HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) The Juggler #1.

HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999)
The Juggler #1.

Oil on canvas, circa 1964. 812x608 mm; 32x24 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.

Provenance: the artist; private New York collection.

Exhibited: Reality Expanded, Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Dorchester, MA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, 1969; Hughie Lee-Smith, A Retrospective, The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME, July 1 - August 1, 1997 (traveling exhibition), with the labels on the frame back.

Illustrated: Hughie Lee-Smith, A Retrospective, The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, 1997.

This brooding painting is an extraordinary example of the artist's "metaphysical phase." One of the earliest known examples from this stage in the collection of the artist, Interval, 1960, shares the same flying banners and L-shaped, cracked concrete pier. Lee-Smith's continued interest in the subject of solitude, both psychological and social, combined with the death of the artist's wife in 1961, lead to a change in his painting. The artist described the transition himself - "The metaphysical phase really began in earnest in the early 1960s. In an almost unconscious, not at all deliberate way, it crept in. I was still with Janet Nessler Gallery, and it became much more pronounced in the late sixties. In that period my whole palette changed. There was the introduction of more white - so that the greys began to take over and a kind of fatality, I felt, developed in terms of the paint values themselves. I suppose this was an unconscious effort on my part to gain a feeling of forlornness. I never sat down and thought about it." Bearden/Henderson p. 333.