Dec 10, 2020 - Sale 2554

Sale 2554 - Lot 154

Price Realized: $ 40,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999)
Man with White Flag.

Oil on linen canvas, 1987. 914x1270 mm; 36 1/4x50 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.

Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner.

Exhibited: June Kelly Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; Two Master Painters: Clarence Carter & Hughie Lee-Smith, New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, Summit, NJ, September 13 - October 25, 1992; Hughie Lee-Smith: An Overview, 1949 - 1995, The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Princeton, New Jersey, October 15 - November 26, 1995.

Illustrated: The Sunday Star Ledger, October, 11, 1992.

This large and striking canvas epitomizes the Surrealism found in Hughie Lee-Smith's late-career painting. This sun-drenched scene juxtaposes an older white man walking and carrying a white flag with a distant, younger African American man playing with a beach ball in a park. Both appear very separated, divided by a neo-classical stone park wall. The discordant pairing suggests the enigmatic Surrealism of a De Chirico painting or Fellini film. The peaceful atmosphere of the summer day is punctuated by a floating frisbee. Man with White Flag represents the final period of Lee-Smith's body of work - his enigmatic and isolated figures are now actors in landscapes full of intrigue and beauty.