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CHARLES WHITE (1918 - 1979)
J'Accuse! No. 10 (NegroWoman)
.
Charcoal on paper, 1966. 711x711 mm; 28x28 inches (tondo, image); 864x864 mm; 34x34 inches
(sheet). Signed and dated in pencil, lower right recto. Signed and inscribed with the artist’s Altadena,
CA address, upper left verso.
With—a copy of the 1966
Ebony
magazine with a detail of the drawing featured on the cover.
Provenance: the artist; collection of John H. Johnson of Johnson Publishing Co., Chicago; private
Chicago collection.
Illustrated: Benjamin Horowitz,
Images of Dignity: The Drawings of Charles White
, p. 116;
Ebony
Magazine
, August, 1966, front cover (detail).
This is the first of the artist’s important works from his
J’Accuse
series to come to auction. In using
the famous title of Émile Zola’s article against anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus Affair,White instead
references the racism, discrimination and oppression faced by African Americans. Yet the men,
women and children he depicted in the series were proud and strong.The pages of
Ebony
’s special
issue, “The NegroWoman,” describes how African-American women in the 1960s were beginning
to defy the female roles and stereotypes of the era.
White’s social realism of the 1940s found a new voice in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s with
this series of 18 drawings.White had also found a new generation of artists to connect with when he
began teaching at the Otis Art Institute in 1965. His students included David Hammons, Suzanne
Jackson,Alonzo Davis, Dan Concholar andTimothyWashington.White was also continuing his theme
of strong, heroic women—having completed his iconic and monumental drawing
General Moses (Harriet
Tubman)
for the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1965. Jones p. 17.
[150,000/200,000]