?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
HALE WOODRUFF (1900 - 1980) Untitled (Still Life of Flowers).
Gouache or tempera, watercolor and oil on cardboard, circa 1932-40. 700x550 mm; 27 1/2x21 1/2 inches. Signed in gouache, lower left recto. With a pencil study of men playing checkers, lower left verso.
Provenance: Sacks Fine Art, New York, with the gallery label on the frame back (acquired in the early 1990s); private collection.
This is an unusually large and dramatic example of Hale Woodruff's early painting. Few early still lifes are known, as Woodruff focused primarily on landscapes--Still Life Interrior, circa 1930, and Untitled, 1931, ink and wash on paper, are two known examples from France. At the time of his 1936 trip to Mexico to study the murals of Diego Rivera, Woodruff also painted a modernist Night Blooming Circus, circa 1936, in the Clark Atlanta University art collection, also against a dark background. The drawing on the back of the painting is a fascinating figure study similar to many of his murals, with an attention to gestures.
