ELDZIER CORTOR (1916 - 2015) Island Momento No. 1.
Oil on linen canvas, 2012. 1270x965 mm; 50x38 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: estate of the artist, New York.
Island Momento No. 1. is a significant, late career example of Eldzier Cortor's accomplished figurative painting. It demonstrates the remarkable continuity in his practice - working until the last moments of a long and very distinguished career. At the age of 96, Cortor painted this series with compositions of Caribbean women set in serene island locales - rethinking classical depictions of female beauty. The subject fits into Eldzier Cortor's decades-long series of "classical compositions" in painting and printmaking, celebrating the form and beauty of African-American women. With his characteristic dense layering of both brush and palette work, this composition is punctuated by his devices of the fan, conch shell, painted chair and window balcony and shutters, also found in such canvases as Cuban Souvenir in the David C. Driskell collection. Cortor's Tableau No. 2, also 2012, is in the collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Cortor has incorporated elements of Caribbean culture into his artwork since the 1940s - in 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel in the West Indies. After time in Jamaica and Cuba, Cortor settled in Haiti for two years where he taught classes at the Le Centre d'Art d'Haïti in Port-au-Prince. Beyond his early academic training at the Art Institute of Chicago, and his travels to the Sea Islands and West Indies, these paintings show the influence of his study of African sculpture and 19th-century French painting. Unlike his social realist counterparts, Cortor investigated both the formalism and symbolism of the African American female figure.
