?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
BEULAH ECTON WOODARD (1895 - 1955) African Woman.
Glazed terra cotta, circa 1937-38. Approximately 292x286x114 mm; 11 1/2x11 1/4x4 1/2 inches. Signed in glaze in the interior.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection; thence by descent to the current owner.
Illustrated; Farrington, Lisa, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Woman Artists, figure 4.16, p. 94.
This beautiful, modern bust by Beulah Woodard is a very scarce example of this early Californain sculptor's work. In celebrating African beauty, African Woman displays Woodard's powerful realism in the careful modelling of the subject's features and in the detailed description of her headdress, hair and earrings. Woodard made a similar African woman in terracotta entitled Maudelle, ex-collection the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, sold at Swann Galleries on October 4, 2007, and now in the collection of Columbia Museum of Art and Archeology, University of Missouri. Woodard was commited to the tenets of Alain Locke in his celebrated 1925 anthology The New Negro--looking to Africa instead of Europe for a new African-American aesthetic. Beulah Woodard faithfully recorded African styles of dress and decoration in both her busts and masks from her own research. In 1937, she founded the Los Angeles Negro Art Association, and throughout her career, supported efforts "to educate African Americans to take pride in their African heritage." Farrington pp. 95-96.
