Aaron Douglas painted the Harlem Renaissance canvas for the Greensboro women's college. Its Nov. 18 sale could set a record for the artist and fund a women's health initiative.
For 95 years, one of the most important paintings of the Harlem Renaissance has belonged to a small women's college in east Greensboro. Next month it goes up for auction. Bennett College plans to sell Aaron Douglas's "Harriet Tubman" (1931) at Sotheby's in New York on Nov. 18, with an estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, the highest ever put on a work by the artist, ARTnews reported this week. The Triad Business Journal and 88.5 WFDD also covered the announcement on Oct. 28.
Douglas painted the canvas in 1931 on a commission from Chicago philanthropist Alfred K. Stern, who intended it for a dining hall at Bennett, according to ARTnews and a FOX8 report. It is large, about six feet wide, and it shows Tubman standing on a raised patch of ground, arms up, snapping a chain while other figures look on. Among them are a man working his own land and a young woman reading a book.
Douglas himself described the subject as "a heroic leader breaking the shackles of bondage and pressing on toward a new day," as ARTnews quoted him. The magazine notes that the composition recalls Eugène Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People", and that the painting shares its style with Douglas's best-known work, the "Aspects of Negro Life" murals, completed three years later.
Douglas grew up in Kansas and moved to Harlem in the 1920s, where his flat silhouettes, bold geometric shapes and African motifs came to define the look of the movement. The philosopher Alain Locke called him "the father of Black American Art."
The painting has not hung on Bennett's campus in close to two decades. The college has no museum of its own and decided it could not properly care for the work, so it was placed on loan with the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, according to ARTnews and WFDD.
Acting president Ronald Carter told ARTnews that the decision to sell came after more than two years of deliberation. He described what he felt seeing the painting: "It's powerful," he said, and added, "It represents the best of what we are." Carter, who first visited the school at age 14, said the image of broken chains and people moving into the future summed up his own experience growing up during the civil rights era.
Board of trustees chair Cassandra Jones Havard said in a statement reported by FOX8 that the college's centennial "has given us an opportunity to both acknowledge our history" and look ahead, and that the painting "reminds us of the strength and power of women." She noted that "although the painting has not been on campus for close to two decades," it remains part of Bennett's story.
Proceeds will support the college's future growth, ARTnews reported, including an expansion of its Women's Health Initiative. Bennett launched that program in January to address healthcare disparities and advance health equity for women. WFDD described the sale as funding a health equity initiative, and FOX8 said the money will support the college's ongoing mission.
The timing is deliberate. This school year marks 100 years since Bennett became a women's college. The school was founded in a church basement in 1873, a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, and became a college for women in 1926. Today it is one of only two historically Black women's colleges in the country, along with Spelman College in Atlanta. The college has spent October marking the centennial, including a Founders Day keynote by U.S. Rep. Alma Adams and a Centennial Family & Friends Weekend.
Douglas paintings almost never come up for sale, which is part of why the estimate is so high. His auction record is $600,000, set in 2008 for a much smaller painting, "Building More Stately Mansions" (1944), at Swann Galleries in New York, according to ARTnews. "Harriet Tubman" will be the first Douglas work ever offered in a Sotheby's marquee evening sale, FOX8 reported, and Sotheby's confirmed to ARTnews that the lot carries a house guarantee.
David Galperin, Sotheby's vice chairman and head of contemporary art, told ARTnews that a major Douglas has never come to auction "because they are so, so rare," and said he would not be surprised to see major museums around the world compete for it. In recent years the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art have both acquired Douglas paintings.
The painting's subject fits a campus with its own record of activism. In 1955 Bennett became the first four-year college in the United States led by a Black woman, Willa Beatrice Player. During her presidency, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on campus in 1958 after the local NAACP invited him to Greensboro, and Bennett students helped organize the city's civil rights sit-ins. "People don't know, but they worked out that plan of action right here on Bennett's campus," Carter told ARTnews.
Bennett's alumnae, known as Bennett Belles, include the artist Beverly Buchanan and Carolyn Payton, the first woman and first African American to lead the Peace Corps.
Who buys the painting, and whether it ends up in a public museum, won't be known until the sale. Either way, a work painted for a Greensboro college nearly a century ago will help pay for the next chapter of the college it was made for.
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