?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
SARGENT CLAUDE JOHNSON (1888 - 1967) Mask.
Copper repoussé with gilding, 1933. Approximately 318x165x51 mm; 12 1/2x6 1/2x2 inches. Incised signature and date, verso.
Provenance: private collection, Pennsylvania.
Mask is an excellent example of Sargent Johnson's work in repoussé from the 1930s, and the first of its kind to come to auction. It is among the earliest examples his sculpture incorporating African forms with a modernist design. We have been able to locate only a handful of his copper masks--all are in museum collections, including another Mask from 1933, in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Head of Girl, 1926, in the collection of the Newark Museum of Art, and Mask, circa 1930-35, with wood, in the collection of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Two other copper works, entitled Negro Mother and Mask, both 1935, from the Albert M. Bender Collection, were included in the Sargent Johnson: Retrospective curated by Evangeline Montgomery at the Oakland Museum in 1971.
