Image Not Available

Hughie Lee Smith

American, 1915 - 1999

BiographyHughie Lee-Smith

Considered a romantic realist, Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999) was an artist whose dignified, isolated men and women have a surrealistic touch expressing man's lonely and confused condition in a complex technological age. As a youth, his interest in art was nurtured by his family and later enhanced through his training at The Chicago Art Museum, The Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, The Cleveland School of Art, and his employment at the Works Progress Administration's Ohio Art Project. Throughout his distinguished career, Lee-Smith won countless awards, became the second African American (after Henry Ossawa Tanner) to be elected a full member of the National Academy of Design, and taught at the Art Students League in New York for over twenty years.

Lee-Smith began his career during the Depression painting in a Social Realist vein. During the 1950s and 60s, as his style matured, he began to incorporate elements of Surrealism, fantasy, and spiritual isolation in his art. In Woman In Green Sweater Lee-Smith conveys a sense of desolation and isolation through his solitary figure of a young woman juxtaposed against a hauntingly empty landscape. He conceded that his propensity for depicting human alienation in his work reflected his experience of being a Black man in the United States. He explained, "The condition of the artist is already one of aloneness… Being one of a group of outcasts in a society makes my sensitivity to the condition of aloneness much sharper than that of the average person."

Person TypeIndividual

Terms