Oil on linen canvas, 1991. 660x457 mm; 26x18 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance The artist. June Kelly Gallery, New York (label). Private collection, Connecticut, 1991. Swann Galleries, October 5, 2017, lot 124. Private collection, Georgia, 2017.
Exhibited "Clarence Holbrook Carter and Hughie Lee-Smith - Two Master Painters," New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts, Summit, New Jersey, September 13 - October 25, 1992 (label).
Interlude is an excellent example of the artist's late series of paintings depicting musicians and actors in a staged environment. Lee-Smith's 1990s paintings explore the dramatic mood and space around or between young African-American performers. These depictions of figures also recall Lee-Smith's early experiences of dance and theatre while working at the Playhouse Settlement (named Karamu House in 1941) during the WPA period in Cleveland. Lee-Smith taught art at Karamu House in the late 1930s in return for the full scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (now the Art Institute of Cleveland) that the Gilpin Players awarded him in 1935.
