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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
ROSS BRAUGHT Mako Sica (Tchaikovsky's Sixth).
Lithograph, 1934. 327x360 mm; 12 7/8x14 1/4 inches, full margins. Edition of 20. Signed, dated and titled in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression.
Braught (1898-1983), called the "greatest living American draftsman" by Thomas Hart Benton, was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia where he was awarded the William Emlem Cresson Memorial Traveling Scholarship in 1921 allowing him to travel studying art throughout Europe. When he returned from this sojourn, he began his career as an artist, exhibiting along the East Coast.
In 1928, he moved to Woodstock, New York, becoming a member of the local art colony. While there, Braught developed an interest in lithography from Grant Arnold who also printed lithographs by Yasuo Kuniyoshi and other members of the colony.
In 1931, the Great Depression forced Braught to move west to Kansas City, Missouri, for work, where he served as the head of the painting department at the Kansas City Art Institute. He persuaded the institution to buy a lithography press, and, with his students, he experimented further with the medium. He traveled throughout the west during his time off, visiting the Grand Canyon, the Colorado Rockies and the Dakota Badlands. Inspired by the Badlands, he composed the painting Tchaikovsky's Sixth and its companion lithograph Mako Sica (the Lakota name for the Badlands of South Dakota), a turning point in his career where he pivoted to broader forms, less detail and more muted, earth-tone colors. In 1936, he resigned from his position in Kansas City and moved to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, but later returned to the school and was the chairman of the painting department and acting dean of the school.
