Cliff Joseph Sold at Auction Prices

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      • CLIFF JOSEPH (1922 - 2020) Rise People Rise.
        Oct. 06, 2022

        CLIFF JOSEPH (1922 - 2020) Rise People Rise.

        Est: $35,000 - $50,000

        CLIFF JOSEPH (1922 - 2020) Rise People Rise. Oil on linen canvas, 1970. 1378x1835 mm; 54 1/4x72 1/4 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "oil/canvas 4'x6'" in ink, verso. Signed, titled and dated in ink on the upper stretcher bar, verso. Provenance: the estate of the artist; private collection. Rise People Rise. is an important mid-career painting by artist, activist and art therapist Cliff Joseph. It is a powerful political and artistic statement created at the height of the Black Arts movement. As a founding member of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York, Joseph was working at the vanguard of a transformative moment in African American art and history. Born in 1922 in Panama City where his father was employed in the construction of the Panama Canal, Joseph's family emigrated to the United States the following year, settling in Harlem. Following military service in the Army artillery and WWII, he studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, receiving a degree in illustration in 1952. Cliff Joseph best described his practice of painting: "the power of the art belongs to the people." By 1968, both his painting and activism were reaching new heights. That year, Joseph painted one of his best known works, My Country Right or Wrong, a powerful anti-war statement. In 1968, Joseph also co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) with Benny Andrews, Henri Ghent, Reggie Gammon, Mahler Ryde and Edward Taylor. Faith Ringgold also became a member of BECC. Its founding was a direct response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's controversial exhibition Harlem on My Mind which did not include any Black painters or scultpure. Its goal was to increase the representation of Black artists in New York galleries and museums. Joseph and the BECC went on to also protest the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Contemporary Black Artists in America, and organized the exhibition Rebuttal to Whitney Museum Exhibition at the Acts of Art Gallery in Manhattan. Joseph was also one of the first African Americans to join the professional practice of art therapy, and the first African American to join the American Art Therapy Association. He practiced art therapy at Lincoln Hospital and was on staff at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Joseph's iconic Blackboard, 1969, with its vision of an Afro-centric education, was recently included in the important traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power organized by curators Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitely at the Tate Modern, London. Rise People Rise is the most significant and largest painting of Cliff Joseph to come to auction to date.

        Swann Auction Galleries
      • Cliff Joseph, 1924-2020, The Dead Negotiate the Peace
        May. 22, 2021

        Cliff Joseph, 1924-2020, The Dead Negotiate the Peace

        Est: $10,000 - $20,000

        Cliff Joseph 1924-2020 The Dead Negotiate the Peace The Dead Negotiate the Peace 1966 oil on board 20 x 16 inches signed; titled and dated verso Illustrated: Cliff Joseph, Artist and Activist, Thom Pegg, Tyler Fine Art, 2018, pp. 54-55 Provenance: Ann Joseph, the artist's widow.

        Black Art Auction
      • Cliff Joseph, b. 1922, The Fire Next Time, Oil on canvasboard, 21.5 x 30 inches
        Nov. 14, 2020

        Cliff Joseph, b. 1922, The Fire Next Time, Oil on canvasboard, 21.5 x 30 inches

        Est: $10,000 - $20,000

        Cliff Joseph b. 1922 The Fire Next Time Oil on canvasboard 1965 Signed. Additionally signed, titled and dated verso. Based upon James Baldwin’s book of the same title written two years earlier. Baldwin’s book is comprised of two essays exploring religion and racial injustice, written in the form of letters. The first, entitled, My Dungeon Shook, is a fictional letter to the author’s 14 year-old nephew written on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The letter is a plea to the nephew, and by extension, all black youth, to transcend their immediate anger and adopt a broader, more compassionate perspective. He argues that a deeper understanding of the true source of the “Negro problem”, as he calls it, would derive power and mobility. This places the responsibility on the African American to help the sadly insecure white “countrymen” come to terms with a history they do not understand. Until that happens, they are incapable of understanding or relating to the African American, or correcting the existing (illogical) structures of inequality. In the second essay, (originally titled, Region in My Mind) Down at the Cross, Baldwin addresses his initial joy of finding Christianity and the eventual disillusionment with the church and its teachings, finding them oppressive and deeply flawed. Baldwin writes: “White people were, and are, astounded by the Holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But, I very much doubt whether black people were astounded – at least, in the same way. For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much. I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically, instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counselors. … “ Joseph addresses these issues by way of illustration of the words of the slave song; the white man, the black man, the Christian, the Jew and the Muslim all occupy the same world, and the current path, if continued to be guided by hate and oppression, will only lead to an all-encompassing hell-fire. 21.5 x 30 inches

        Black Art Auction
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