?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
MOSE ERNEST TOLLIVER (1920 - 2006) Untitled (Figure).
House paint on found plywood, circa 1985. Approximately 965x838 mm; 38x33 inches. Signed in paint, lower right
Provenance: the Ness Oleson Trust. The late Frannie Ness and Gary Oleson were the proprietors of Waiting for Godot Books of Hadley, MA, which specialized in rare American and English books, including African American literature.
The son of an Alabama sharecropper and farm overseer, Mose Tolliver was the youngest of seven sons born into the Ike Tolliver family of twelve children. Living in Montgomery, married and raising his own family, Mose Tolliver began painting after a work accident left him handicapped in the mid 1960s. An early admirer who brought his work to public attention was Mitchell Kahan, former curator at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. In 1981, the museum mounted a one-man exhibition of Tolliver's work. He then was featured in Black Folk Art in America 1930-1980, the important national exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in 1983. He has since become one of the most enduring and widely collected self-taught artists of his generation, and painted actively until 2002.
