?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
HALE ASPACIO WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Totem.
Oil on canvas, circa 1950-54. 915x510 mm; 36x20 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: Ex-collection Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, with a hand-written label with the title and gallery address, 32 East 57th Street, on the stretcher bars; private New York collection.
Upon returning to New York in 1946, Woodruff soon began embracing the modern movement to abstraction in his painting. The artist adopted Ashanti gold weights as the basis for his abstraction and used a narrow vertical format. These characteristics are illustrated as early as 1946 in a painting titled Figurations. The artist is listed as having a one-man exhibiton at Berth Schaefer Gallery from October 25 to November 13, 1954. Mary Schmidt Campbell , Hale Woodruff, 50 Years of His Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1979, p. 35.
