Dec 10, 2020 - Sale 2554

Sale 2554 - Lot 43

Price Realized: $ 21,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
LOÏS MAILOU JONES (1905 - 1998)
Cock Fight.

Oil and newsprint collage on masonite board, in a hand-carved Haitian wood frame, 1960. 502x406 mm; 19 3/4x16 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right, and inscribed "Haiti" in oil, lower left recto.

Provenance: the artist, with her hand-written label on the frame back; Carey Ellis Company, Houston, TX, with the gallery label on the frame back; private collection. Georgia. The artist's hand-written label supplies the title and includes her 17th Street Washington, DC address.

Illustrated: Tritobia Jones. The Life and Art of Löis Mailou Jones, p. 84.

This extraordinary work by Löis Mailou Jones is a very scarce example of her use of collage and a Cubist composition. In Haiti, Jones made a dynamic breakthrough - away from her earlier Impressionist style of painting - with these modern paintings made in the 1960s. Jones took her first trip to Haiti in the summer of 1954 with the invitation of President Paul E. Magloire for a portrait commission, and made subsequent annual trips with her husband Pierre-Noël through 1969. With Cock Fight and her other significant early 1960s oil paintings, including Marché de Kenscoff, Haiti, Parade des Paysans and Bazar Du Quai, Port Au Prince, Haiti, Jones embraced modernism and focused on the abstract forms found in Haiti. Today these striking 1960s paintings are some of the artist's most sought after and distinctive works.