Since founding the African-American fine art department at New York’s Swann Auction Galleries in the fall of 2006, category specialist Nigel Freeman has seen a profound strengthening of the market for the category as well as an increase in institutional acquisitions of works by African-American artists and a broadening of American art in general. “When we started the department,” Freeman recalls, “the auction records for many of these artists were slim, if there were any records at all. That changed dramatically, seemingly overnight.”The house’s December 15 sale of African-American fine art presents around 135 lots, with a total low estimate just under $2 million. Leading the sale with an estimate of $250,000 to $350,000 is Untitled, a circa-1958 oil on canvas by Norman Lewis, whose retrospective is on view in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through April 3, 2016. Lewis’s auction record was achieved at Swann in October 2013 by an untitled oil on linen from around 1957, which sold for $581,000. Additional highlights in the sale include Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1978 oil and acrylic on canvas Tuff Tony and Romare Bearden’s The Annunciation, 1946, both works estimated at $120,000 to $180,000. Bearden’s oil painting, created just a year after his first New York gallery show, marks a departure for the artist, who usually worked in collage. “It was made at the time when he really established his name as a New York artist,” notes Freeman.
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