance: the artist; Bill Hodges Gallery, New York; private collection.
Expressive images of the pool hall and its resident hustler have re-occurred in many of Benny Andrews's series of Southern scenes. J. Richard Gruber writes in his recent Andrews biography that "the creation of pool players has become 'like signing a signature' for him, a regular part of his working routine." This particular America Series was first shown in a solo museum exhibition at the Tate Center Gallery of the Unversity of Georgia in 1990, and traveled to both museums and galleries for the next three years. When the artist told The New York Times writer Edward Zimmer, who wrote the introduction to his exhibition catalogue for the America Series,"I believe I am doing America," Andrews felt that he retold the American story by recreating these characters and moments of his experience. Zwimmer went on to say "I believe Benny Andrews is something of a latter-day Walt Whitman, the trailblazing poet who caught the nuances of America and celebrated both what was taken for granted, and was passed over, unseen by others." Gruber p. 223.
