May 21, 2009 - Sale 2181

Sale 2181 - Lot 42

Price Realized: $ 6,720
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
STENBERG BROTHERS (VLADIMIR 1899-1982, GEORGI 1900-1933) [THE CHOCOLATE KIDDIES.] 1926.
40x26 inches, 103x68 cm.
Condition B- / B: repaired tears, restored losses, restoration, overpainting and discoloration in margins and image; trimmed bottom margin; vertical and horizontal folds. Japan.
Sam Gooding and his band The Chocolate Kiddies performed in the Soviet Union in 1926. It was only the second time that Jazz had been performed in that country (the first time was earlier the same year in a band that featured Sydney Bechet on clarinet). "The revue, which never played in New York City although its name obviously borrowed on the popularity of Sissle and Blake's The Chocolate Dandies . . . depicted nightlife in a Harlem café . . . It predates the better known black America revue La Revue Negre which opened in Paris in the fall of 1925" (American Music, volume 7, no. 1, special Jazz Issue, 1989, p. 32). The Chocolate Kiddies consisted of an 11 piece orchestra, 30 chorus girls, and the vaudeville duo of Rufus and Drayton. The poster, of the performing vaudevillians and one of the chorus girls is an excellent Stenberg construction, using broad planes of flat color, and also employing typography in an innovative manner, capturing the spirit and frivolity of which the show was surely composed.