?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
CHARLES L. SALLÉE, JR. (1911 - 2006) Swingtime.
Oil on canvas, 1985. 458x610 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and titled in pencil, upper left verso.
Provenance: commissioned directly from the artist, private Michigan collection.
We believe this is the first work of the artist to be offered at auction.
This painting was commissioned as a recreation of the artist's early WPA print, Swingtime, an aquatint and etching from 1937. Impressions of the scarce print are found in the collections of the museum of Howard University and the St. Louis Art Musuem.
In 1936, Charles Sallee was the first African-American to graduate from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Sallee was a leader and teacher of the Karamu group in Cleveland, an artist colony for various writers, artists, dancers and actors, which included Hughie Lee-Smith and William E. Smith. He contributed greatly with his mural painting and printmaking for the WPA during 1936 -1941. After service as a cartographer in the Army, Sallée established a career as an interior designer working into the 1980s.
