African Headdress

1935

Not on view

African art offered artists attractive alternatives to Western artistic traditions of realism and suggested different and desirable cultural standards of physical beauty. The sensuous female figure in Woodruff’s print echoes the aesthetic criteria promoted by Baule artists from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. Her oval head and long, slender nose suggest a specific type of Baule mask that a man might commission from a carver to honor a female relative or in homage to a particular woman’s dance skills and beauty. Such masks were well known among European and American artistic circles during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Artwork Details

Title: African Headdress
Artist: Hale Woodruff (American, Cairo, Illinois 1900–1980 New York)
Date: 1935
Medium: Linocut
Edition: 7/10
Dimensions: 11 1/2 × 9 in. (29.2 × 22.9 cm)
Classification: Prints
Credit Line: Gift of Reba and Dave Williams, 1999
Object Number: 1999.529.204
Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

More Artwork

By Hale Woodruff

In the same medium

From the same time and place

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Figure, Hale Woodruff American, Oil on canvas — Figure
Hale Woodruff
1967

Sunday Promenade, Hale Woodruff American, Linocut — Sunday Promenade
Hale Woodruff
1935

Coming Home, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦, Hale Woodruff American, Linocut on Chine collé — Coming Home, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦
Hale Woodruff
Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
1935, posthumously printed in 1996

By Parties Unknown, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦, Hale Woodruff American, Linocut on Chine collé — By Parties Unknown, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦
Hale Woodruff
Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
1935, posthumously printed in 1996

Trusty on a Mule, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦, Hale Woodruff American, Linocut on Chine collé — Trusty on a Mule, from ¦Hale Woodruff: Selections from the Atlanta Period 1931–1946¦
Hale Woodruff
Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop
1935, posthumously printed in 1996

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