Oct 03, 2024 - Sale 2680

Sale 2680 - Lot 12

Price Realized: $ 4,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
CHARLES WHITE (1919 - 1979)
Pensive Child.

Silver print, 1938-40. 203x229 mm; 8x9 inches. With the estate ink signature stamp on the mat, lower right.

Provenance: the estate of the artist; Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles; private collection, California; private collection, New York.

The gallery label indicates that this is a "unique photograph".

The growing popularity of photography in the 1940s dovetailed with White's interest in social realism and recording everyday images. White was also friends with photographers Gordon Parks, a fellow founding member of the South Community Art Center in Chicago; and Roy DeCarava in New York in the 1940s.

The traveling exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective was one of the first exhibitions to include original photographs by White. It included 18 photographs from the 1950s including many portraits of fellow artists, candid family and street scenes and documentary images that inspired his work. The printed catalogue also features an essay on White's work in photography by art historian Deborah Willis.