“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about my father (as well as my mother). You know him as the artist, one of the few who could claim membership in both the Chicago and Harlem Renaissance. I was very fortunate enough to be surrounded by art growing up as well as experienced a true racial diversity living in a modest household on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
My father had a very long career and out -lived all of his contemporaries. His passion was art and yet at the age of ninety-three he took a pause and devoted himself to caring for my mother who was terminally ill. After her passing, two years later, my father returned to his passion of art and completed thirteen paintings (a couple of them quite large) and had two unfinished works. His very last signed painting was a painting that he based on one of his “L’Abbatoire” etchings. ”
Photo: The artist, 1949, taken by Gordon Parks.
Eldzier Cortor was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1916. His family moved to Chicago in 1917 where Cortor was to play a large role in the Chicago Black Renaissance of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In 1936, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later studied at Chicago’s Institute of Design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He worked for the WPA Federal Arts Project in the 1930’s and in 1941, co-founded the South Side Community Art Center on South Michigan Avenue.
After winning two successive Rosenwald Grants, he traveled to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas. It was here that he began to paint the women of the Gullah community as the archetype of African American culture, with their long, elegant necks and colorful head scarves. He focused on “classical composition”, making his figures resemble African sculpture. In 1946, LIFE magazine published one of these semi-nude female figures.
In 1949, Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to the West Indies to paint in Jamaica and Cuba before settling in Haiti for two years. There he taught classes at the Centre d’Art in Port au Prince. Cortor worked up until his death in 2015 at the age of 99.
Recent exhibitions of his work have been held at the South Side Community Art Center in 2014; Eldzier Cortor Coming Home, an exhibition of prints, was held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston held a joint exhibition of the works of Cortor and John Wilson in 2017. His work is found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Howard University
1989/2014
relief color etching and aquatint (printed in orange) on cream wove paper
20-3/8 x 15 inches, full margins
signed, titled, and numbered 19/90
Printed in 2014 by the artist and Kathy Caraccio at the K. Caraccio Studio, New York. The first edition of 15 was printed at Robert Blackburn's
“This is a photo of my father with Kathy Caraccio at her studio. The print that my father is signing is a viscosity print. When we were going over cataloging my father’s prints, I came across a couple of zinc plates that had no prints made in his collection. He told me that the plates were done years ago and he wasn’t satisfied with them. He agreed to have Kathy use the viscosity method (painting various layers of ink diluted with an oil based substance). It’s such a laborious task because only one print can be pulled and the process has to be repeated again.”
Excerpt from a letter by Michael Cortor
“My father’s printing technique was often very involved. Many of the plates themselves are works of art. My father originally wanted to cut up the plates, while we were cataloging his artwork after my mother’s passing. But I discouraged that because I thought that it was important to preserve the entire process, so we began a two year process of donating artwork to institutions that had some connection to my father’s art.”
