Game with Ball with Fleeing Figure
Artist
Hughie Lee-Smith
(American, 1915-1999)
Date1948
Mediumoil on panel
DimensionsImage Size: 16 1/2 × 20 in. (41.9 × 50.8 cm)
Frame Size: 27 × 30 1/2 in. (68.6 × 77.5 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineStudent Gift to the Miles Poetry Committee
Object numberUAC391
DescriptionHughie Lee-Smith is a remarkable African American artist known for his paintings. He was born in Eustis, Florida in 1915, and his parents divorced soon after his birth. As a result, he grew up in Atlanta, Georgia with his maternal grandmother while his mother pursued a singing career in Cleveland. Lee-Smith’s grandmother lived a middle-class lifestyle and instilled the values of respectability and education in him; She would do so by closely monitoring his friendships and leisure activities. Lee-Smith’s grandmother contributed to his intellectual growth, however her monitoring prevented him from experiencing the carnivals and fair in his town, as she considered them “low class” forms of mass media entertainment. Not only was Lee-Smith prohibited from participating in “low class” entertainment, he also was not allowed to interact with people who consumed such attractions. These restrictions created a sense of alienation for the artist, which took on several different dimensions in his life and work. He felt alienated as an artist, as he needed to “perpetually observe the world from a distance.” Lee-Smith also experienced alienation “as a Black man from a U.S. culture that defined itself through whiteness and often rejected African Americans from the national imaginary through caricature, discrimination, and violence”. This notion of isolation would come to influence Lee-Smith’s paintings, “which are full carnivalesque elements that only add to a pervading sense of isolation, often because they seem blissfully indifferent to the condition of the people near them”. Lee-Smith knew from a young age that creating art was his “mission” in life. Lee-Smith and his grandmother moved to Cleveland in 1925, once his mother’s singing career took off. Together, his grandmother and mother encouraged his talent in drawing and painting, enrolling him in Saturday classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While in high school, he changed his last name from Smith to Lee-Smith, in order to make it stand out more. He served as the president of his school’s art club and earned a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art, where he studied painting. He graduated high school in 1934, and won a scholarship afterwards from the Scholastic Awards exhibition, allowing him to study at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Crafts for a year. In 1938, he began working for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). As a WPA artist, Lee-Smith “was concerned about the contribution art could make to the struggle for social justice and racial equality.” He served in the Navy for nineteen months “as an official painter of patriotic, morale-raising scenes, ” where he was stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Base near Chicago, Illinois. While there, he was also involved with the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), which led him to meet notable Chicago artists such as Archibald Motley Jr., Charles Sebree, and Charles White. Following his time in the Navy, he attended Wayne State University under the GI Bill, earning a bachelor’s degree in art education. In addition to being an artist, he was also an educator, teaching at the “Karamu House in Cleveland (a center for Black artists), the Princeton Art Association, and the Art Students League.”
Despite the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, Lee-Smith carved out his own aesthetic within the art world. He took an eclectic approach to artmaking, drawing from a diverse array of styles. For instance, he takes inspiration from artists such as the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired the Surrealist art movement, the romantic realist artist Edward Hopper, and Eugene Berman. Moreover, Lee-Smith’s longstanding interest in the neo-classicism of Jacques Louis-David is evident in his work. His feelings about racial inequities play an important role in his paintings, however “he seeks to create images that articulate his emotions about social and cultural disparity as it relates to all of humanity”; He had a strong interest in people and their relationship to the world. To add, Lee-Smith “created deeply personal landscapes populated by figures whose ethnic features were often ambiguous or who, even when assigned a distinct racial identity, functioned as universal embodiments of loneliness, introspection, or human existence,” which applied to people of all genders and races. By the 1950s, he had shifted away from WPA-era themes of labor, history, and collectivity. Nevertheless, he maintained his interest in socially committed art. He started to receive more national attention in the mid-1950s, beginning with a solo exhibition at Howard University’s art gallery. He then went on to win the Emily Lowe Competition in 1957, which was sponsored by the Eggleston Gallery in New York City. By 1967, “Lee-Smith became the first African American to receive full membership to the National Academy of Design since Henry Ossawa Tanner’s induction forty years earlier.” He also went on to become the artist-in-residence at Howard University, “where he supervised the creation of a series of murals that recognized the scientific and artistic achievements of African Americans.” While in residency, Lee-Smith was involved in discussions about what the “Black aesthetic” should look like, as the Black Arts Movement was prominent in Washington D.C. Lee-Smith does not explicitly address race in his paintings, however Leslie King-Hammond highlights that “Lee-Smith used representation and its illusions as a means to ponder questions of humanity by working through the specifics of Black American lives.”
Lee-Smith had many solo exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s, drawing attention from private collectors. He went on to have a retrospective in 1988 with New Jersey State Museum when it organized its traveling exhibition. In 1995, Lee-Smith was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He continued creating art up until his passing in 1999. His art continues to be relevant today, as it challenges “us to contemplate the complexities of human existence and its representation.”
Lee-Smith composed his oil painting Game with Ball with Fleeing Figure in 1948, while he was transitioning out of his WPA-era style and themes. Rather than a scene of labor, Lee-Smith appears to create a scene of leisure. Nevertheless, there appears to be some overlap between WPA themes and his trademark style. Following the title, the scene features two figures throwing a ball to each other in the foreground and middle ground, and a third figure running away in the background. The land the figures run on is constructed in a defined triangular shape surrounded by water. This spatial construction speaks to the theme of isolation that is often present in Lee-Smith’s work. The abrupt end of the land creates the appearance of a deserted island, yet the figures do not seem phased by being isolated from the rest of the world. In addition to the triangular land mass, the other forms in the work are very angular. The figures are rendered with triangular torsos, and the land to the far right of the composition contains a mix of triangles and rectangles defined by dark brown lines. Lee-Smith’s use of sharp angles, paired with defined shadows on the ground, creates movement in the composition. This in turn emphasizes that they are in the heat of physical activity, which perhaps could still be reminiscent of labor in WPA-era art. The dark skin of the figures suggest that they are of African descent. However, he seems to convey ideas that can be seen as universal to the human experience. They engage in a game with a ball, an activity that anyone could participate in. Despite the fact that the land clearly ends, the background figure does not stop running. Perhaps this may convey the transcendence of time and space. The moon in the distance looks like a ball as well, and the background figure may be running to catch it. Likening the moon to a ball also adds a surrealist flare to the work. Moreover, it also may convey the ambitious notion of reaching for the stars, which may also appeal to WPA art: it suggests the labor towards a solution to struggles, be them financial or familial, among others.
Written by Angela Athnasios
Sources: "Hughie Lee-Smith." americanart.si.edu.
"Hughie Lee-Smith Artist Information." michaelrosenfeldart.com.
