Oct 18, 2012 - Sale 2290

Sale 2290 - Lot 30

Price Realized: $ 10,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
CLAUDE CLARK (1915 - 2001)
Steel.

Oil on masonite board, 1942. 508x355 mm; 20x14 inches. Signed in oil, upper right recto.Titled and inscribed with the artist's Philadelphia address in pencil, upper right verso.

Provenance: the artist, Philadelphia and Oakland, CA; estate of the artist.

Claude Clark was an innovative painter and printmaker whose family 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 Workshop of the WPA from 1939-1942, where he helped develop carborundum etching. He returned to his native Alabama to give an art workshop at Talladega College in 1949. He stayed and eventually created the art department at the school, where he taught until 1955. His paintings and prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. Messenger p. 48.