Oct 03, 2013 - Sale 2323

Sale 2323 - Lot 25

Price Realized: $ 60,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980)
Gathering Storm (Blue Landscape).

Oil on linen canvas, circa 1958-60. 1270x1016 mm; 50x40 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Signed and titled "Blue Landscape" in oil, stretcher bar verso.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private 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 museum label on the verso.

This large, modernist canvas is an excellent example of Hale Woodruff's postwar painting in which he describes natural phenomena within the idiom of Abstract Expressionism. Here, like many other of his mid-to-late 1950s paintings, including Caprice, 1954, Woodruff interweaves larger dark forms with smaller passages of bright color. Woodruff paints with bravado, using a slashing, diagonal underpainting and drawing. Woodruff exhibited many of these abstract paintings at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, while teaching at NYU, through the 1950s. A small oil study for this painting, End of Day, circa 1958-60, was sold at Swann Galleries on October 18, 2012.