?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
ROBERT GWATHMEY Southern Farmer.
Oil on canvas, 1966. 1280x975 mm; 50 1/2x38 1/2 inches. Signed in oil, upper 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.
Exhibited "Robert Gwathmey Exhibition," Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, January 23-February 10, 1968; and "Robert Gwathmey, Southern Themes," Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, May 5-June 15, 1990.
In 1944 Robert Gwathmey received a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship which allowed him to live and work on a North Carolina tobacco farm. He recalled his short time there as very formative in the development of his art: "I spent a summer on this tobacco farm in North Carlonia. They had three sharecroppers on this farm. I said I'd give each of the three guys a day a week. Harvesting tobacco is difficult…I picked tobacco because I wanted to know the whole story…I couldn't sit there and make a sort of representational [painting] and calling it priming tobacco, if I hadn't done it myself" Hard Times (New York, 1986, p.374). Gwathmey's experience working on a farm, alongside those who relied upon the tobacco crop's harvest for their livelihood, undoubtedly aided the painting's impetus and empathy.And even though he spent most of his adult years in the North, Gwathmey continued to return to the South, largely through his memories, for inspiration. As so many scholars have pointed out, the South has an incredibly strong sense of place that is nigh impossible to escape.
The farmer, laboring under a heavy pail of lard, scuttles across a tobacco field against a crimson-brown sky. His face is almost obscured with exception to his nose and left eye suggesting forgotten personal importance, though their significance to a profitable tobacco industry could not be overstated. His use of three-quarter profiles and tipped hat, or in this case a pail, to obscure a full view of his protagonist's face he employed throughout the 1960s. These portraits may very well be a response in part to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man of the previous decade.
While his work cannot be categorically associated with any one style, Gwathmey certainly showed admiration for many. He adored Picasso's experimentation, as seen in the planar effects that easily separates themselves as shapes in the tobacco leaves, the patchwork in the overall bibs and the harlequin-patterned undershirt; his coloring more subtely takes after that of Georges Rouault who made juxtapositions of contrasting colors, but perhaps his interest in stained glass window was more impacting. "After visiting the cathedral in Chartres I was willing to believe that the stained glass there was the finest visual art expression ever. I still think it can't be beat and the color sensations in relation to the half-light within the catherdral is overwhelming."
