HUGHIE LEE-SMITH (1915 - 1999)
Ball Player.

Oil on linen canvas, 1970. 610x813 mm; 24x32 inches. Signed in oil, lower left.

Provenance: collection of the artist, New York; the estate of the artist; acquired from Stella Jones Gallery, New Orleans, private collection, Georgia.

Exhibited: Three Masters: Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee-Smith, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, May 22 - July 17, 1988; Hughie Lee-Smith: A Retrospective, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, Maine, July 1 - August 1, 1997 (traveling exhibition); Stages of Influence: The Universal Theatre of Hughie Lee-Smith, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM, February 6 - June 3, 2001.

Illustrated: Michael Culver, Hughie Lee-Smith: A Retrospective, Ogunquit Museum of American Art; Hilton Als/Lauren Haynes/Leslie King-Hammond/Steve Locke. Hughie Lee-Smith, Karma, New York, p. 221.

Ball Player is a significant, mid-career painting by Hughie Lee-Smith and depicts an essential aspect of his oeuvre. Throughout his practice, Lee-Smith has portrayed youth playing or improvising games, from balancing sticks and tires to flying kites and playing ball games. His subjects find moments of pleasure and escape despite their environs - similar scenes are found in his Street Scene, 1952 and Along the Tracks, 1953. Here Lee-Smith depicts a youth playing hand ball in a particularly desolate urban space. A very similar boarded-up arched entrance appears in the 1970s Lee-Smith paintings Woman with Balloons and Wall Variation II.

Lee-Smith effectively created a new type of American landscape - an existential urban space in which the Black figure was the protagonist. His combination of figure painting and social-realist depiction is an important precursor to the paintings of Ernie Barnes and Kerry James Marshall.