This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Hale Woodruff was a black artist who sought to express his heritage in
his abstract painting. Of his artwork he said: "I think abstraction is
just another kind of reality. And although you may see a realistic
subject like a glass or a table or a chair, you have to transpose or
transform that into a picture, and my whole feeling is that to get the
specatator involved it has to extend that vision" . . ." (Herskovic 358)
Hale
Woodruff was born in 1900 in Cairo, Illinois. After high school he drew
political cartoons part-time for the black newspaper, the Indianapolis
Ledger. His art studies included the John Herron Art Institute in
Indianapolis; Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard's Fogg Museum School;
and Académie Moderne in Paris with Herny Ossawa Tanner in 1927.
Tanner
was a black American living in France where discrimination was not as
pronounced as in the United States. Woodruff, like most young
painters, was an artist in search of himself. Traveling in
Europe, he was supported in part by New York dealer, Edith Halpert, who
in turn solicited nearly $700.00 from Abby Rockefeller, wife of John D.
Rockefeller, Jr. In Paris, Woodruff
painted landscapes, black genre and Cubist pictures. As he
matured, Woodruff, after a period of history painting, would ultimately
end up an abstractionist emphasizing African symbolism.
The
artist returned to America in 1931. He established the art
department at Atlanta University in the depths of the Depression,
beginning a forty-year teaching career. He created the Atlanta Annuals,
exhibitions for black artists. In the late 1930s, he painted
black history murals for Atlanta's Talledega College Slavery Library
that reflect the influences of the great mural painters of the age,
Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera. Woodruff had recently
studied in
Mexico with Rivera. Woodruff may be best known for these
works. In addition to murals the artist also produced, at this
time, prints and watercolors of black lynchings
and poverty, which some critics referred to as the Outhouse School
because so many latrines dotted his landscapes.
In 1943, Woodruff went to New York City for two
years on a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation. Though he would
return for a year to his Atlanta teaching position, this essentially
marked the end of that experience and the start of his life in New York
as an abstract painter and member of the faculty at New York
University. He would retire from NYU in 1967.
Hale Woodruff died
in New York City in 1980. He was a member of the New Jersey
Society of Artists, New York State Council on the Arts and the Society
of Mural Painters.
Woodruff's paintings can be seen at Atlanta University and Talledega
College, Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit Institute of Arts; Newark Museum,
New Jersey; Howard University and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C;
New York University and New York Public Library, New York City.
Source:
David Michael Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s
Lindsay Pollock, The Girl With The Gallery
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Biography from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery:
| Hale Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois and studied at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
Encouraged by a bronze award in the 1926 Harmon Foundation competition, Woodruff traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Scandinave, the Académie Moderne, and with Henry Ossawa Tanner.
In 1931, Woodruff returned to America for a teaching position at Atlanta University (1931-45). Throughout the Great Depression, Atlanta was his home, and Woodruff consistently turned to the Georgia landscape for inspiration. In 1936, he spent the summer in Mexico studying mural painting with Diego Rivera, and in 1948, Woodruff teamed with Charles Alston to work on the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance company murals in California, illustrating the contribution of African-Americans to the development of the state.
His most famous public art commission, "Art of the Negro" (1950-51), a series of murals in the library at Atlanta University, celebrates the contributions of African-Americans to all the arts. A founding member of the Spiral Group, he died in 1979 after having created a diverse body of paintings and prints that span from realism to abstraction. In 1979, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized a major retrospective of his work entitled, "Hale Woodruff: 50 Years of His Art". |
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Hale Woodruff is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
Black American Artists
Modernism
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