?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Landscape No. 1.
Linoleum cut on cream wove paper, 1939. 229x267 mm; 9x10 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered "46" in pencil, lower margin.
Provenance: the artist; Russell and Rowena Jelliffe, Cleveland (founders of the settlement house in Cleveland that became Karamu House); by descent, Dr. Roger and Joyce Jelliffe, Pasadena, CA; estate of Joyce Jelliffe, Pasadena, CA (2021); private collection, Cleveland.
Exhibited: Karamu Studio of Karamu House, Cleveland, with the original printed label on a fragment of the backing board.
Lee-Smith produced his first important prints at Karamu House in Cleveland in the late 1930s. Founded as a "settlement house" in 1915 by Oberlin College and University of Chicago graduates Rowena and Russell Jeliffe, Karamu House (as it was later renamed) was an important center for the training of African American artists in the 1930s and 1940s, and was sponsored by the Works Progress Administration for a time. Landscape No. 1 is an abstracted and modernist interpretation of the Central neighborhood surrounding Karamu House. An exhibition exploring the history of Black artists who worked at Karamu House is currently being organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
