Lot 184: Meyer Wolfe O/B, The Conversation, Exhibited

Meyer R. Wolfe (Tennessee/New York, 1897-1985), “The Conversation,” WPA era oil on panel painting depicting two African American women standing deep in conversation at a clothesline, with the steeple of a church visible in the background against a darkening sky. Unsigned. Two exhibition labels en verso. Panel: 20″ H x 24″ W. Frame: 25″ H x 30″ W. Exhibition History: The Art of Tennessee, Frist Art Museum, 2006, and illustrated in the exhibition catalog as no. 166. Artist Biography: Meyer (“Mike”) Wolfe was born into a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant family, the second of ten children. He was raised in a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood of Nashville just north of the Tennessee State Capitol, where he observed the social and cultural lives of his African American friends. As a teen with an interest in drawing, he became a protege of Pulitzer Prize-winning Nashville cartoonist Carey Orr. In 1917 he studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as an illustrator. In 1918 he moved to New York and met Ashcan School painter John Sloan, who became one of his most influential teachers. Wolfe traveled to Paris in 1926 to train at the Academie Julian in Paris. While overseas, he met (and later married) the fashion photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Meyer exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association, the New York 1939 World’s Fair, and in Nashville, where he later returned to live. However, much of his later life was spent supporting and managing his wife’s career, and as a result, many of Wolfe’s paintings and prints were never publicly shown or sold and remained within his family. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the Parthenon in Nashville in 2021. Many of those works are included in this auction; others are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American Art-Smithsonian Institution, the Tennessee State Museum, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis. Sources: “Meyer Wolfe: The Star of All Things” (digital catalog for the 2021 exhibition at the Nashville Parthenon); Dr. Lawrence Wolfe; Robert Ikard, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Summer, 2007.