Sometimes being a packrat pays off. Among the mountains of clutter, of the dusty tucked away, a gem may be found.
Bill Ritchie, an artist and professor of printmaking at the University of Washington's School of Art was sorting through the stacks and piles of artwork, papers and supplies and he came across three lithograph prints done by the late and celebrated artist Jacob Lawrence, who spent his career depicting African American life through what he called a "dynamic cubism" style.
The "Chess Players" as the prints are known, were created in 1970 when Lawrence was a visiting artist at the University of Washington. Ritchie was teaching lithography and taught Lawrence what would be his first and last attempt at the artform.
"He said he'd never made a stone litho before and I said 'it's easy, here's the crayons,'" Ritchie said.
So for two weeks, while Ritchie was teaching students, Lawrence was in an apartment in the third floor of the School of Art building drawing images of Harlem on a lithographic limestone. He loved the game of chess, according to Ritchie, and people playing chess was just one of many depictions of African American life in the United States that Lawrence became famous for. Perhaps his most famous effort here was the "Migration of the Negro," a series of 60 paintings portraying the journey of millions of African Americans after World War II.
When Lawrence completed the Chess Players drawing on the four-inch block of limestone, Ritchie took the stone and made 30 prints from it. All of them later sold at Sedars Gallery, the last of which for an estimated $5,000.
But that one wasn't the last, as it turned out. In 2004, Ritchie, a resident of Queen Anne, unearthed the three remaining trial proofs of the litho and will auction one of them at 5 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 5 at Pacific Galleries at 241 S. Lander St. Pacific has set the price at between $3,000 and $4,000. The litho is black and white, a departure from the usual vivid colors Lawrence was known for. And on the back of the litho, is an etching that Ritchie did of a semi nude and a chicken, two years after he made the Lawrence prints. He was conserving paper.
"I was an artist experimenting, juxtaposing different things," Ritchie explained. "It wasn't that interesting."
Ritchie's artwork and his family's entire art collection will also be put up for sale to help fund an online art school program he's developing. The program is an online, blended course in printmaking that will have a video game component to it.
An appraiser has valued Ritchie's entire collection at about $750,000. The work in that collection, including the other two Lawrence prints, will be available at a Ritchie's gallery currently in the making at the corner of Fifth and Aloha streets, a block from where Ritchie lives and where he keeps a studio. That the proceeds will go toward funding the online art course, Ritchie said, would have appealed greatly to Lawrence who became a tenured professor of art at the University of Washington, made a home in Seattle with his wife, Gwen, and died in 2000. He was 82.
"Jake loved the game of chess," Ritchie said. "He'd think this is a good move."
For more information on the auction, visit Pacific Galleries' Web site at www.pacgal.com.
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