Carroll Cloar (American/Tennessee/Arkansas, 1913-1993) lithograph on Arches paper titled "Controversy Under the Persimmon Tree" and depicting a boy who holds a small dog and a girl, possibly Cloar's childhood friend Charlie Mae Brown. They stand in an autumnal landscape beneath nearly leafless persimmon trees. A second boy, likely Cloar himself, perches in one of the trees and observes the others. With printed signature, lower right margin, and editioned in pencil 96/100, lower left margin. With Carroll Cloar Estate / Kurts Bingham Gallery, 1994 blind stamp, lower right. Pencil signed en verso by the artist's widow, Patricia S. Cloar, and stamped "Carroll Cloar Estate." Housed under glass in a modern wood frame with linen mat. Sheet: 29 1/2" H x 41" W. Frame: 33 1/2" H x 44" W. Note: The boy in the tree resembles Cloar's depiction of his childhood self in his 1988 painting What Charlie Mae Dreamt, cat. 84 in Stanton Thomas' exhibition catalog "The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South" (Little Rock, AR: The Arkansas Art Center, 2014), pp. 183-184. Charlie Mae Brown was a frequent subject of Cloar's work. Biographical Note: Carroll Cloar's work is celebrated for capturing "the essence of a vanishing South" (Marilyn Sadler, "The Art and Life of Carroll Cloar," Memphis Magazine, June 1, 2011). The artist was known for incorporating nostalgic images, often from his Southern childhood, sometimes merged with dreamlike motifs, into powerful magic realist scenes, and he often noted that literature, particularly by Southern Gothic writers such as William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, influenced his artistic approach. Born in Arkansas, Cloar graduated from Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee, and went on to study at the Memphis Academy of Arts under the artist George Oberteuffer. In 1936, he moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. There, Cloar’s achievements earned him a McDowell fellowship which he used to travel across the American Southwest, West Coast and Mexico. Cloar served with the Army Air Corps during World War II and upon his return, he was awarded a Guggenheim traveling scholarship to fund an extended sojourn to Central and South America. Two years later, several of his images were featured in a Life Magazine article titled Backwoods Boyhood, and Cloar's work began to earn national acclaim. By the mid 1950s, he had settled permanently in Memphis, where he produced paintings, often executed in casein tempera and acrylic paints. His works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooks Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. In 1993, Cloar's painting, Faculty and Honor Students, Lewis Schoolhouse, was one of six paintings by American artists selected to commemorate the inauguration of President Clinton. (Sources: The Johnson Collection/Memphis Brooks Museum of Art).

PROVENANCE: A Nashville, Tennessee Estate.

CONDITION: Excellent condition.