?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
CARROLL SOCKWELL (1943 - 1992) Untitled.
Oil on masonite board, 1960. 597x1499 mm; 23½x59 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, Washington, DC.
This vivid landscape is an early painting by the abstract artist and important Washington, DC painter, Carroll Sockwell. With its bold colors and expressionism, it recalls the work of both William H. Johnson and Bob Thompson., and shows the promise of a budding young artist.
Born in 1943, Carroll Sockwell was raised in Washington, DC, as the youngest of five brothers. Sockwell's youth was checkered by domestic unrest, but with the support of his art therapist, Elinor Ulman, he took art classes at the Corcoran School of Art as a teenager. This painting dates from the period, when, after turning seventeen, Sockwell moved to New York, immersing himself in the art scene. He famously met Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning, but struggled to find a stable living situation.
In 1963, Sockwell returned to Washington, and joined the growing artistic community of what was becoming the Washington Color School. Sockwell developed a distinctively expressive abstraction, combining the gestural and linear, and began exhibiting at Jefferson Place Gallery. In 1974, championed by director Walter Hopps, Sockwell received a breakthrough solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. His work was included in many gallery and museum exhibitions in Washington DC, and at the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1992, Sockwell had a large retrospective exhibition at the Washington Project for the Arts, just before his tragic death by suicide.
Sockwell's work is in many institutional collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Menil Collection, the American University Art Museums, Bowie State University, the Delaware Art Museum and the Federal Reserve Bank Collection. Sockwell is presently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell, January 24 - March 9, 2024.
