?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
CLAUDE CLARK (1915 - 2001) Drewry Hall, Talladega College.
Oil on board, 1950. 405x505 mm; 16x20 inches. Signed in oil, mid-center.
Provenance: ex-collection of the artist; The Little Gallery, East Newark, NJ, with the stamp and typed gallery label (with the artist's Philadelphia address) on the stretcher bar; estate of the artist, Oakland, CA.
Claude Clark was an innovative painter and printmaker who returned to his native Alabama to give an art workshop at Talladega College, Talladega, AL in 1949. He stayed and eventually created the art department at the school, where he taught until 1955. His family had originally moved from Alabama to Philadelphia in 1923. After winning a four-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, he was supported by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, and in 1944, his painting Cutting Pattern was the second work by an African-American artist accepted into the Barnes Foundation, after one by Horace Pippin. Clark was a colleague of Dox Thrash and Raymond Steth in the Philadelphia Fine Print Worskhop and the WPA workshop from 1939-1942, where he helped develop carborundum etching. His paintings and prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the De Young Museum, San Francisco. Lisa Mintz Messenger, p. 48.
