?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
CHARLES ALSTON (1907 - 1977) Untitled (Figures with Architecture).
Tempera and crayon on wove paper, 1949. 330x380 mm; 13x15 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist; Judge and Mrs. Edward R. Dudley, New York; thence by descent to the current owner.
This work on paper is from an important transitional period of modernist works Alston started at the end of the 1940s. Alston began to incorporate the European influences of Picasso and Léger into his painting - a clear departure from the realism that culminated in the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance murals of 1949. Other paintings from this period, especially Harlem at Night, oil on canvas, 1948, and Ceremonial, oil on canvas, circa 1950, share this new fragmented vision of urban life against a dark, atmospheric ground.
