?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Celestial Gate.
Oil on canvas, circa 1960. 912x610 mm; 36x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right. Signed and titled in ink on the stretcher bars verso.
Provenance: ex-collection the Danetta Sanders Collection, New York, thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited: Hale Woodruff 50 Years of His Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, April 29 - June 24, 1979, with the printed label on the painting back.
Illustrated: Hale Woodruff 50 Years of His Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1979, p. 38.
This series incorporates the forms derived from Asante gold weights and the doors of dwellings of Dogon chiefs in Mali. There is some debate about the date of this series as the artist did not date his work and the characteristics appear in paintings dating as early as 1946 and continuing into the 1960s. We do know the artist had a one-man exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1954 with abstract works such as Totem, which was offered at Swann Galleries on February 6, 2007. The recent Spelman College exhibition dated some Celestial Gate paintings 1950-53.
