?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Two Boys.
Oil on canvas, 1968. 457x601 mm; 18x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited: Hughie Lee-Smith: An Overview, The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Princeton, NJ, October 15 - November 26, 1995; Hughie Lee-Smith, June Kelly Gallery, New York, September 2 - 29, 2000, with the label on the frame back. The painting was highlighted in the gallery's memorial retrospective as reviewed by Ken Johnson in The New York Times, September 29, 2000.
Illustrated: Leslie King-Hammond, Hughie Lee-Smith, Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2010, pl. 69; p. 67.
This striking painting is a great example of the artist's "metaphysical" phase, which began in the early 1960s. Lee-Smith moved away from Social Realism and his figurative scenes left the abandoned lots and rooftops of Detroit and New York. Here, as in many of his 1960s paintings, the tension between isolated figures is now set against a mysterious, existential space--a desolate and cracked concrete pier. This is only the second painting from Lee-Smith's mature period to come to auction--The Juggler, #1, circa 1964, was sold at Swann Galleries on October 7, 2008, and is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
