Description:

ALVIN HOLLINGSWORTH (AMERICAN 1928-2000)

Equality, circa 1965
oil on canvas
76 x 92 cm (29 7/8 x 36 1/4 in.)
signed on stretcher, possibly in another hand

LOT NOTES
The pioneering Afro-American comic-book illustrator, poet, painter and educator Alvin Carl Hollingsworth was born in Harlem in 1928 to Barbadian emigrants. He began his career, aged twelve, as an artist assistant at Holyoke Publishing Company for Catman's Comics. He continued working in comics throughout the 1940s and 50s before transitioning to painting and printmaking. With his background in commercial illustration, Hollingsworth was an experienced draftsman with an eye for bold colors and compositions, who oscillated seamlessly between styles, genres, media, and influences as diverse as Henry Ossawa Tanner and Gustave Dore to contemporaries Salvador Dali, Tom Wesselmann and Nicholas de Stael.

Equality evidently dates to Hollingsworth’s early painting years, characterized by naturalistic modelling and earthy color palettes with fluorescent accents, as well as an interest in found materials and urban life (or, the social inequalities it perpetuates). It is closely related to the artist’s most notable body of work from the period: a series entitled Cry City, the subject of a solo exhibition at Terry Dintenfass Gallery. Using material salvaged from the streets -- tar paper the artist found on tenement roofs; fishbones, broken cement, stones, teeth and bits of glass -- Hollingsworth presented the city as a psychologically and physically difficult terrain (John H. Hewitt, “The Themes of Alvin C. Hollingsworth,” Black Art – An International Quarterly 2:1 (1977): 5).

Compared with the sober, alienated character of many paintings from this time, Equality is rather more emotionally inscrutable. Here, the blackboard -- evidently bearing a lesson on the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution -- has already been partly erased, and class appears to be in recess. Space is collapsed, figures disjointed. Superimposed over the right side of the board is a portrait of a 19th century man in a European military uniform, whose implied gaze looms over the sea of racially ambiguous but pale faces streaming this way and that. The frontality of the man’s portrait is repeated by the two boys at the lower corners of the frame, but they too don’t make direct eye contact with the viewer or the figures around them. (Hollingsworth used a similar composition and narrative device in Group of Children, also circa 1965, sold by Swann Galleries, October 8, 2009, lot 55). Equality, however, shares in the dynamism of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, and perhaps also its reticent optimism for the future.

Hollingsworth attributes the crystallizing of social issues in works from the 1960s to his involvement with Spiral, a Black artist’s collective founded by Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff and James Yeargans. A dozen or so members initially gathered in Bearden’s and Charles Alson’s shared Greenwich Village studio in July 1963 to discuss the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, planned for August 28th. Realizing their galvanizing potential went beyond the scope of the march, the group began planning their first (and only) group exhibition: “Spiral: First Group Showing (works in black and white)”, which ran in May-June 1965 at a rented Christopher St. storefront. (Black and white was chosen both as a universal political appeal and an organizing principle, since Spiral’s members did not share any specific aesthetic sensibility). Though the group was active for some two and a half years, their praxis and unifying outlook were enormously influential on future generations of artists. (This contribution was the subject of a 2011 show, Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective, at the Studio Museum in Harlem).

Between 1960 and 1970, Hollingsworth expanded his reach to muralism and lithography, as well as hosted a popular ten-part series for NBC titled "You're Part of Art". From 1980 until his retirement in 1998, he was a full Professor of Art at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. Hollingsworth’s role during the Golden Age of Comic Books has recently been covered by Ken Quattro in Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books (San Diego: YOE Books/IDW Publishing, 2020).

CONDITION
Observed in frame, the painting appears in good condition. No apparent issues visible to the naked eye with no significant issues to report. Inspection under UV shows no apparent sign of restoration.
framed dimensions: 90 x 105 cm (35 3/8 x 41 3/8 in.)

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