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Meyer R. Wolfe (Tennessee/New York, 1897-1985), "Red Eye's Hall," 1934, American Regionalist lithograph depicting a group of dancing African American couples at a dance hall in Nashville, Tennessee. A man, presumably Red Eye himself, observes the scene at left. Titled and numbered 13/25, lower left. Signed and dated lower right. Housed under glass in a simple, ebonized wood frame with cream mat. Sight: 16 1/2" H x 13 1/4" W. Framed: 24 3/4" H x 20 3/4" W. Note: This is among the best recognized and earliest of a series of approximately 15 lithographs created by Wolfe depicting lives of African Americans in Nashville during the Jim Crow era. According to Wolfe, Red Eye's night club was a popular nightclub located on Cedar Street (Charlotte Avenue) near Nashville's Capitol Hill. There were 25 prints in the single edition; the stone plates used to create this and other prints in the series are no longer extant. This particular image, along with Wolfe's "Vanderbilt Clinic" and "Tuesday – Ophelia" (also included in this auction) from the same series, are among the prints and drawings in the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Collection at the Library of Congress; "Red Eye's Hall" is also in the collection of the AD&A Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography: Meyer ("Mike") Wolfe was born into a Jewish Lithuanian immigrant family, the second of ten children. He was raised in a low-income, multiracial 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. His narrative lithographs of African American life in Nashville during the 1930s are considered among his most important works and very rarely come on the market. His work is also held by 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.
PROVENANCE: The estate of Dr. Lawrence Wolfe, by descent from his uncle, the artist Meyer Wolfe.
CONDITION: Overall very good condition. With faint marginal toning plus minor foxing to margins and to upper left of image. Not examined outside of frame. Negligible abrasions and paint loss to frame.