Apr 22, 2021 - Sale 2565

Sale 2565 - Lot 63

Price Realized: $ 12,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
SAMELLA LEWIS (1924 - )
Sunrise.

Oil on linen canvas, 1962. 686x914 mm; 27x36 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist: private collection, Florida (1962). Samella Lewis and the owner were both on the faculty of SUNY Plattsburgh at the time.

Sunrise is a striking and scarce example of Samella Lewis's embrace of abstract painting in the early 1960s, and her interest in non-Western symbolism. She began teaching at Plattsburgh in 1958, and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study at First Institute of Chinese Civilization and Tung Mai University in Taiwan in 1962. She continuing teaching Asian history at SUNY Plattsburgh until 1965 when she moved to Los Angeles. There she was awarded a National Defense Education Act post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California, where she studied the Chinese language and Asian civilization.