Hale Aspacio Woodruff (1900 – 1980) Painting of a young man playing a banjo. Oil on canvas laid on board. Signed upper right. This early painting is one of only a handful of paintings by Woodruff that have come to auction with African-American subject. Provenance: Private Florida collection.
Hale Woodruff was born in 1900 in Cairo, Illinois. After high school he drew political cartoons part-time for the black newspaper, the Indianapolis Ledger. His art studies included the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard’s Fogg Museum School; and Académie Moderne in Paris with Herny Ossawa Tanner in 1927. Woodruff was a black American living in France where discrimination was not as pronounced as in the United States. Traveling in Europe, he was supported in part by New York dealer, Edith Halpert, who in turn solicited nearly $700.00 from Abby Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In Paris, Woodruff painted landscapes, black genre and Cubist pictures. As he matured, Woodruff, after a period of history painting, would ultimately end up an abstractionist emphasizing African symbolism. The artist returned to America in 1931. He established the art department at Atlanta University in the depths of the Depression, beginning a forty-year teaching career. He created the Atlanta Annuals, exhibitions for black artists. In the late 1930s, he painted black history murals for Atlanta’s Talledega College Slavery Library that reflect the influences of the great mural painters of the age, Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera. Woodruff had recently studied in Mexico with Rivera. Woodruff may be best known for these works. In addition to murals the artist also produced, at this time, prints and watercolors of black lynchings and poverty, which some critics referred to as the Outhouse School because so many latrines dotted his landscapes. Woodruff’s paintings can be seen at Atlanta University and Talledega College, Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit Institute of Arts; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Howard University and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; New York University and New York Public Library, New York City.
Sight Size: 10 x 5 in.
Overall Size: 15 x 10 in.