Feb 13, 2014 - Sale 2338

Sale 2338 - Lot 82

Price Realized: $ 25,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
WILLIAM E. ARTIS (1914 - 1977)
Michael (Head of a Boy).

Cast bronze, with a greenish-copper patina, circa 1950. Edition size unknown; cast from a 1940 terracotta. Approximately 230 mm; 9 inches high. Inscribed signature in the neck, just at the base edge, lower left.

Provenance: collection of the photographer William Anderson, Jr.; private collection.

This beautiful bronze is an unusual medium for this sculptor, but the geometric simplification of this African-American head is typical of his mid-century sculpture. Another cast of this head is in the the University of Delaware's Paul R. Jones collection. Artis usually worked in clay or stone and only a handful of his terra cotta works have come to auction.

Born in Washington, NC, William E. Artis moved to New York during the Harlem Renaissance like fellow North Carolina native artists Charles Alston and Romare Bearden. Artis took private sculpture lessons with Augusta Savage and studied with Robert Laurent at the Art Students League with a Harmon Foundation scholarship. After service in the air force during World War II, Artis studied at the New York State College of Ceramics. Following the successful completion of his second certificate program, according to Daniel Schulman, Artis applied to the Rosenwald Fund in 1946 (for the second time); he was awarded a fellowship 'to work with the native clays of Alabama in the production of creative sculpture and sculptured free form ceramic ware." Artis decided late in the process to collaborate with the Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883- 1962), newly appointed to Syracuse University. According to Rosenwald scholar Jonathan R. Nolting, Artis improved his technical skills and learned new media in sculpture under Mestrovic. In his master's thesis, Nolting uses Michael to show Artis how now used texture and geometric abstraction to instill his heads with both a naturalism and the influence of African sculpture, particularly masks of the Dan peoples. Schulman p. 134, Nolting pp. 58-59, 89.