?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 80,000 - $ 120,000
CHARLES ALSTON (1907 - 1977) Family in Cityscape (Family Group - Cityscape).
Oil on linen canvas, circa 1964-66. 762x1524 mm; 30x60 inches. With the artist's estate ink stamp, lower right recto, and on the stretcher bars, verso.
Provenance: the estate of the artist, with a hand-written label (and alternate title) verso; Essie Green Galleries, New York; private collection, New York.
Exhibited: In the Spirit of Resistance: African-American Modernists & the Mexican Muralist School, traveling exhibition, 1996-98, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, October 2 - December 8, 1996.
Illustrated: Lizette LeFalle Collins. In the Spirit of Resistance: African-American Modernists & the Mexican Muralist School, pl. 30, p. 119.
This modernist oil painting of an African American family in front of a city skyline is a large study for an unrealized mural project. As a result of his many mural commissions, Alston excelled at compositions that included multiple figures - from his celebrated 1936 WPA Harlem Hospital and 1949 Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company murals to the lesser known 1957 Our Constitution at City College of New York. This painting is similar in its composition to the Alston's 1964 mosaic mural Man on the Threshold of Space for the Harriet Tubman Junior High School, PS 154 in Harlem. By 1976, Alston completed two more mosaic murals, Equal Justice Under the Law and The Family of Man, for the Bronx County Family and Criminal Court buildings with more abstract figures.
The subject of this painting was also a familiar one to Alston at the time. It is part of a significant body of work, his series of Familypaintings, made in the late 1960s. Alston's important modern portrait Family (Family #1) in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art was painted in 1955. The next seven paintings in the series were painted between 1965-1968; Alston's Family #3, 1966 is also in this 30x60 inch horizontal format.
