?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
CHARLES ELMER HARRIS (BENI E. KOSH) (1917 - 1993) Two oil paintings.
Untitled (Factory Entrance), oil on canvas, circa 1957. 457x355 mm; 18x14 inches. With the artist's ink stamp "Beni Kosh Collection" on the verso * Untitled (Tennis Players), oil on canvas, 1957. 457x864 mm; 18x34 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Rachel Davis Fine Arts, Shaker Heights, OH; John Axelrod, Boston (2000); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2011).
Beni Kosh was a Cleveland artist, relatively unknown in his lifetime. He is noted in the catalogue Yet Still We Rise African American Art in Cleveland 1920-1970 and included in shows at Cleveland State University, the Butler Institute of American Art and the Riffe Gallery during 1996-97. Born as Charles Elmer Harris, he changed his name in the 1960s to Beni E. Kosh, which translates to "Son of Ethiopia." He rarely exhibited or sold his work and was affiliated with the African-American artists' "Sho-nuff Art Group" and the Karamu House and studied under Cleveland School artist Paul Travis. His style is very diverse; he experimented with Cubism, portraiture and abstractions. He was only "rediscovered" literally days after his death when hundreds of his paintings were rescued, catalogued and later sold. Biography courtesy of the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program.
