34
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THELMA JOHNSON STREAT (1911 - 1959)
Louis Armstrong.
Watercolor and ink on thin cardstock, circa 1940. 292x305 mm; 11
1
/
2
x12 inches. Signed and titled
in ink, lower right.
With —
Asian Girl
, watercolor, on the verso.
Provenance: estate of the artist, Oregon.
Illustrated: (verso) Bullington, Judy,
Thelma Johnson Streat and the Cultural Synthesis on theWest Coast
,
in
American Art
, Smithsonian American Art Museum, pl. 6, p. 97.
This double-sided watercolor is only the second painting by Thelma Johnson Streat to come to
auction, and the first in her representational, mural style of figuration. Thelma Johnson Streat was
one of the few artists to paint directly with Diego Rivera on his Pan-American Unity mural at the
1940 Golden Gate Exposition. The state supervisor of the WPA project, Beatrice Judd Ryann,
described them at work on the mural: “Rivera stands high up on the scaffold, his awkward bulk
emphasized by the color girl,Thelma Streat, beside him, tall and slim in her blue jeans.”
Louis Armstrong
differs from her modernist gouaches, like
Asian Girl
on the verso, that focus on abstract
forms found in Native American,Asian and African art. Her
Rabbit Man
, 1941, was the first painting
by an African-American woman to be exhibited and purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, in 1942.Today, her work is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork,
and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. Bullington p. 95.
[6,000/9,000]
(verso)