?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915 - ) In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom.
Linoleum cut on thin cream wove paper, 1946-47. 226x176 mm; 9x7 inches, wide margins. Signed, dated 1946 and dedicated "To Gwen and Dick with all my love" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist and the Taller Gráfica, Mexico City. The seventh plate, from the 15 print series The Negro Woman. A very good, dark and evenly printed impression of this very scarce print.
We have found only one other 1946 impression of this print in the collecton of Howard University, Washington, DC. The artist printed a later, numbered edition of 20 in 1989.
In 1945, Elizabeth Catlett won a Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship with a proposal to make a series of prints depicting the oppressions and struggles of The Negro Woman, based on her work at the George Washington Carver School in Harlem. In 1946, needing to leave her job to find the time, Catlett renewed her Rosenwald Fellowship, and travelled to Mexico City to finish the project. Working at the Taller Gráfica Popular, the famous printshop founded by Leopoldo Mendez, Raul Anguiano, Luis Arenal and Pablo O'Higgins, she completed the series of 15 linoleum cuts. The series is a historical achievement in the self-depiction of women, black women and working-class women.
