CHARLES WHITE (1918 - 1979)
Untitled (Diego Rivera).

Lithograph on thin, smooth wove paper, circa 1936. 305x254 mm; 12x10 inches. Proof, with no known edition. With the artist's estate signature ink stamp, lower right.

Provenance: the estate of the artist; Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles; private collection, New York; thence by descent to a private collection, California.

This extremely scarce print is not only a fascinating portrait of one of Charles White's heroes but is likely the earliest known lithograph by the artist. This proof is also likely unique as we were not able to locate any other recorded examples of this lithograph. The artwork was first catalogued by Heritage Galleries as a drawing, and subsequently sold as a drawing at Swann Galleries on April 22, 2021. When this artwork was conserved, it was discovered that it was a lithograph, and not a drawing. A very similar drawing of this image of Diego Rivera is catalogued as D10 in Lucinda Gedeon's catalogue raisonné, and was was sold at Swann Galleries on April 2, 2015.

This remarkable proof was made at the beginning of Charles White's study at the Art Institute of Chicago. White was determined to become an artist despite his family's tight finances, and early rejections from discriminatory art schools. White won a $240 scholarship to attend the Chicago Art Institute, entering in 1937. White completed the two year course in one year despite often walking 60 blocks home to save money, and while working as both a cook and valet. In his essay, Graphic Interpeter of the Black People, in the catalogue of Charles White; A Retrospective, Mark Pascale describes how Charles White had experience in lithography in the late 1930s while a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pascale notes how one of White's sketchbooks from the period includes numerous notes on lithography techniques and a reference to Francis Chapin, the principal instructor of lithography at SAIC. Upon his graduation in 1938, White soon qualified to join the easel and mural divisions of the Federal Art Project in Illinois. The previously earliest recorded lithograph was Laborer, circa 1939-40, whose location is not known today, and, as Pascale illustrates, also has a related drawing found in one of the artist's sketchbooks.

Diego Rivera's international fame and the rise of the Mexican muralists made a profound impact on Charles White and many other social realists' art work. In the mural division of the FAP, White worked with muralists Mitchell Siporin and Edward Millman, who both had assisted Rivera on murals in Mexico. Later in 1947, upon winning a Rosenwald scholarship to travel and study in Mexico, White met Diego Rivera and studied with David Alfaro Siqueiros at the Esmeralda Escuela del Arte and worked at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in Mexico City. Oehler/Adler pp. 40-41.