?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 120,000 - $ 180,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Europa and the Bull.
Oil on canvas, circa 1958. 1320x1522 mm; 52x60 inches. Signed twice, in oil, lower right and in ink, lower right, faded. Signed and titled in ink on the upper stretcher bar, verso.
Provenance: Ex-collection Dr. Danetta Sanders, 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 typed label on the upper stretcher bar, verso.
Illustrated: Hale Woodruff 50 Years of His Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1979, p. 40.
Europa and the Bull is one of the largest known Abstract-Expressionist canvases of the artist and an important work in the artist's move from figuration to abstraction in the 1950s. We know of only 3 other oil paintings from the Mythic series, and the location of only 2 of them - a same-titled and sized work in the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami and a smaller Africa and the Bull in the Studio Museum in Harlem. Both these works are painted in grisaille, in black and white. The Studio Museum catalogue also mentions a Leda and the Swan from this series.
Woodruff had been a New York University professor of art since 1946, and had just participated in the exhibition Eight New York Painters at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in the summer of 1956. With last year's exhibition at Spelman College, Woodruff's undated abstract works are being re-considered; this phase occurred just before his Celestial Gate series. Amaki, pgs. 117, 177 and 180.
