Pen and ink on smooth wove paper, circa 1942. 410x290 mm; 16x11 1/2 inches. Signed in ink, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, Chicago; Arthur Hornblow, Jr., New York; private collection, New York (1965); private collection, Santa Fe, NM; Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, Chicago; private Chicago collection.
Exhibited: The Twenty-First International Exhibition of Watercolors, the Art Institute of Chicago, with a printed label on the frame back.
Literature: Listed in Falk, Peter Hastings, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago 1888-1950. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1990, p. 233.
African Women is an outstanding drawing by Eldzier Cortor from his scarce, early Chicago period. Cortor was a high school classmate of fellow future artists Charles White and Charles Sebree at Englewood High School. Cortor later studied drawing at the Chicago Art Institute, and taught drawing at the Southside Community Art Center during the WPA in the late 1930s. His famous painting Southern Gate from the same year features a very similar depiction of an elegant, tall African-American nude. With these interpretations of African-American female beauty, largely influenced by African figures, the artist earned a national reputation and a Guggenheim fellowship.
