Feb 06, 2007 - Sale 2102

Sale 2102 - Lot 100

Price Realized: $ 22,050
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
ELDZIER CORTOR (1916 - )
Study.

Pen and black and brown ink on cream wove paper, circa 1960-65. 520x457 mm; 20 1/2x18 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.

Provenance: Gift from the artist; private New York collection. With a handwritten, signed note from the artist on the frame back.

Painter and printmaker Eldzier Cortor is best known for his elegant draughtsmanship and depiction of the beauty of black women. Born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916, his family moved to Chicago where he attended Englewood High School with future artists Charles White and Charles Sebree. He studied drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a founding member of the Southside Community Art Center where he taught drawing and worked on murals during the Works Progress Administration. A Rosenwald Fellowship in 1944-1945 at Sea Islands, Georgia, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, and teaching at the Centre d'Art, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1949-1951 all increased his awareness of both nature and the African diaspora, which he incorporated in the naturalism of his painting. Cortor's work is in the collection of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Roxbury, MA, The David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland and the Walter O. Evans Collection, Detroit.