?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,000
HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999) Untitled (Policeman Beating Man and Protestor with Sign).
Pencil on buff wove paper, 1938. 177x133 mm; 7x5 1/4 inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.
Provenance: the estate of the artist; thence by descent to a private collection.
Exhibited: Stages of Influence: The Universal Theatre of Hughie Lee-Smith, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM, February 6 - June 3, 2001.
Hughie Lee-Smith drew this striking image of the police violently breaking up protests in 1938. His sketchbook included many Depression-era scenes of workers and food lines. That same year, Hughie Lee-Smith graduated with honors from the Cleveland School of Art, and worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Ohio Works Progress Administration as a printmaker from 1938-40. While working for the WPA, Lee-Smith developed his interest in social realism and documented the civic unrest he saw. Lee-Smith incorporated a similar scene in his 1939 lithograph Artist Life #2.
