?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 100,000 - $ 150,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Poet #4.
Oil on masonite, 1954. 610x914 mm; 24x36 inches. Incised signature and date in oil, upper right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist (1955); private collection. This painting was purchased from the artist at his solo exhibition at Howard University in 1955. It has not been exhibited publicly since. There also is a black and white photograph, date stamped March 12, 1954 by The Detroit News, of the painting, located in the artist's archives in the American Archives of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Exhibited: Howard University Gallery of Art, Howard University, Washington, DC, 1955.
Poet #4, an important painting by Hughie Lee-Smith, was only recently rediscovered, and epitomizes the artist's career-defining body of work from Detroit in the early 1950s. The year earlier, Lee-Smith was awarded by the Detroit Institute of Arts its prestigious Founders Prize, a national painting award, for his painting The Piper, now in their permanent collection.
Painting with confidence and a command of the medium, Lee-Smith displays his mature style of the mid-1950s that had evolved from his social realism of the earlier decade. He explores the tension and space between an African-American man and a white woman in a red dress. In the large figure, Lee-Smith also has incorporated himself in the drama--this "poet," a smart young man in his sweater and tie, is an apparent self-portrait. And in this one painting, Lee-Smith has included almost all his "personal signifiers," as Dr. Leslie King-Hammond describes them, the elements that he will use to construct his scenes in the years and decades to come. These include the movement suggested by the windblown figures and fluttering ribbons, a mysterious dark rope connecting the figures, the separated poles, a distant shore line at the horizon, an ambiguous couple, figures with their backs turned, and a beautiful but forbidding sky of cumulus clouds.
Poet #4 is one of the finest examples of Lee-Smith's 1950s paintings to come to auction. Lee-Smith also exhibited at the 1955 Howard University show End of the Festival, 1954, in the collection of the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, FL, and Discussion on the Rooftop, 1955, in the collection of Howard University. King-Hammond p. 42.
