?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
HALE ASPACIO WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Shantytown.
Woodcut on cream wove paper, 1935. 254x203 mm; 10x8 inches, wide margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A very good, dark impression of this very scarce, early print.
Exhibited: Black Printmakers and the WPA, Lehman College Art Gallery, Robert Lehman College, New York, 1989.
Illustrated: An impression from the Reba and Dave Williams Collection in Alone in a Crowd, p. 31, pl. 21, and African-American Artists, 1929-1945, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 38, another impression from the collection of Hampton University in A History of African-American Artists, p. 206.
Hale Woodruff enjoyed early success exhibiting his paintings in his native Illinois, and at the Harmon Foundation. His Harmon prize in 1926 was enough to send him to Paris, where he painted primarily landscapes through the late 1920s. Woodruff returned to teach at Spelman College in Atlanta from 1931-1946, and made a series of woodcuts showing the harsh, rural experience of African Americans in the South. This print is also entitled View of Atlanta, and Going Home, a 1981 restrike. Alone in A Crowd, Reba and Dave Williams Collection, p. 58.
