ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915 - ) El Abrazo (The Embrace).
Carved mahogany, with painted details, 1978. 660x355x265 mm; 26x14x10 1/2 inches. Initialed "EC" and dated in ink, lower edge verso.
El Abrazo is a beautiful and strong sculptural statement by Elizabeth Catlett and a great culmination of her thematic and formal concerns. Catlett has made sculpture in wood since the mid-1950s in Mexico. According to Melanie Herzog, after 8 years of motherhood, Catlett returned to sculpture by working in wood for the first time, studying with José L. Ruiz at the Esmeralda school from 1955-1959. Today her work in wood reflects some of her greatest artistic achievements.
El Abrazo is a natural embodiment of this action - a pose carved from a single piece of wood with no separation of the figures. The grain and cut of this mahogany sculpture accentuate the form and abstraction of the paired bodies - particularly in profile and from the rear, on the shoulders and buttocks. The flared massive base and diagonal lines also direct the viewer upward to the faces. There the painted eyes accentuate both the emotion and the facial features - a technique used in earlier wood works, including Mujer, 1960, and The Black Woman Speaks, 1970. The direct gaze of the couple invites the viewer to share the emotions and humanity of their tight embrace.
Catlett said in 1989: "I still work figuratively, trying to express emotion through abstract form, color, line, and space. I attempt to reach out to ordinary people who have little or no experience or understanding of art principles, and extend to them what I may feel about a subject, whether anger, indigination, strength, beauty, sacrifice, understanding--whatever, but always something. Even in more abstract sculpture I attempt to get a reaction, possibly by a strong upward gesture, or a close tight feeling between two figures."
A later Embrace of a couple kissing while embracing was made in 1990 in two versions, in mahogany and black marble. Catlett's sculptures are found in such museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, and the private collections of Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr., David C. Driskell, Dr. Walter O. Evans and Grant Hill. Herzog , p. 117 and 169.
