?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
ROBERT BLACKBURN (1920 - 2003) Mike's Place.
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1938. 337x413 mm; 13 1/4x16 1/4 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 3/5 in pencil, lower margin.
This lithograph is a rare view of a Harlem Renaissance gathering and one of the earliest lithographs by the artist to come to auction.
Robert Blackburn printed Mike's Place, alternately titled Clubroom, at the Harlem Community Art Center, where he studied lithography with artist Riva Helfond. Blackburn was still in high school at DeWitt Clinton in 1938 - his drawings and lithographs illustrated in The Magpie, his high school's literary magazine - graduating in 1939.
We have found only one other record of this extremely scarce print, Clubroom. Once owned by Riva Helfond and then in the collection of Reba and Dave Williams before it was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Mustalish, p. 72; Fine, p. 248.
