Hughie Lee-Smith
Hughie Lee-Smith was an influential African American painter born on September 20, 1915, in Eustis, Florida. As a child, he faced family upheaval and poverty, which deeply influenced his artistic vision. Lee-Smith developed his talent early on, supported by his mother, and went on to study at prestigious institutions, including the Cleveland Institute of Art. His work, characterized by themes of alienation and isolation, reflects the struggles of marginalized communities, often depicting African Americans in stark, surreal landscapes that evoke feelings of loneliness and disconnection.
Over his career, Lee-Smith produced a diverse body of work that combined elements of realism and surrealism, incorporating rich symbolism to comment on the African American experience within a racially charged environment. He achieved significant recognition, including being elected to the National Academy of Design and receiving various awards. After relocating to New York City and teaching at institutions like the Art Students League, Lee-Smith continued to evolve as an artist, increasingly portraying interactions between races in a more optimistic light. His legacy endures as a poignant reflection of the complexities of identity and experience in American life, making him a notable figure in the landscape of 20th-century art. Lee-Smith passed away in 1999, leaving behind a significant artistic contribution that resonates with enduring themes of alienation and hope.
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Subject Terms
Hughie Lee-Smith
Artist and educator
- Born: September 20, 1915
- Birthplace: Eustis, Florida
- Died: February 23, 1999
- Place of death: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Lee-Smith is best known for his paintings of solitary figures in bleak, urban, or seaside landscapes. His work has been described as magic realism, metaphysical realism, social realism, surrealism, and romantic realism.
Early Life
Hughie Lee-Smith was born in Eustis, Florida, on September 20, 1915, to Luther and Alice Williams Smith. Lee-Smith’s parents separated when he was a child, and he moved to Atlanta to live with his grandmother. At the age of ten, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, to join his mother, who raised him during the Great Depression.
From an early age, Lee-Smith spent his days drawing. His mother supported his artistic endeavors and helped him gain admittance to a class for gifted children at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He was the only black student. As a teenager, he changed his last name to Lee-Smith because he felt the name Smith was too common for the distinguished painter he hoped to become.
Life’s Work
At the age of twenty, Lee-Smith won a scholarship from Scholastic magazine to study for a year at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts’s art school. Later, he taught art classes at the Karamu House, a community center founded by and for African Americans in Cleveland and famous for the quality of its arts programs. After receiving a scholarship from the Karamu Theater’s Gilpin Players, he studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art, graduating in 1938.
From 1936 to 1939, Lee-Smith worked as a teacher and artist at the Harlem Art Center. He then taught for a short time at Claflin College, a black school in Orangeburg, North Carolina. During this time, he met and married Mabel Eueridge. The next year, the couple moved to Detroit, where their daughter, Christina, was born.
During World War II, Lee-Smith worked in an airplane factory and then enlisted in the U.S. Navy, for which he painted murals of African Americans from U.S. military history at the Great Lakes Naval Base. After the war, Lee-Smith moved back to Detroit and used the G.I. Bill to earn a bachelor’s degree in art education from Wayne State University.
Early in Lee-Smith’s career, his work centered on social concerns inspired by the Great Depression of the 1930’s—the plight of the working class, the marginalized, and the dispossessed. His work from the late 1930’s into the 1940’s has been compared to that of Edward Hopper, an American realist painter. Like Hopper, Lee-Smith used open, often abandoned spaces to suggest an aura of isolation for his solitary characters.
Many of his paintings portray black people in stark locales dominated by cloudy skies, cracked masonry walls, and vast bodies of water. Deteriorating beaches, vacant lots, or tenement buildings inspired by the poor neighborhoods of Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit evoke themes of alienation, isolation, and loneliness. Because many of his paintings depicted black people, the connection between their alienation and a racially adverse and impoverished environment communicates poignantly.
In the 1950’s, Lee-Smith came under the influence of surrealists Kurt Seligmann of Germany and Giorgio de Chirico of Italy. Except for his formal portraits, many of Lee-Smith’s paintings began to show characteristics of surrealism, regardless of whether they drew upon classicism, romanticism, or realism. Lee-Smith used surrealism to depict the disconnect between the reality of the African American experience and the dream of a better future.
Lee-Smith’s lonely figures are placed in environments replete with symbols: brick or stone structures with cracked or disengaged walls signifying alienation and decay, tangles of wire representing the obstacles between people trying to connect in urban wastelands, and displaced silhouettes signifying dislocation. Other symbols include wooden poles that stand like sentinels, masks, mannequins, labyrinths, bodies of water, factories, industrial debris, men in business suits, young girls, ribbons, circus imagery, balls, and balloons. Lee-Smith’s compositions are filled with allegory and metaphor.
While he is best known for his isolated characters and surreal landscapes, Lee-Smith also was a talented portrait painter. He was commissioned by the Navy to paint a portrait of the first African American admiral, Samuel Gravely. He also painted portraits of famous African Americans from Maryland for the state’s Commission on African American History and Culture.
Lee-Smith had his first major solo exhibition in 1955 at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Two years later, he received the National Academy of Design’s Emily Lowe Award. In 1963, Lee-Smith was elected to the National Academy of Design, making him only the second African American to obtain this honor.
Lee-Smith relocated to New York City with his wife, who died in 1961. From 1969 to 1971, he was artist-in-residence at Howard University. In 1972, Lee-Smith began teaching at the Art Students League in New York City, where he remained an instructor for fifteen years. In 1978, he married a former student, Patricia Thomas-Ferry. During the 1980’s, Lee-Smith’s paintings often depicted whites and African Americans trying to relate to each other. His works lost some of their sadness and increased in optimism.
In 1988, a retrospective of his work was shown at New Jersey State Museum and then toured the country. In 1995, another large-scale retrospective of his more recent work opened at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lee-Smith died of cancer at a hospice in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1999.
Significance
Lee-Smith’s career spanned more than fifty years. As an African American who lived through the Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights movement, Lee-Smith brought to his art a distinctive point of view. In his work, the fantasy world conjured by surrealistic technique corresponds with the real world inhabited by black Americans. Lee-Smith was able to meld surrealism with the African American experience. He came to be viewed as an important American painter whose depiction of alienation goes beyond race.
Bibliography
Lee-Smith, Hughie. Hughie Lee-Smith: An Overview, 1949-1995. Princeton, N.J.: Bristol-Myers Squibb, 1995. This catalog of Lee-Smith’s 1995 exhibition offers an overview of his career and life.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Hughie Lee-Smith Retrospective Exhibition. Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey State Museum, 1988. Highlights of Lee-Smith’s 1988 retrospective exhibition in Trenton.
Wald, Carol. “The Metaphysical World of Hughie Lee-Smith.” American Artist 42, no. 435 (October, 1978): 48-53. An interesting commentary on the visual language Lee-Smith developed over six decades of painting.