?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 25,000
WALTER WILLIAMS (1920 - 1988) Untitled (Boy in Field of Flowers).
Oil and collage on masonite board, circa 1960-64. 711x813 mm; 28x32 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.
Provenance: the collection of Muriel Harris; thence by descent to the current owner.
This richly layered painting is easily the finest and largest example of Walter Williams's work to come to auction at Swann Galleries. This mid-career painting incorporates his signature subject of children in sunny fields of flowers and butterflies with an experimental investigation of paint surface and texture. Williams creates butterfiles and flowers out of an expressive, almost organic build up of brushstrokes, dots, drips and daubs of paint. He then daringly opens up the painting to reveal the board beneath to create clouds in the sky. Small collaged elements become leaves, wings, petals, and even the tiny head of a woman appears to the right of the boy's head.
Born in Brooklyn, the painter, printmaker and sculptor Walter Williams studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino from 1951-55. His social realist New York City street scenes were exhibited as early as 1952 at Roko Gallery, and included in 1953 in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum. But after receiving a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship in 1955, which he used to travel to Denmark in 1956, Williams left behind the stark subjects of the city for a warmer, poetic countryside. He found a new level of expression in imaginary Southern landscapes and inspiration living abroad.
His Southern Landscape, 1963-64, also oil with collage, was shown in the important 1976 exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art. The catalogue notes by Leonard Simon are also a fitting description of this painting: "What is impressive about Williams' paintings, however traditional his formal devices may sometimes appear, is the fact that what he produces is always completely contemporary. His spontaneous discoveries of new uses of media are seen in the rhythmic marks of paint and collage. The marks, one feels, could at any moment rearrange themselves but would retain a sense of order harmony." Driskell p. 192.
