?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
REX GORELEIGH (1902 - 1986) Spring Pruning.
Oil on canvas, 1966. 1676x1067 mm; 66x42 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: collection of the artist; private collection.
Exhibited: Emerging & Established: the Afro-American Artist in New Jersey, the Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ, May 18 - June 8, 1981, with the label on the frame back.
Illustrated: Price, Clement Alexander. Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey, New Jersey Historical Society, Trenton, NJ, 1980, front slip cover.
This dramatic, large canvas is the first oil painting by Rex Goreleigh to come to auction, and is a significant work created by the artist during the Civil Rights era. Rex Goreleigh, who has long been known for his scenes of rural life in New Jersey, incorporates a political and social awareness in his depictions of workers. Here, a young man with an ax is about to chop down branches that upon close examination have ropes hanging down--an allusion to the scourge of lynchings.
Born in Pennsylvania, Goreleigh's family moved to Washington, DC, where he graduated from Dunbar High School. Throughout the 1930s, he was associated with many WPA programs and taught art across the country. Goreleigh first worked with WPA muralist Ben Shahn in 1934. After a two-year hiatus studying art in Paris, he returned to New York and taught art at the Utopia House under the Federal Arts Project, and later at the Harlem branch of the YMCA. Goreleigh and Norman Lewis also taught under the Federal Art Project in Greensboro, NC, where he remained and married a local librarian. The couple moved to Chicago in 1940, and he worked as an art coordinator for the Schreiner-Bennet advertising agency. From 1944 to 1947, Goreleigh directed the Chicago South Side Community Art Center, succeeding its first director Margaret Burroughs.
Goreleigh eventually moved to Princeton, NJ in the late 1940s, and directed the Princeton Group Arts from 1947 to 1953, a community arts center that provided lesson and organized concerts, lectures, and exhibits. In 1955, he opened his "Studio-on-the-Canal" on Canal Road where he worked for 23 years. His paintings and prints are included in the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the Paul R. Jones Collection, University of Delaware, and the Harriet and Harmon Kelley Collection of African-American Art, San Antonio.
