Sale 2649 - Lot 25
Additional Images
3
CHARLES WHITE (1918 - 1979)
Waiting (Awaiting His Return)
Lithograph on cream wove paper, 1945. 402x310 mm; 15x12¼ inches, full margins. Edition of approximately 25. Signed, titled both "Hope for the Future" and "Waiting", dated and inscribed "Ed/25" in pencil, lower margin. Printed by the artist at the Taller de Gráfica Popular, Mexico City.
Provenance: gift from the artist; Bob Blackburn, New York; gift from the artist, private collection, New York. The artist and printmaker Bob Blackburn printed Charles White's later lithographs John Brown, Gedeon and Frederick Douglass.<
Waiting is a very good impression of this very scarce print - it is best known as Awaiting His Return. According to Lucinda Gedeon, it was the first of four lithographs White printed in Mexico in 1946. White apparently was uncertain of its title when he inscribed this impression - under the title Hope for the Future, he wrote Waiting. Hope for the Future is the title he had already used for his previous 1945 lithograph which depicts a mother and a child. We have not found another impression of this print with either title. Another impression in the collection of the National Gallery is alternatively titled Mother. The image is a scarce depiction of a wartime African American subject. White depicts an African American woman seated under a banner of the Gold Star, a celebration of a husband or son actively serving in the armed forces.
Other impressions of this important lithograph are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the David C. Driskell Collection, University of Maryland, the Howard University Gallery of Art, the Artist Students League, New York and the Primas Family Collection. Gedeon Ea4.
