Oct 04, 2018 - Sale 2487

Sale 2487 - Lot 45

Price Realized: $ 40,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
CHARLES WHITE (1918 - 1979)
Young Farmer (Young Worker).

Linoleum cut printed in tan and black on thin Japan paper, 1953. 660x483 mm; 26x19 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right (inside the image). Inscribed "Title: Young Farmer; Medium: Linocut (Two Colors); Date: Feb., 1954" in pencil on a fragment of the original backing paper, attached to the frame back.

Exhibited: ACA Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back.

This is a wonderful, richly-inked impression of an extremely scarce print. Charles White made two versions of this print; this is the second, with an additional block of the landscape as the background. Gedeon notes only "a few in 2 colors," and illustrates the first version. Both versions are included in the 2018 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective which travels next to the Museum of Modern Art.

The latter impression, entitled Young Worker and dated 1954, is the only other impression of this print that we have located - it was sold at Swann Galleries on October 7, 2010. There is also a 1953 crayon drawing, Young Farmer, of the same subject. According to Gedeon, the print was also titled Young Farmer, and was reproduced in Tribune Magazine, February 17, 1954. Oehler/Adler pl 45 and 46, p. 150; Gedeon Eb9.