LOT 0175 Prentiss Taylor (American, 1907-1991)
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Prentiss Taylor (American, 1907-1991) , "Christ in Alabama", 1932, lithograph on paper, pencil-signed, titled, dated and inscribed "45 prints" lower margin, handwritten label inscribed "Property of George Houston Bass" on backing, 13 3/16 in. x 10 in., framed. Note: "Christ in Alabama" is one of four lithographs made in New York by Prentiss Taylor to illustrate three poems and a play by Langston Hughes for their book Scottsboro Limited. This book was sold to benefit the legal defense fund of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young Black men falsely accused of raping two white women on a train traveling from Chattanooga to Huntsville in 1931. The resulting legal cases are now considered egregious miscarriages of justice, spanning decades of appeals, yielding two landmark Supreme Court rulings and ending in 2013 with posthumous pardons for the remaining three of the Scottsboro Boys who were never pardoned nor had their convictions overturned. In the lithograph here entitled "Christ in Alabama", Taylor illustrates Hughes' poem of the same title. He uses compelling imagery including two black silhouette-like figures representing Christ and Mary. Stylized images of cotton to the right indicate the Southern locale. The emotional tone of the lithograph is, like the poem, elegiac in response to threatened death by lynching and rife with the turmoil surrounding the Scottsboro case. The handwritten label on the backing indicates that this print was likely in the collection of George Houston Bass, literary secretary to and the executor and trustee of Hughes’ literary estate.Ref.: Williams, Lynn Barstis. Imprinting the South: Southern Printmakers and Their Images of the Region 1920s-1940s. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007
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