Apr 06, 2023 - Sale 2632

Sale 2632 - Lot 13

Price Realized: $ 5,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
CLAUDE CLARK (1915 - 2001)
The Camp.

Oil on masonite board, circa 1946. 406x508 mm; 16x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.

Provenance: the estate of the artist, with the artist's typed label on the verso; private collection, Philadelphia.

The Camp is an excellent example of Claude Clark's modernist, impastoed painting of the 1940s. In the late 1940s and 50s, Clark painted many black subjects taken from his travels in Africa and the Caribbean.

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 a painting by Horace Pippin. His first New York show was at the Bonestell Gallery in 1945, followed by one at the Michael Freilich's Roko Gallery 1946-1947. He returned to his native Alabama to give an art workshop at Talladega College, AL in 1948. Offered a permanent teaching position, Clark founded the art department at Talladega 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.