Sale 2528 - African-American Fine Art, January 30, 2020

69 c CLIFFORD L. LEE (1926 - 1985) Guitars . Oil on cotton canvas, circa 1970. 610x1016 mm; 24x40 inches. Signed in oil, lower right. Provenance: the Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago. [700/1,000] 70 c CLIFFORD L. LEE (1926 - 1985) Louis Armstrong . Oil on cotton canvas, circa 1970. 864x483 mm; 34x19 inches. Signed in oil, lower right. Provenance: the Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago. This striking portrait by popular Chicago painter and illustrator Clifford Lee is from his series of jazz musician portraits from the early 1970s. Lee studied art at the Kendall Academy, the Grand Rapids Art Gallery and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He first worked in a social realist style in the 1950s before making commercial art for Ebony magazine in the 1960s and 70s. Lee is included in Theresa Dickson Cederholm and Lynn Moody Igoe’s listings of African-American artists, the 1974 Ebony Handbook and Falk’s Who’s Who in American Art . [1,000/1,500] 69