Oct 03, 2013 - Sale 2323

Sale 2323 - Lot 92

Price Realized: $ 1,875
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
HARPER T. PHILLIPS (1928 - 1988)
Soliloquy.

Acrylic and enamel spray paint on illustration board, 1972. 560x762 mm; 22x30 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private Atlanta collection.

Exhibted: Richard B. Russell Federal Courthouse, Atlanta, 1980; Art Station, Stone Mountain, GA, 1986; Fulton County Courthouse, Atlanta, 1995.

This almost psychedelic composition by Atlanta and New York artist Harper Phillips is his first known work to come to auction. Born in Courtland, AL, Phillips was a student of Hayward Oubré at Alabama State College in Montgomery, a talented group that included William Anderson and Herman "Kofi" Bailey. Phillips anchored the art department at Grambling College, LA, through the late 1950s, taught at Fisk University with Gregory Ridley, and later in the New York City area in the 1970s. Two of his late 1950s figurative paintings are illlustrated in Cedric Dover's American Negro Art. His paintings are also in the permanent collections of Paul R. Jones, University of Delaware, and Atlanta University.