Walter Willams (1920-1998)
Denmark
Oil on paper laid down on Masonite, Signed
9 1/2″ x 11″
Provenance: Galerie Marya, Copenhagen, 1967

Walter Williams was an African-American artist whose early work depicted life in the Brooklyn and Harlem neighborhoods where he grew up. A Whitney fellowship allowed him to travel for the first time to Denmark, a country he had heard about from his maternal grandfather, who was from the Danish West Indies. Time spent on the island of Bornholm transformed his art, moving him away from cityscapes and toward landscapes which included images of children, birds, flowers and butterflies, images symbolizing freedom and rebirth.

When he returned to the United States, it was with his second wife, a Danish ceramicist. For the next decade or so, as recognition of his and other African- American contemporaries’ work grew, they traveled in and out of the U.S., eventually returning to Denmark to stay.
He is one of a group of expatriate African-Americans of the post-War period who found greater ease in making art in Europe than they ever would in the land of their birth.

“All my life I have been painting one picture,” Williams told a friend. “It is one that reflects my own image and the inner thoughts of my mind. I feel the naivete of a child when I paint yet I have the passions of the father that I am. I am an artist who is full of love for the world and all the images it holds.”

His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery, and many other institutions.