?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
RAMON GABRIEL (1911 - ) String Quartet.
Watercolor on thick wove paper, circa 1945. 200x305 mm; 7 1/2x12 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right. Titled in pencil, lower left.
Provenance: private collection.
This is only the second known work of this Chicago WPA artist to come to auction, and the first in his signature style of semi-abstraction. Born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Gabriel was a graphic artist and painter who worked at the Southside Community Art Center with Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Charles Sebree and Charles White in the Federal Art Project. His work was included in We Too Look at America, the opening exhibition of African-American artists in the Illinois Art Project, WPA, in 1941.Though he showed through the 1940s and was written about in Opportunity by Willard Motley, today his work has been largely overlooked. An oil painting was included in the 1978 New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist exhibiton of the Studio Museum in Harlem that traveled to the Chicago Public Library.
