Hughie Lee-Smith, Black painter 1950s

[Beringia]

1915 to 1999



“My earliest direct contact with painting was . . . as a ten-year-old student at the Cleveland Museum. The specific painting that made an impression was Ryder’s ‘Death Riding the Race Track.’ My early attraction to that macabre composition suggests a natural propensity to a romantic perception of reality. . . . In addition to this, in later years I have come to realize the unconscious influence of the Midwestern climate as a key factor in the development of my colour scheme. My predilection for cold, dark skies and sparse, flat landscapes in my painting is undoubtedly due in large measure to the long, continuously grey winters of my youth in Ohio, Michigan and Ontario.”
















https://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/hughie-lee-smith-1915-1999

[frazzled]

1. Or this

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Hughie Lee-Smith’s art conveys the alienation and isolation experienced by many African Americans during the middle decades of the twentieth century, yet his work speaks in larger terms about our inability to reach out and connect with others on grounds larger than race. Although Lee-Smith was a direct contemporary of Jacob Lawrence, his art followed a different trajectory, adopting an approach to realism inflected by the sense of isolation and alienation in Edward Hopper’s work, and by the surrealistic tendencies of Giorgio di Chirico. That surrealistic edge to his work intensifies the emotional distance conveyed by the people in his paintings.
Over a sixty-year career, Lee-Smith explored psychological corners of the human experience grounded in separation and displacement. As the artist remarked about his work, ​“I think my paintings have to do with an invisible life—a reality on a different level.” In The Beach, a young woman holds a small child as a strong wind buffets her body and sweeps across the sand. She seems lost in the close contact with her child, while the limitless sky and sea speak to the larger universe around her, of which she seems unaware.

https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/beach-78131

[Beringia]

3. Thanks, great additional outlook that the artist had

[FM123]

2. Wow. Just beyond amazing.

[blm]

4. Just gorgeous. I feel the subjects and the palettes.

Cleveland has one of the finest art collections in the world. The school system there encouraged art and music education. There were regular field trips scheduled to expose students to the fine arts and to the Cleveland Orchestra, which was also viewed for decades as one of the finest orchestras in the world.

[MLAA]

5. These paintings move me. I have never seen them before.

Thank you for sharing them. I feel richer for having seen them. What talent.

I love the tall, elongated figures in the midst of the mid western landscape and weather he describes. The figures look simply and complicated all at the same time.