Aaron Douglas's Harriet Tubman Painting To Sell For Up To $3.5 Million

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A significant painting by Aaron Douglas, titled Harriet Tubman (1931), will be offered at Sotheby's New York on November 18, with an estimated sale price between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. This estimate marks the highest ever placed on a work by the prominent Harlem Renaissance artist. The six-foot-wide canvas will be part of the auction house's modern art sale and will be publicly displayed at Sotheby's New York headquarters starting November 7. The work comes with a house guarantee, as Sotheby's confirmed to ARTnews.

The painting is being sold by Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of only two historically Black women's colleges in the United States. Proceeds from the sale will support initiatives including women's health equity. The work is expected to surpass Douglas's current auction record of $600,000, which was set in 2008 for the smaller painting Building More Stately Mansions (1944) at Swann Galleries New York. This painting is notably larger than any of Douglas's other top-selling works.

David Galperin, Sotheby's vice chairman and head of contemporary art, noted the rarity of Douglas's paintings in the market. He told ARTnews in a phone interview,“The most significant painting was offered nearly two decades ago. It was on Masonite and it's about 20 inches high. Of course, since then, the market for modern art has evolved, and artists from Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence to Romare Bearden have been reappraised.” Galperin added,“We haven't seen a major work [by Douglas] come to auction ever because they are so, so rare. There have been a few that have sold privately at prices in excess of our low estimate, that have gone directly to museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art. These institutions have all acquired important works, but only in the past 15 years. I wouldn't be surprised, given the importance of this work, if we see major museums globally compete for this piece.”

Douglas, originally from Kansas, moved to Harlem in the 1920s and became a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance alongside artists such as Archibald J. Motley, Augusta Savage, Hale Woodruff, and James Van Der Zee. This cultural movement aimed to forge a new Black identity through various art forms. Douglas drew inspiration from African motifs, incorporating flattened figures, bold geometric shapes, and silhouettes into his work, which philosopher Alain Locke described as defining the visual art of the movement.

The painting depicts Harriet Tubman, breaking a chain on an elevated mound of earth while others observe, a composition that echoes Eugène Delacroix's 1830 masterpiece Liberty Leading the People. Douglas described Tubman as“a heroic leader breaking the shackles of bondage and pressing on toward a new day.” The scene includes figures such as a man cultivating his land and a young woman reading a book. The painting shares stylistic elements with Douglas's renowned work Aspects of Negro Life, painted three years later. Tubman herself famously escaped slavery in 1849 and subsequently led approximately 13 perilous missions back into the Southern states, rescuing around 70 enslaved individuals, including family and friends, through the Underground Railroad. She also served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War and advocated for women's suffrage.

Ronald Carter, acting president of Bennett College, expressed the painting's impact in a phone interview, stating,“It's powerful. It's awesome to look at the symbolism, and for me as an African American to actually say, Yes! When I looked at it I went, Yes! We are where we are because Harriet Tubman had a vision. We are who we are because we were able to do hard work to make things happen for our future. We are where we are because we are social activists.” Carter added that viewing the painting encapsulated his experiences growing up through the 1950s and 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, noting,“If you look at it and see the breaking of the chains and people going into the future and what it can mean to be free, all these things are integral to our institutions. It represents the best of what we are.”

Douglas's market presence has grown since a 2007 traveling retrospective organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. His work was also featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2024 exhibition“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired an oil on masonite by Douglas in 2015, and the National Gallery of Art acquired two paintings by him in 2014.

Chicago philanthropist Alfred K. Stern originally commissioned the Harriet Tubman painting for a dining hall at Bennett College, which was founded in a church basement in 1873, a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation. The institution became a women's college in 1926. For two decades, the painting has been on loan to the North Carolina Museum of Art, as Bennett College, which lacks its own museum, determined it could not properly care for the work.

The decision to sell the painting followed over two years of discussions, according to Carter. The proceeds will support the college's future development, including the expansion of its Women's Health Initiative, which was launched in January to address healthcare disparities and promote health equity for women. Notable alumnae of Bennett College, known as the Bennett Belles, include the late artist Beverly Buchanan, US Congresswoman Alma Adams, Carolyn Payton, the first woman and first African American director of the Peace Corps, and Glendora Putnam, the first African American woman to serve as assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. In 1955, Bennett College became the first four-year college in the US to be led by a Black woman, Willa Beatrice Player, who hosted Martin Luther King, Jr. on campus in 1958. Students from the college also organized crucial civil rights sit-in protests in Greensboro.

Source: ARTnews

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