?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Untitled (Female Nude with Vase).
Oil on masonite, 1949. 760x605 mm; 30x24 inches. Signed and dated in oil, upper left.
Provenance: ex-collection the artist; private collection, Michigan.
This gorgeous, early painting is one of the artist's few known nude paintings. He painted this work while studying in college, and working in a Ford factory in River Rouge, IL. The evocative pose, the polished, cool palette and the model's gold jewelry take the work beyond academic study and suggest the stylization and surrealism that characterize his mature work.
Born in Eustis, Florida and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Hughie Lee-Smith was a high school friend of legendary track star Jesse Owens. In the early 1930s Lee-Smith received artistic training at the Karamu House, and won a full scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (later renamed the Cleveland Institute of Art), and the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts School. From 1938 to 1939 he worked in the Ohio WPA under the Federal Arts Project. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he used funds from the G.I. Bill to earn his bachelor's degree from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1953.
Unfortunately like many African-American artists, Lee-Smith did not enjoy a major solo exhibition of his work until very late in his career. His first retrospective exhibit, at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton occurred in 1988, when he was 73 years old. His paintings today are found in such museum collections as the Detroit Institute of Arts, Howard University, Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.
