?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 150,000 - $ 250,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1979) Landscape.
Oil on linen canvas, 1967. 775x1073 mm; 30 1/2x42 1/4 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. With a small sketch in oil, verso.
Provenance: collection of the artist, New York; Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago (1970); private collection.
Exhibited: Retrospective Exhibition: Hale Woodruff, Leob Gallery, New York University, New York, May 15 - June 8, 1967 (held in conjunction with Woodruff's retirement from NYU); Hale A. Woodruff: Paintings, Prints and Watercolors, Carl Murphy Fine Arts Center, Morgan State College, Baltimore, MD, May 21 - June 14, 1968; Afro-American Artists,1800-1969, the Division of Art Education, School District of Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Civic Center Museum, Philadelphia, PA, December 5 - 29, 1969; Five Famous Black Artists, the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Art, Roxbury, MA, February 9 - March 10, 1970.
Illustrated: Randall J. Craig. Afro-American Artists 1800-1969, p. 22; Edmund Barry Gaither, Five Famous Black Artists, p. 7.
This vibrant canvas is an excellent example of Hale Woodruff's postwar painting in which he described landscape and natural phenomena within the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. This significant and striking canvas shows Woodruff's continued evolution as an abstract painter through the 1960s. In addition to continuing his Celestial Gate series, Woodruff created some of his most abstract painting as landscapes. Landscape is typical of Woodruff's late 1960s compositions with bold, horizontal strokes over layers of both earthy and jewel-like colors. Other significant 1967 paintings are in institutional collections, including Ancestral Memory, the Detroit Institute of the Arts and Figure, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
