?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,500 - $ 5,000
WALTER ELLISON (1900 - 1977) What A Man.
Color monotype on cream wove paper, 1942. 95x165 mm; 3 3/4x6 1/2 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Print" in pencil, lower margin.
A very scarce, early monotype by any African-American artist, this work by painter and printmaker Walter Ellison is one of the artist's few known prints. Born in rural Georgia, his family later migrated to Chicago, and Ellison studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and was active at the South Side Community Art Center, where he was employed by the Illinois Art Project of the WPA in the 1930s. He exhibited in 1940 in the important Tanner Galleries Exhibition of the Art of the American Negro (1851-1940) in Chicago, and in 1942 in the first Negro Annual Exhibition at Atlanta University. His work is found today in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Chicago Public Library.
