Romare Bearden’s African American visions speak to all

Romare Bearden’s ‘Inscriptions At The City Of Brass,’ a 1972 collage on Masonite, achieved $355,000 plus the buyer’s premium in December 2022. Image courtesy of La Parisienne Des Arts and LiveAuctioneers.

NEW YORK — Lively and spontaneous scenes from the Harlem diaspora as well as depictions of the Black experience helped Romare Bearden (1911-1988) shift from being just a talented painter to one who broke through racial barriers. Making a statement on Black American culture, Bearden created powerful paintings and collages to take his rightful place among the best of the American modernists, most of whom were white. Using his own memories, literature, popular magazines, and African American history, his artworks told African American stories in a way that made them universal.

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Hughie Lee-Smith found art lurking in loneliness

This circa-1961 Hughie Lee-Smith painting, ‘Rooftops,’ achieved $55,000 plus the buyer’s premium in November 2019. Image courtesy of Treadway and LiveAuctioneers.
This circa-1961 Hughie Lee-Smith painting, ‘Rooftops,’ achieved $55,000 plus the buyer’s premium in November 2019 at Treadway. Image courtesy of Treadway and LiveAuctioneers.
This circa-1961 Hughie Lee-Smith painting, ‘Rooftops,’ achieved $55,000 plus the buyer’s premium in November 2019. Image courtesy of Treadway and LiveAuctioneers.

NEW YORK — Isolation and solitude are pervasive themes in the paintings of Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999), an African American artist who often painted figures with their backs to the viewer or set them against desolate backdrops with foreboding skies. Grappling with existential and surrealist themes, Lee-Smith explored his place in society and the art world at a time when only white male artists were accepted as full professionals, able to choose their subject matter as they pleased, while Black artists were pushed to document the Black experience.

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March 24 auction Americana, Folk Art & Outsider Art spotlighted in New York, March 24

Signed Mose Tolliver painting on wood, est. $1,500-$2,000
Signed Mose Tolliver painting on wood, est. $1,500-$2,000
Signed Mose Tolliver painting on wood, est. $1,500-$2,000

NEW YORK – On Thursday, March 24, starting at 6 pm Eastern time, Jasper52 will hold a sale of Americana, Folk Art and Outsider Art. The 534-lot auction is, as always, curated by Clifford Wallach, an expert on tramp art, folk art and Americana. Featured in the sale lineup are a trio of museum-quality portrait dolls dressed in silk and satin wedding attire, created in the first half of the 20th century; duck decoys, a wood carving of a Great Dane dog, a Southern country abacus, a quartet of Beatrix Potter Vienna bronzes, and a generous selection of quilts, including a circa-1880s Victorian silk crazy quilt.

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