{
"data": {
"id": 454848,
"accession_number": "2022.54",
"share_license_status": "Copyrighted",
"tombstone": "Landscape No. 1, c. 1939. Hughie Lee-Smith (American, 1915\u20131999). Linocut; image: 22.8 x 26.2 cm (9 x 10 5/16 in.); sheet: 30.5 x 40.6 cm (12 x 16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance and Greta Millikin Trust, 2022.54",
"current_location": null,
"title": "Landscape No. 1",
"creation_date": "c. 1939",
"creation_date_earliest": 1925,
"creation_date_latest": 1949,
"artists_tags": [
"Cleveland Institute of Art (alumni)",
"May Show",
"Black American Artists"
],
"culture": [],
"technique": "linocut",
"support_materials": [],
"department": "Prints",
"collection": "PR - Linocut",
"type": "Print",
"measurements": "Image: 22.8 x 26.2 cm (9 x 10 5/16 in.); Sheet: 30.5 x 40.6 cm (12 x 16 in.)",
"dimensions": {
"sheet": {
"height": 0.305,
"height_inch": 12,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.0,
"width": 0.406,
"width_inch": 16,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.0
},
"image": {
"height": 0.228,
"height_inch": 9,
"height_inch_fraction": 0.0,
"width": 0.262,
"width_inch": 10,
"width_inch_fraction": 0.3125
}
},
"state_of_the_work": null,
"edition_of_the_work": "25 or 50",
"copyright": null,
"inscriptions": [
{
"inscription": "Inscribed, lower left, margin, in graphite: \u201cLandscape No. 1.\u201d; lower right margin, in graphite: Hughie Lee Smith 8/50",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
},
{
"inscription": "Typed on sheet attached to original mount: LANDSCAPE #1 / I had watched the Central Avenue area rapidly deteriorating; its houses fall- / ing down, and too many of its people going to pieces as well. It depressed me / beyond words. I could only express my feeling about it all by drawing, not that / the drawing was altogether realistic. The way I felt about it got blended with / the way it actually looked. / Hughie Lee-Smith",
"inscription_translation": null,
"inscription_remark": null,
"sortorder": null
}
],
"exhibitions": {
"current": [],
"legacy": [
{
"description": "Exhibit by Karamu Artists. Associated American Artists Galleries, New York (January 7\u201322, 1942); Temple University, Philadelphia (February 2\u201316, 1942).",
"opening_date": "1942-01-01T00:00:00"
}
]
},
"provenance": [
{
"description": "(Lusenhop Fine Art, Cleveland Heights, OH), sold to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "2022",
"sortorder": 1
},
{
"description": "The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH",
"citations": [],
"footnotes": null,
"date": "June 6, 2022-",
"sortorder": 2
}
],
"find_spot": null,
"related_works": [],
"former_accession_numbers": [],
"did_you_know": "This print was included in a 1942 exhibition of Karamu House artists organized at New York\u2019s Associated American Artists Galleries and sponsored by a committee including cultural figures such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, and Carl Van Vechten. The show traveled to Philadelphia\u2019s Temple University and brought national attention to the Karamu House printmaking workshop.",
"description": "This linocut was created by Hughie Lee-Smith while he was involved in the printmaking workshop at Karamu House, a community art center founded in 1915 that is still active in Cleveland today. Created by carving into a smooth linoleum block, linocut is an accessible technique that was favored at Karamu for its accessibility and democracy. Lee-Smith used it to evocatively depict the lives of Black Clevelanders\u2014here, as he described, \u201cthe Central Avenue area rapidly deteriorating; its houses falling down, and too many of its people going to pieces as well. It depressed me beyond words. I could only express my feeling about it all by drawing.\u201d",
"external_resources": {
"wikidata": [
"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117247188"
],
"internet_archive": []
},
"citations": [
{
"citation": "Exhibit by Karamu Artists. Exh. Cat. New York: Associated American Artists, 1942.",
"page_number": "",
"url": ""
}
],
"catalogue_raisonne": "Salsbury, Benay, and Kruse 53",
"url": "https://clevelandart.org/art/2022.54",
"images": {},
"alternate_images": [],
"creditline": "Severance and Greta Millikin Trust",
"image_credit": null,
"sketchfab_id": null,
"sketchfab_url": null,
"gallery_donor_text": null,
"athena_id": 454848,
"creators": [
{
"id": 557245,
"description": "Hughie Lee-Smith (American, 1915\u20131999)",
"extent": null,
"qualifier": null,
"role": "artist",
"biography": "One of the most gifted figurative painters of his generation, Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida. He moved to Cleveland in 1925 with his mother, a singer who recognized her son's talent and enrolled him in Saturday-morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. While in high school, he took life-drawing classes at the Huntington Polytechnic Institute. After attending classes at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, 1933-34, he studied with Carl Gaertner and Rolf Stoll at the Cleveland School of Art, graduating in 1938. During this period Lee-Smith taught drawing at Karamu House, then known as the Playhouse Settlement. For financial reasons he declined a fifth-year scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art in 1938 and began working for the Works Progress Administration's Ohio Art Project, where he learned lithography and etching. He exhibited in the annual May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1937-41). In 1939 he became a board member of the magazine \"Crossroads\" and later that year received a one-year appointment to teach art at Claflin College in South Carolina. In 1940 he cofounded Karamu Artists Incorporated and served as the organization's president. In the early 1940s he moved to Detroit, the hometown of his new wife. After serving in the navy during World War II, he returned to Detroit and attended Wayne University, where he earned a B. S. in education in 1953. He exhibited steadily throughout the 1940s and 1950s, showing at galleries in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. In 1957 he won the prestigious Emily Lowe Award from the National Academy of Design and soon after moved to New York. In 1967 he was elected a full-member of the National Academy of Design and began teaching there in 1972. In 1988 the Malcolm Brown Gallery in Cleveland mounted a solo exhibition of his work, and later that year the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton organized a retrospective. Lee-Smith lives and works in New Jersey.
\"Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 233",
"name_in_original_language": null,
"birth_year": "1915",
"death_year": "1999",
"use_in_caption": true,
"include_extent": false,
"weight": 1
}
],
"legal_status": "accessioned",
"accession_date": "2022-06-06T04:00:00Z",
"sortable_date": 1925,
"date_added_to_oa": null,
"date_text": "c. 1939",
"collapse_artists": false,
"on_loan": false,
"recently_acquired": false,
"record_type": "object",
"conservation_statement": null,
"has_conservation_images": false,
"cover_accession_number": null,
"is_nazi_era_provenance": false,
"impression": null,
"alternate_titles": [],
"is_highlight": false,
"updated_at": "2026-05-01 06:54:19.157000"
}
}