Untitled, ca.1939 Important Racial Painting by 1930s Radical American Surrealist

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Walter Quirt
Untitled, ca.1939 Important Racial Painting by 1930s Radical American Surrealist
ca. 1939

About the Item

NOTES: Exceptionally rare painting circa late 1930s when Quirt begins to transition from “social surrealism” to an exploration of more explicitly surreal figuration and landscape that we later see in the larger, bolder canvases of the early/mid 1940s. Most of his Surrealist paintings from this earlier period are either in public collections or lost to time. Purchased by private collector, date and origin unknown. Consigned by the private collectors estate to Frederick Holmes And Company. While not originating from the artist’s estate, it has been confirmed as authentic by the Walter Quirt Family Estate. The painting had been professionally re-lined likely decades ago by its original owner. It’s been inspected by a professional conservator (details on request) in Seattle, cleaned and lightly revarnished, and is in excellent condition for its age. THE RADICAL PAINTER Decades before Black artists were exhibited in today's reform-minded American galleries and museums, before the term "civil rights" was a familiar cry for racial justice, before miscegenation laws were repealed, when Jim Crow segregation and lynching were still common in America, Walter Quirt used his voice and Social Surrealism to advocate for racial equality. As the secretary of the John Reed Club, an organization of leftist writers and artists calling for social change, Walter Quirt was outspoken in his work about social, economic, and racial disparities in 1930s depression-era America. It was this pioneering genre that drew the attention of avant-garde gallery owner, Julien Levy, who gave Quirt his first solo show in New York in 1936, describing the artist at that time as “a radical painter.” Quirt continued to be represented and was a prominently exhibited artist with the Julien Levy Gallery for over four years, 1936-1940. It was during this time that Quirt became known for his pioneering “Social Surrealism” and became identified by arts writers, critics, and curators as one of the first American Surrealists. Levy was renowned in New York and critical art circles as the one of only a few galleries in NYC known for their nearly exclusive representation of European Surrealism and avant-garde artists, like Dali, Duchamp, Magritte, Matta, Ernst, and others. (Quirt was, along with Man Ray, Sandy Calder, and Joseph Cornell, among the minority of American artists represented by Levy.) So while the artist often dismissed the influence of the Europeans, instead crediting his American contemporaries and the Mexican muralists as influences, it’s nevertheless fair to assume that some – if not much – of this (then) “radical” aesthetic was absorbed by Quirt. Walter Quirt became a celebrated artist for the first time in the 1930s as one of a small handful of painters who'd embraced the tenets of European Surrealism as a means of expressing their concerns about social and economic inequities, labor rights, and specifically (in the case of this painting) racism in America. This new movement, primarily led by Quirt, also included Louis Guglielmi and James Guy as the influential contributors. By the late 1930s, Quirt's bone fides as an intellectual and critically acclaimed artist were already well established in New York. When the founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr, began to assemble what would become the groundbreaking exhibition on Surrealism "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism" (1937-1938), the museum also sponsored a speakers symposium, in cooperation with the American Artists Congress. The chosen speakers included various academics, critics, and writers. The artists selected to represent and speak on behalf of Surrealism, were Salvador Dali and Walter Quirt. In UNTITLED, c.1939 (SURREALIST WHITE FIGURES W/BLACK MAN), the scale is in keeping with much of Quirt’s earlier work. Canvas and oil paints were expensive and hard to come by during the depression, and its 12" x 15" dimensions reflect the artist's frugality. The standing and walking figures in the composition border on the grotesquely Dali-esque. They hold sticks which could reference crutches, a detail seen in several of Dali's paintings or could perhaps be sticks meant to oppress the central figure they surround. It's relevant to this entire narrative to note the male figure in the center of this painting; contrasted in prisms of deep and light blue from the others in pastels, and with short wavy hair, is clearly a Black man. He stands upright and without the cartoonishly grotesque features of the others, his arm draped around the Picasso-like cubist female; something likely intended as a provocatively, defiant gesture at the time by Quirt. While the style of the painting differs from BURIAL and other earlier examples of Social Surrealism, which were more “on-the-nose”, it is clearly a Surrealist image, with its subject and ideological narrative of racial justice, subtly front and center. By the late 1930s, Quirt had become somewhat disillusioned with the Marxist-influenced Surrealism. So while still retaining his empathy for the marginalized in the larger context of American society as we see in UNTITLED, c.1939 (Surrealist White Figures w/Black Man), only now the style is more overtly surreal and free of the dogmatically ideological. In spite of his abandonment of explicit “social surrealism”, the artist still maintained his support of marginalized communities and defiance of racism and bigotry. Walter Quirt, constantly experimenting and exploring the myriad genres of Modern which were evolving in mid-century America, continued to integrate surrealism into many of his paintings throughout the 1940s and early 1950s (see UNTITLED,1951 (Surrealist Woman As Landscape) also featured on this platform.) After his death in 1968, his widow, Eleanor, in an act of profound grief, kept all his paintings close to her and in climate-controlled storage; unseen by anyone but a few; the artist's legacy ultimately falling into obscurity. In 2015, the first exhibition of Quirt's paintings was produced by Frederick Holmes And Company, Seattle, and the gallery has remained the exclusive representative of the artist's estate. Quirt's work is found in over thirty permanent American public collections, including MoMA, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; the deYoung Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco MoMA, and others. The exhibition catalogue from the 2017 retrospective, "Walter Quirt: A Science of Life" is included with the purchase of any Quirt painting or work on paper, while supplies last..

Creator:
Walter Quirt (1902 - 1968, American)
Creation Year:
ca. 1939
Dimensions:
Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 15 in (38.1 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)
Medium:
Oil
Movement & Style:
Surrealist
Period:
1930-1939
Condition:
The painting is in remarkably good condition for its age. It's a brilliant example of Quirt's transition from Social Surrealism in late 1930s to more explicit Surrealism, with it's now subdued narrative nonetheless still front and center.
Gallery Location:
Seattle, WA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU2410211815872