Feb 16, 2012 - Sale 2268

Sale 2268 - Lot 111

Price Realized: $ 45,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ELLIS WILSON (1899 - 1977)
En Route.

Oil on masonite, 1954. 572x1219 mm; 22 5/8x48 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto. Signed and titled in oil, upper left verso.

Provenance: the artist; private collection, Rye, NY; private New York collection.

En Route, one of his larger figure compositions, is an excellent example from Ellis Wilson's celebrated Haitian period. After exhibiting in several museum exhibitions in the 1940s and winning a $3,000 prize, Wilson traveled to Haiti in 1952, on the first of several visits that resulted in a large body of work. Wilson was drawn to both Haiti's dignified people and its storied culture. Ellis remarks in Bearden and Henderson's chapter on the artist how Haiti "was a black republic where they [black people] were in charge of everything. I'd never been to a place like that. And although they were black, I couldn't understand them--they spoke Creole and French. All that excited me. And then it was tropical ... I'd never seen a tropical place--and with the music, the drumming, the dancing they were very artistic." Like En Route, Wilson often painted these vibrantly colored scenes of silhouetted figures across horizontal, frieze-like compositions.

Wilson's bold Haitian paintings earned him press coverage in publications including Art News and Art Digest in 1954. Six years later, his Haitian paintings were shown at New York's Contemporary Arts Gallery. After his travels through Haiti, he returned to his Manhattan studio apartment where he continued to paint in the spring and summer. Wilson, however, struggled to make a living and continued to work at manual labor jobs in New York and paint on the side until his death in 1977. His Haitian paintings are now found in museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, the Amistad Reserach Center, Howard University and the North Carolina Museum of Art. (Haitian) Funeral Procession became his most celebrated work when it became an integral part of the set on The Cosby Show in 1985. Henderson/Bearden pp. 337-343.