Fired terracotta, painted or stained dark brown, 1947. Approximately 280x150x215 mm; 11x6x8 1/2 inches. Initialed "EC" at the rear lower edge.
Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist, circa 1964-7, Joe and Reva Bernstein, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, thence by descent to the current owners, New Mexico. According to the owner, the sculpture was purchased from Elizabeth Catlett by the Bernsteins while they were living in Mexico in the mid-1960's. Their families often visited each other in Mexico City and in San Miguel de Allende. The sculpture has remained in the family until the present day.
Exhibited: Elizabeth Catlett: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, 1998.
Illustrated: Samella Lewis, The Art of Elizabeth Catlett. Los Angeles: Handcraft Books, 1984. Front cover and p. 173; Lucinda Gedeon, Elizabeth Catlett: A Fifty-Year Retrospective, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY, 1998, p. 45.
This exquisite sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett is an important and iconic work of art, made at the beginning of a great period of creativity that continues today in Mexico. In 1947 Catlett had just began studying terracotta with the sculptor Francisco Zúñiga in her first full year in Mexico. She also married the artist Francisco Mora and finished her famous series of linoluem cut prints Negro Woman that year. This sculpture is a powerful representation of African-American women in general and a work of keen observation. The author and artist Samella Lewis chose it to grace the cover of her monograph of Catlett.
Head represents a new technique for the artist, and a departure from methods she learned at the University of Iowa, under Grant Wood, and in New York. In a recent interview with Michael Brenson in Sculpture, the artist defined her new interest: "I had worked with Ossip Zadkine in New York, and he beat the clay into the form that he wanted and then cut it in half and hollowed it out. I wanted to find out about the coil system, and I was working with Francisco Zúñiga at one of the art schools." She preferred his technique as "it was the pre-Hispanic method. I felt that it had more of a clay form, like pots; I felt that it was more characteristic of clay to build it up with coils ... it was more connected to cultural traditions that had existed for centuries. Like the stone carving or the ceramics of the Pre-Columbian period. And the woodcarving of the Africans." In addition to the form and construction in Head, the artist lets the natural materials show their inherent characteristics with the marked surface of the hair and the translucent stained color.
Head epitomizes the attention to form and an exploration of materials that would characterize the rest of her career. As with most of her other subjects, Elizabeth Catlett made other variations - Head, also circa 1947, in white clay terracotta in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, and Negro Woman, in wood and onyx, circa 1956, in the collection of Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries, Atlanta.
