788. Sargent Johnson (American, 1888-1967), "Figure of a Woman", c. 1964; bronze sculpture, 9"h, signed. provenance. Highly important African-American sculptor. Johnson began his studies at the A.W. Best School of Art in1915. He then studied at the California School of Fine Art in 1919, under sculptors Ralph Stackpole and Benjamin Bufano. He exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association in 1925, and won a gold medal. He became associated with the William E. Harmon Foundation of New York in 1926, and exhibited there for the next 13 years, winning numerous prizes for his sculpture. In 1948, he moved from Berkeley to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. By this time he had completed several important public commissions in San Francisco, and that year was the chairman of both the sculpture selection and award juries for the Sixty-seventh Annual Exhibition of Oil, Tempera, and Sculpture at the San Francisco Artists Association.
Lizetta Lefalle-Collins writes in her foreword to the exhibition catalog, Sargent Johnson, African-American Modernist" (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998), that Johnson's body of work could be divided into three stages of concern and development, and that in his mature period, "Johnson for the most part dropped the realism of his earliest works and the racialized images of his middle period for a style that was a response as much to Mexican and African art as to the Abstract Expressionism of his Bay area contemporaries." This image relates directly to Girl with Braids , 1964 (catalog #49, Sargent Johnson, African-American Modernist, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) This is a rare and exceptional sculpture by Johnson, and the first bronze of its caliber to ever be offered at auction. 30,000-50,000
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