?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
ROBERT GWATHMEY Prologue II.
Oil on canvas, 1962. 1180x915 mm; 46 1/2x36 1/8 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto. Ex-collection Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, with the label on the frame back; and the estate of J. Bruce Llewellyn, New York.
Published in Kammen, Robert Gwathmey, The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer, Chapel Hill, 1999, page 163, figure 59.
Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) is best known as one of the most celebrated painters of African-American life in the rural South. As an outsider to the African-American communities, his works are that of an observer, picturesque scenes of everyday life without sentimentality, as he managed unbiased to imbue humanity and an unromanticized dignity into his subjects.
At a young age Gwathmey personally experienced the challenges faced by poverty: his father, a railroad engineer, died in train accident before Gwathmey's birth, forcing the family into low-paying jobs to make ends meet with the children holding part-time jobs around their schoolwork. At the age of 19 he worked on a shipping freighter that visited ports throughout Europe and the Americas. This job helped foster his interest in art, during which he often sketched other crew members, and when the ship stopped at European ports, he visited museums and galleries where he was exposed to the great artists of the past. When he returned to the United States he enrolled at the Maryland Institute of Design in Baltimore and later at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia where he studied for four years, including winning several Cresson scholarships, to continue his studies.
Abroad and at home, Gwathmey's studies and exposure to art taught him more than just style and subject, which he certainly assimilated from the likes of François Millet's peasant scenes and the macabre imagery of Goya and Picasso; he also learned how to subtly illustrate injustice and societal inequities through his art: "I consider myself a 'social realist.' I'm interested in the human figure and the human condition." His residency in New York from the 1940s on and his travels elsewhere expanded his outlook and provided points of comparison with his early life, especially when he returned to the South, where he was struck by the plight of African Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, Gwathmey, like many intellectuals and artists, was drawn to efforts to reform America's economic and social structure. The artist Rosalie Hook, whom he married in 1935, shared many of his political views and encouraged the direction his art was taking.
Throughout the 1940s Gwathmey enjoyed his most prolific output and success, having won several competitions and being included in the Whitney's 1943-44 annual exhibition of contemporary art and in the annual exhibition of American painting and sculpture at the Art Institure of Chicago. During this time he painted his most affecting and powerful pictures, such as From Out of the South (circa 1941), Hoeing (1943), Sharecropper and Blackberry Pickers (circa 1941), which was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1942 and, even in print with the silkscreen Rural Home Front (1943) (Williams 2), which won first prize in the Artists for Victory exhibition that was part of the National Graphic Arts Competition.
Prologue II is a culmination of Gwathmey's personal views, during the 1960s his art remained deeply committed to issues of racial justice, combined with a more concise style. His is able to present a subject he has painted before, but with more complexity, that still recalls visual echoes of his earlier work (Kammen, p. 150). From his former mural projects he learned to reincorporate images from previous ones, calling this approach a "composite montage." Prologue II is just this, a work full of social commentary, utilizing a more mature style, and culminating into Gwathmey's largest figural painting to come to auction to date.
