?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
MARGARET BURROUGHS (1917 - ) Untitled (Abstract Head).
Gouache on illustration board, circa 1939-42. 380x273 mm; 15x10 3/4 inches. Signed "Margaret T. Goss" in gouache, lower right recto.
Provenance: private Washington, DC, collection.
This gouache is a very early, modernist work by this important artist. Margaret Burroughs has been a pioneering female artist in Chicago from the WPA era to the present - leader and founder of the South Side Community Art Center, the Du Sable Museum and the National Conference of Artists. The South Side Community Art Center was made part of the Federal Art Project, and formally dedicated by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1941. Its purpose was to make art and culture available to minority groups and to provide jobs for artists and other cultural workers. Burroughs' contemporaries at the center included Charles White, Bernard Goss, George Neal, Eldzier Cortor, Gordon Parks, Charles Sebree and Archibald Motley.
Margaret Burroughs's works are in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, the Walter O. Evans Collection of African-American Art, Detroit and the Paul R. Jones Collection, University of Delaware. Few works from her WPA period are known outside these collections. Margaret Burroughs married Bernard Goss in 1939, and they had a daughter Gayle. They later divorced.
