?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
CHARLES WHITE (1918 - 1979) Awaiting His Return.
Lithograph on wove paper, 1946. 405x344 mm; 16x12 1/4 inches, full margins. Edition of approximately 25. Signed, titled, dated '45 and inscribed "25/prints" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist at El Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City. A superb, very dark impression of this very scarce print.
This is only the second impression of this lithograph to come to auction; the first was sold at Swann Galleries on February 4, 2007. There are only two other known impressions - in The David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland, and Howard University Gallery of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC.
Provenance: ACA Gallery, New York; private Connecticut collection.
Awaiting His Return was printed in Mexico in 1946 after Charles White finished his military service and the end of the war permitted a safe passage abroad. This impression is dated 1945, and others have even been dated previously to 1943, presumably due to the wartime subject - an African-American woman seated near a banner of the Gold Star, a husband's or son's medal of bravery. In Mexico, White was influenced by a close working relationship with many of the great modern muralists and painters. While studying at the Escuela de Pintura y Sculptura, "The Esmeralda", he lived in the same residence as David Siqueiros and worked alongside Pablo O'Higgins and Diego Rivera at the Taller. White had previously studied lithography under Harry Sternberg at the Artists Student League in New York during the first of his back-to-back Julius Rosenwald scholarships in 1942. A History of African-American Artists, Romare Bearden and Harry B. Henderson, Jr., p. 411, Gedeon Ea4.
