Blue Landscape

Unlike the majority of American painters who were engaged with gestural abstraction at mid-century, Hale Woodruff remained rooted in an artistic process that originated with traditional notions of subject matter. A leading African American artist of the period, Woodruff had devoted his energies emphatically to subjects relevant to the black experience and the civil rights effort beginning in the 1930s. After his move to New York in 1946 and a decisive turn to abstraction, he executed numerous landscapes such as this one, in which the forms are intended to convey the character of a particular place and time of day.