106 / 250
74
●
AARON DOUGLAS (1899 - 1979)
Creation
.
Oil on canvas board, 1969. 508x406 mm; 20x16 inches. Signed and dated
in oil, lower right.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; Mr. and Mrs. Louis Daniels,
Nashville,TN.
Exhibited:
Aaron Douglas: A Private View Selections from the Daniels
Collection
, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, October 24,
2003 - February 1, 2004; Berry-Hill Gallery, New York, with the label
on the frame back.
This striking oil painting is an unusual example of a foray into abstraction
by Aaron Douglas. Douglas had never completely crossed into abstraction
like his peers Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff despite a modernist
sensibility and his use of elements of Cubist design and geometric
abstraction in his early painting.The concentric circles and tonal patterns
Douglas employed as early as 1926 were innovative and strong indicators
of his formal concerns. The earliest and best known example of his
painterly abstraction is found in the oil on canvas,
Birds in Flight
, 1927. In
1973, Douglas recalled to David Driskell how “I wanted to create
something new and modern that fit in with Art Deco and the other
things that were taking the country by storm.That is how I came upon
the notion to use a number of things such as Cubism and a style with
straight lines to emphasize the mathematical relationship of things.”
Kinshasha Holman Conwill in her Frist Center exhibition essay points
out that “though these smaller-scale paintings lack the monumentality of
Douglas’s better-known murals, they affirm his enduring attraction to
geometric abstraction.” In 1969, while Douglas had been retired from
Fisk University for three years, he continued to paint and exhibit his
artwork. Earle p. 37.
[25,000/35,000]