NYAB Event - Hughie Lee-Smith "The 1950s: Major Paintings"

Hughie Lee-Smith "The 1950s: Major Paintings"

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

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Comprised of eight oil-on-Masonite paintings from a pivotal decade in the artist’s career, this is the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Lee-Smith’s work. Immediately recognizable for their beautifully haunting, sparsely populated landscapes, Lee-Smith’s paintings trouble conceptual binaries—between internal and external, real and surreal, black and white, isolation and community, hope and despair—and defy categorization. The dream-like atmosphere and pervasive sense of alienation in these works inevitably elicit comparisons to Giorgio de Chirico, Edward Hopper, and Eugene Berman, but such corollaries are only half right. While these artists share many of Lee-Smith’s existential concerns, the figures in their work are predominantly white, reinforcing a Western tendency to imagine whiteness as the “universal” or un-raced identity. At a time when white artists were thought of simply as “artists” while African American artists were expected to paint/sculpt/draw “the black experience,” Lee-Smith created deeply personal environments populated by figures whose ethnic features were often ambiguous or who, when assigned a distinct racial identity, still functioned as universal embodiments of loneliness, introspection, or human existence, thus expanding the category of the “everyman” to include men and women of diverse identities. While these paintings work as psychological landscapes, the spaces Lee-Smith’s figures inhabit also have referents in the real world. The boarded tenements, crumbling brick, crackled façades, and industrial yards are an expression of existential themes as well as a depiction of the actual deprivation that exists in cities throughout the United States.

[Image: Hughie Lee-Smith "Untitled" (c.1955) oil on Masonite 19 x 13.5 in.]