Oil on canvas, circa 1973. 1092x970 mm; 43 1/8x38 1/8inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New York; thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited: Reality Expanded--Hughie Lee-Smith, Rex Goreleigh, Eldzier Cortor, Museum of National Center of Afro-American Artists, Roxbury, MA, January 10 - 31, 1973; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, March 18, 1973; Three Masters: Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee-Smith, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, May 22 - July 17, 1988.
This impressive and graceful canvas is one of the largest known examples of Eldzier Cortor's Classical Composition series, his long study of the beauty of the African-American woman. It is the largest Cortor painting, and the first of this important series, to come to auction. Cortor is best known for his elegant, elongated depictions of women that show the influence of his study of African sculpture, 19th-century French painting, and his travels to the Sea Islands and West Indies.
Like the European modernists before him, the influence of African sculpture on Cortor's conception of the figure was critical. It was at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1940s where he was first introduced to African sculpture by his art history professor Kathleen Blackshear. Cortor later said in 1973 that "it was her enthusiasm for African art that really got me. That was the most important influence of all in my work. To this day you will find in my handling of the human figure this cylindrical quality that I was taught by Miss Blackshear to appreciate in African sculpture." Cortor painted Classical Composition and Classical Study paintings through the 1980s. They express an articulated sense of history with the accumulated surface of brushstrokes and paint, in addition to the focus on a figurative subject. While Cortor returned briefly to teaching at the Pratt Institute of Art from 1972-74, he also painted his monumental and nostalgic Still-Life: Past Revisited, 1973, recently acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bearden/Henderson p. 274.
