“There’s David Driskell.”
Alvin Lester was sitting about two chairs away from me and could see around the thick post that was blocking my view. Lester is an art consultant from Richmond, VA, whom my auction buddy Kristin and I had met a few hours before as we previewed works at Swann Auction Galleries sale of African American art recently.
I poked my head around the post and saw a black man with a full round face and bits of gray in his hair. I instantly recognized artist David Driskell from photos I’d seen in books.
After he sat down, I watched as several people came up to greet him, the first a Philadelphia art and ephemera collector who offered him a Swann catalog to autograph, presumably on a page featuring one of three of his works. Some approached him with the familiarity of old friends, and others were like me, just wanting to meet our own version of a modern-day celebrity – but in the world or art, not movies and music.
David C. Driskell is just as well-known internationally as an art historian as he is a painter. The David C. Driskell Center for the African Diaspora, established by the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2001, was named in his honor as a place for the study of African American visual art and culture.
He was born on June 7, 1931, in Eatonton, GA (also the hometown of writer Alice Walker). The family moved to Ellenboro, NC, when he was 5 years old and he attended public schools there. His mother was a quilter and his father a blacksmith, Driskell told Martha Stewart in an interview. His father (who was a Baptist minister) would draw what he described as “stylized” angels.
Driskell arrived at Howard University in 1949 with a few dollars in his pocket and his high school report card but no admission papers to the university, according to a story on the website for the International Review of African American Art. He didn’t know that he had to apply to be admitted, but he was accepted.
He began painting in 1952 after James Porter, a renowned artist and scholar who was one of his teachers, advised him to switch from history to art, he said in the interview and noted in the 2006 biography “David Driskell: Artist and Scholar” by Julie L. McGee and the artist.
Auction Galleries recently. Photo from the Swann website.
Another of his teachers was artist Lois Mailou Jones, who had been teaching at the university for about 20 years. In 1953, he won a scholarship to participate in an art program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME. Two years later he graduated from Howard with a degree in art and left as a friend-for-life with Jones.
Driskell bought his first work of art while a student at Howard, he told Stewart – a woodcut by his teacher James Lesesne Wells. He now has a large collection of African American art and African sculptures.
His first teaching job was as an art professor at Talladega College in Alabama, and he held his first solo exhibition at the school’s Savery Art Gallery in 1956. His first major solo show was held at the Barnett Aden Gallery in Washington, DC, 1957, where a few years later, he would be appointed director.
Other teaching jobs followed until Driskell arrived at the University of Maryland in 1977 and soon became head of its Department of Art. He retired in 1998, the same year that Jones died. Driskell received a master’s in fine arts degree from Catholic University of America in 1962, and attended the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague to study art history.
He is also well-known as a curator, collector and art consultant. Since 1977, he has advised Bill and Camille Cosby on their acquisition of African American art. An exhibit of works from their collection is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art until January 2016.
Driskell has written five exhibition books on African American art and co-authored four others, according to the Driskell center’s biography. His 1976 exhibition titled “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is cited as the jump start for subsequent events.
He began his career as a painter of realism, but gradually moved to abstract art, he said in the Stewart interview. His works are in many museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the upcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture.
When the auction ended, I finally got a chance to meet Driskell. I wanted to know his reaction to the prices of his works. The most expensive – “Two Pines (Two Trees)” – was an original painting that sold for $38,000 ($47,500 with buyer’s premium). He said his paintings sell for much more at the gallery, referring to the DC Moore Gallery in New York that represents him. One site showed a painting of his selling at the Moore gallery for $200,000.
I mentioned that in an interview with Lois Mailou Jones back in 1993, she lamented that neither she nor her works had been properly recognized. That seemed to have changed, I said, noting the $50,000 figure ($62,500 with buyer’s premium) on a painting that sold that day. Could she have ever imagined that they would sell for so much, I wondered.
She’d still be a little disappointed, Driskell said, noting that her works still sell for a lot less than they are worth. “She felt she was never well recognized,” he said, noting that she was one of his teachers and a friend.
Driskell, 84, said he knew that several of his works were up for sale, but he didn’t come to Swann because of them. “I happened to be in town and I hadn’t been to one of these before,” he said.
None of the three works were owned by Driskell himself. They were being sold by others on the secondary market, as much of the art at Swann. His prints were more affordable: A 1965 color woodcut print titled “Still Life with Tile” sold for $1,500 ($1,875 with the buyer’s premium). A 1959 color linoleum cut print titled “Still Life” that was also titled “Red Still Life” and “Red Table” went for $2,400 ($3,000 with the premium).
The large oil painting “Two Pines (Two Trees)” was completed in the 1960s as part of a series of abstract paintings of pine trees in Maine, where he has a home. The painting was purchased by friends from Maine who attended the auction.
