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WALTER WILLIAMS (1920 - 1988)
Southern Landscape
.
Oil and collage on masonite board, 1963-64. 838x737 mm; 33x29 inches. Signed in oil, lower right.
Provenance: the artist, New York; Roko Gallery, New York; Terry Dintenfass, New York, private
collection, NewYork; thence by descent to the current owner.
Exhibited:
The Negro in American Art
, Dickson Art Center, UCLA, Los Angeles, September 11 -
October 16, 1966, (traveling exhibition to the University of California, Davis, Fine Arts Gallery of
San Diego, Oakland Art Museum), with the label on the board back; Division of Cultural Research,
Art Department, Fisk University, Nashville, December 1967;
Two Centuries of Black American Art
,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 30 - November 21, 1976, (traveling exhibition to
the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, and the Brooklyn Museum)
with the labels on the frame backing paper.
Illustrated: Driskell, David C.
Two Centuries of Black American Art
, p. 176.
Southern Landscape
could be described as Walter Williams’ most important painting, as it is one of
his best known artworks and a seminal one in his career.This painting with collage incorporates all
his signature devices of children in Southern landscapes of flowers, moths, blackbirds and butterflies
with an experimental investigation of paint surface and texture.Walter Williams creates a dense
surface out of an expressive, almost organic build up of brushstrokes, dots, drips and daubs of paint.
Small collaged elements become leaves, wings and petals - the head of a woman appears to the left
of the painting.Williams deftly contrasts the innocence of a sunny day in the life of a young boy,
with the darker underside of a tree stump and its massive root structure - reflecting both the physical
and emotional losses during the Civil Rights era.
Born in Brooklyn, the painter, printmaker and sculptorWalterWilliams studied art at the Brooklyn
Museum Art School under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino from 1951-55. His
social realist New York City street scenes were exhibited as early as 1952 at Roko Gallery, and
included in 1953 in the
Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting
at theWhitney Museum.
But after receiving a John HayWhitney Foundation fellowship in 1955, which he used to travel to
Denmark in 1956,Williams left behind the stark subjects of the city for a warmer, poetic countryside.
He found a new level of expression in a series of imaginary Southern landscapes and inspiration
living abroad. It became a subject the artist would revisit again and again for the next twenty years.
Southern Landscape
became well known nationally from its inclusion in the important 1976 nationally
touring exhibition,
Two Centuries of Black American Art
, organized by David C. Driskell.The catalogue
notes by Leonard Simon chose to emphasize the contemporary nature of his 1960s painting,“What
is impressive aboutWilliams’ paintings, however traditional his formal devices may sometimes appear,
is the fact that what he produces is always completely contemporary....This is not an art straining
against its own limitations, but one that is exploring newly discovered and infinitely flexible means
of expression.”This critically and popularly acclaimed exhibition introduced African-American art
to a mainstream museum audience, and reunited the expatriate artist with his American peers.
Driskell p. 192.
[20,000/30,000]
