William Edmondson Carved Limestone Dove, ca. 1940
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GUEST:
It's a sculpture. William Edmondson. It was given to us by my brother. It's been in our house since 1985.
APPRAISER:
This is what is now classified as a dove. Edmondson was African American. He was born in 1874 in the Nashville area. In about 1930, 1931, he took up carving stone pieces. He says he got a message from God, and God directed him to make these pieces out of limestone. It's a very soft, easy-to-carve material. And he opened a yard and there was a sign that said "tombstones and garden ornaments." This is 1930s in America, and here he is in Nashville, he's in the shadows of one of the great universities, Vanderbilt. And people became aware of Edmondson and his yard. And one of the professors there invited a New York fashion photographer, a woman by the name of Louise Dahl-Wolfe, to come down to Nashville to photograph Edmondson's yard. She did. She took the photography back to New York and actually wanted to publish them in "Harper's Bazaar," and was denied that request. It was a racist overtone in America, especially when it came to an African American artist breaking into the mainstream. She also showed them to a friend of hers, Alfred Barr, who was then director of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art. Alfred Barr, a progressive and a real fan of modernism, interpreted Edmondson's work as these modern reductive sculptures. And he gave William Edmondson a one-man show at MoMA in 1937. It ran from November to January of 1938. 12 pieces in an alcove of the museum. Edmondson never journeyed to New York to see the exhibit. People really didn't know how to judge Edmondson's work. "The New Yorker" gave the most prominent review. And they understood the modernistic feel, this reductive nature of the bird. But also said, more than likely Edmondson will return to Nashville and fade into obscurity, which he basically did. He carved until 1948. He died in 1951. And a lot of the work was dispersed at that time. Can you tell us about what went back and forth for him to acquire this?
GUEST:
She was Edmondson's niece, and he paid $700 in the early '80s with the caveat that it not be sold.
APPRAISER:
Well, we're going to give your brother's name, because he's a very seminal figure in Edmondson's progression in the art marketplace. It was Edmund Fuller. And Edmund Fuller curated a show in the '70s at the Montclair Art Museum, and the name of the show was "Visions in Stone." Your brother wrote a book. He was an important guy in people being aware of Edmondson's work. The dating of these pieces is very difficult. So we're going to date this somewhere between the time that he had the exhibit at MoMA in 1937 to the time that he stopped working in 1948. Because this is a family piece, and I would assume it's going to stay in the family, we're gonna put an insurance value on it of $125,000.
GUEST:
(inhales, murmuring) (laughing) Ah...
APPRAISER:
Yes.
GUEST:
Uh, no, no, it, um, that's completely beyond... We're going to have to, uh, find a, um... Yeah... I, I wish I could act like I'm sure Edmondson would have act, and said, "That's not... That's strictly not the point," but it, it changes your life...
APPRAISER:
Yeah.
GUEST:
...you know, to have something like this in your living room. And that's good and it's bad. (chuckles) Um...
APPRAISER:
Yes, I, I understand what you mean by good news, bad news.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
I would expect this to increase over the years. He's a very, very important artist.
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