CHARLES HENRY ALSTON (1907 - 1977) Earth Mother (Woman and Two Sons)..
Oil on linen canvas, 1967. 1270x1016 mm; 50x40 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; Randall Galleries, New York; G. R. N'Namdi Gallery, New York; private collection, Illinois (1995).
Exhibited: Professionals Who Teach, The Gallery of Modern Art, New York, lent by the Artists Students League, New York; Randall Gallery, New York, with the labels of the frame back; Charles Alston, Artist and Teacher, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, NY, May 13 - July 1, 1990.
Illustrated: Corrine Jennings, Gylbert Garvin Coker, Harry Henderson. Charles Alston: Artist and Teacher, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, pl. 21, p. 53.
Earth Mother (Woman and Two Sons) is a striking, modernist depiction of a Black family and part of an important series of Charles Alston's painting. Alston creates an abstracted family group centered around a central maternal figure - she is a symbol of strength and protection. Artist, art historian and curator Gylbert Coker described Alston's series as "paintings are at once formal studies and portraits: they have a particular sensitivity to fluctuating planes and to the treatment of textures". This painting reflects Alston's almost sculptural approach to form: "In Earth Mother, 1967, the actual sense of carving out and modeling can be experienced in the central figures." In addition to his formal concerns, Alston's portraiture here is reduced as a modern description of the "human condition" and the African American experience. Coker writes that Alston's faceless figures are also his reflection on how Blacks were largely perceived in society, reduced and objectified by a white gaze.
The subject of Earth Mother is an important and recurring theme in Charles Alston's late 1960s work and places it within his significant body of Family paintings. In 1955 Alston began the series with his modern portrait Family (Family #1), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He continued the series through 1968 - eight numbered Family paintings were included in his 1968-69 retrospective exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art at Columbus Circle in New York. Jennings/Coker/Henderson pp. 14-15.
